What is the best way to handle combat on a large scale, urban map? I've tried several methods.

This is my second or third (I can't remember) roll20 account, and I've always given up on using the program after a few days because of one simple reason: I run modern superhero games, and I just can't make the maps work out for me. To elaborate a bit, I play the old Classic Marvel system commonly referred to as "FASERIP". The game makes use of area combat, which means one square on the roll20 grid would ideally be any size from an entire building to a quarter of a building. When I play at a regular tabletop, I have a gridded whiteboard that I can quickly sketch out a large city for combat to take place in. My typical rules is one building per square, which leads to an extremely big, sprawling city. (Superhero combat doesn't usually limit itself to a single room.) I don't bother labeling each building unless it's important or the characters get close enough to see what it is. This allows the players to fight all over the city and not feel like I'm railroading them into fighting in the part I've mapped out. Plus it means that I can quickly add things like cars, radioactive sludge, or rubble. Unfortunately, this isn't so simple on roll20. I've tried finding city maps, but I don't want to put money into map tiles when I'm not sure I'm sold on the program itself, and I don't really want to use the tiles anyway if I don't have to. The few maps I can find for free online either don't work well on roll20 or I dislike them for other reasons. (They're usually too small, or they have cars drawn on the map, which means villains can't pick them up and chuck them.) The game system I'm using already has some maps that I've uploaded into roll20, and they work alright. But they only cover New York, and once again limit our combat possibilities. Ideally I would use roll20 just as a whiteboard like I've been doing, but I can't make the drawing tools work for me AT ALL. It's hard to draw movable/breakable things such as cars or lamposts without them getting tangled in other drawings and moved around when I don't want them to. Things like changing colors handling the tool itself feel clunky, awkward, and underdeveloped. And for some reason, even though I have a touch-screen laptop, I am only able to draw with my mouse, rather than my finger or a stylus. I would love it if someone else who runs superheros (or other games with similar requirements) would let me know what they're doing, and how it's working out for them. Is the answer just to practice with the drawing tools until I get used to dealing with the clunky system? Is there any chance of them being updated and optimized for touch screen, which would help me feel like I'm using a normal whiteboard? Is there some other solution I haven't thought of yet? I appreciate your help, and apologize if this is in the wrong forum. TL;DR: I want to use Roll20 as a whiteboard, but the system isn't developed enough and it's too clunky. Is there a way to fix this, or is there another option that will still allow me to make a sprawling city map with minimal detail and effort?

A cheap digitizer (Huion 610) works well for me. Not sure why your touchscreen wouldn't also work. Maybe check your drivers? Some weird option in the configuration? Roll20 shouldn't care what your pointing device is. I prefer the polyline and shapes tools over freehand drawing. A bunch of quick rectangles on a grey background and you'd have a passable top-down city map. Add some yellow street lines and it'll look great. Put your building drawings onto the map layer. For cars and throwable objects, you'll definitely want to use tokens. They're much easier to move around. It should be pretty easy to grab images of cars to drag onto the token layer. The advanced keyboard shortcuts might help. ctrl-s (select tool) and ctrl-d (draw shape), o (token layer), m (map layer) are useful shortcuts. Someone else said they keep their maps 20x20 and make multiple pages to represent different areas or zones. That might work for you. An easy way to do it is to duplicate the page, then duplicate the map layer: select all, copy and paste (ctrl-a, ctrl-c, switch pages, ctrl-v) There's another approach which uses isometric building images from the web. For my outdoor city scenes, I use png images of isometric buildings and drag them onto the map layer. Search for "isometric skyscraper filetype:png" and you'll get a bunch. You have to space them out a little bit so the players can go between them. Or you can move buildings to the GM layer if a player is about to go behind one. A lot of city builder games have wikis with png images of the buildings. Here's a search that might yield some results: "building filetype:png site:sc4devotion.com" Another approach that might work is to take screenshots of google earth and import them into roll20. I know you said you don't want to buy tiles yet, but if you stick around, here's a few I found (not mine). <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/599/metr" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/599/metr</a>... <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/172/mode" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/172/mode</a>... <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/104/matt" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/104/matt</a>... Good luck.

Thank you! I hadn't explored enough to realize there were keyboard shortcuts for drawing; that could be a huge help. I'll try messing around with the polyline tool and see what happens.

I recommend experimenting with Page Size, Scale, and Grid Units, under Page Settings. Wiki Documentation, with screenshots, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Page_Settings" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Page_Settings</a> You could try something like... Scale, 1 unit = 300 feet, and at 1 Unit per square, that's approximately 1 City Block. You could use the drawing tools (or tiles from Art Search or Marketplace) to put roads roughly along the grid lines to whatever extent it's a planned-square grid city, and use Polygon drawing tool to draw several buildings or clumps of buildings within each square city block, leaving plazas and courtyards in the space between the buildings inside the grid squares. &nbsp; I'm not sure how large you could go with the Page Size, but... if you did 100x200 Page Size (which is a size I've done before), if my math is ok, it would represent 30,000 feet x 60,000 feet, which is around&nbsp;41,322 acres (that's 3x Manhattans).

I've used Roll20 for about 2 years now and I really can count the moments with one-hand-fingers when I felt that a physical table would work better than Roll20 and nothing in your OP suggests me that this would be one of those situations. Here are a few things that came to my mind: - Using graphical assets makes map-making slower but the maps nicer. So it's about now detailed do yo want them to look. - Anything you don't assume people will interact with goes to Map layer and anything people will interact with goes to Token layer. - Activate the Advanced Shortcuts from My Settings. After this you have access to most tools through shortcuts. - At any time you feel like you don't know how to do something in Roll20 just think how would you do it on a physcial table and about 99 % you can apply that approach to Roll20.