Your plans for Roll20 and the Systems to use with it

There have been a lot of different game system names dropped throughout the forums. I thought it might be interesting to start a thread for everyone to share what systems/games they plan on using with Roll20. My group mainly uses two game systems: GURPS and Shadowrun. I have been a long time fan of both systems. Currently we are using 3rd ed Rev for GURPS (we really didn't want to buy new books) and 4th ed Shadowrun (which is a huge evolution step from where 1st ed started - for the better). We are also big fans of Arkham Horror. I have done a lot of custom creation to add to the game (hooray for Strange Eons!). I am already plotting ways to use Roll20 to play AH online. It will require a bit of...planning? foresight? data entry? Ha, I love a challenge.

I've mentioned before that I'm planning to start a "Spirit of the Century" (FATE) game on Wednesday. Apart from that it is very likely that I will start running "ForeSight" or "HindSight" again one day. And I might have a go at "Diaspora" or some other SF variant of FATE, perhaps a custom hack. Occasional games of "James Bond 007" seem likely, and I have friends who like to run "Traveller", "Bushido", "Call of Cthulhu", "DragonQuest", "RuneQuest", Hero System, and GURPS. Another friend had some success recently with "The Dying Earth", and I wouldn't be surprised if he tried that again during the beta test.

I will use it for Midgard and Dungeonslayers (both German RPGs), surely Dresden Files (FATE) and most probably Savage Worlds.

HarnMaster Gold

When I end up GMing, I cycle through ~tons~ of games, which means that I'm really hoping roll20 becomes system agnostic enough that I can use it for the variety of games I run. As it is, the app is a bit too focused on miniatures-based games for me to use for the games I'd want to run. But! It's still in early beta, so that's ok. If I had to make my wish list of games whose play was easy enough in roll20 that it was worth using, my list would be Fiasco, Smallville, and any of TwoHourWargames' games. I do play in some more traditional games (D&D 3.5+Basic, Talislanta 4e+5e, Hellas), but those are already supported just fine by bunches of VTTs, so while it'll be nice to see them here in roll20, it's not filling an unfilled niche in that area.

First a traditional old school dungeon crawl using DungeonWorld. Not sure after that.

First campaign for my group will be Pathfinder. Should be good times.

Fiasco! Here's a screenshot of the layout I've been working on for Fiasco. All the text in the screenshot came from the last in-person game my group played. Player characters are represented by the brown post-its, with game elements on green post-its between them. These post-it images are placed on the background layer, to make selecting, moving, and editing text easier during the game. The middle dice images are controlled by all players. Since you can only roll dice using the chat panel, I'll have to manually edit the dice faces during the game to match up with players' rolls. At the bottom is my fog-covered GM area, with dice for quick and easy copying, and the "Tilt" element post-its hiding until the right moment. I created all the images using Illustrator and Photoshop. Can't wait to try playing this on Roll20 with my group! Due to the one-shot nature of this game, I'm really hoping for a page and campaign cloning feature :)

Fiasco! Here's a screenshot of the layout I've been working on for Fiasco. That picture is exactly the type of feel I'd like to see in a Roll20 game of Fiasco, great job! Have you come up with a plan for filling in the notecards during play? I have requested such a feature, but I'm curious if you've already solved that issue. I suppose you could just do 'blank card token with text on top', but it still makes moving the cards around a little inconvenient. Nolan, the game is Fiasco, by Bully Pulpit Games. It's a wonderful game that's about as far from the Basic D&D as you get. Here's the description from the authors: "Fiasco is a game about ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. It’s designed to be played in a single session, usually around two and a half hours, with no prep." I have run the game off of a shared Google Doc in the past, it works decently. But this is the style of game that I'm really hoping Roll20 grows to support, as most of the other VTTs I've tried work too hard on simulating the mechanics of a particular game world, rather than just being a table for players to gather around.

I'm boring, looking to play DnD 4e Though the possibilty of Two Hour Games means more likley to play All Things Zombie and 5150

Have you come up with a plan for filling in the notecards during play? I have requested such a feature, but I'm curious if you've already solved that issue. An improved text box feature would definitely be ideal. What I've done for now, though, is put the post-its on the background layer, so they don't get moved or have layering issues with the text and dice on the token layer. My version doesn't require any post-it moving except for bringing out the Tilts later in the game. I plan on making a different page or campaign for 3 or 4 player games, so I don't have to move anything around. In the screenshot, I have the text filled in with a previous game's results, but if I were starting a new game, I plan to have them just generically say "category" and "element". That way, the text is already there in the desired font and color, and I can edit it once the players make their choices. Then I can make quick adjustments to the text size and placement for aesthetics. Hope that helps! :)

Alanna, that is nice looking stuff! My primary games will be Gurps for an existing fantasy campaign, Traveller (classic or mongoose, haven't decided) for a new campaign, and I also plan to use it to play Melee and perhaps Ogre with my son when the kitchen table is covered in other projects.

Oh, I also want to test roll20 with some old school D&D "Keep on the Borderlands" just for the sake of nostalgia, and to expose people who aren't active in my other game to the program.

I'm planning on running 2E's Labyrinth of Madness next Wednesday with this. I'm also going to run a heavily homebrewed 7thsea adaptation to high-magic fantasy and weird Inception-style multilevel reality stuff next weekend.

Though the possibilty of Two Hour Games means more likley to play All Things Zombie and 5150 I started a small scenario of Warrior Heroes last night; it works pretty well thus far. I definitely enjoyed myself. I just got 5150: New Beginnings in the mail, so I'm excited to give that one a try as well. How is All Things Zombie? I've heard some good things about it, and am deciding between that or Six Gun Sound.

Ideally, I will be running a self-made tabletop strategy game, which allows for any and all settings. There will need to be a couple of additions before I can successfully run it, though. Aside from that, perhaps a bit of Lord of the Rings Strategy.

I'm planning a couple of things, but we'll be starting with Pathfinder just to kick the tires. However, to spice it up, I'll be running a the campaign in tandem with offline play. I'm currently building a Pathfinder module for doing international trade and espionage--commodities trading, political intrigue, bribery, etc--that a few of my players who will be out of country over the summer will be using to influence the party in the normal Pathfinder game. Essentially, the two long distance players will take on the roles of international power brokers trying to get whatever they can out of the various countries where the sit-down players will be meddling as a party. They'll be partly responsible for the random encounters that won't be so random. I'm working on building a world trade map, adding some trade winds, and using the hex grid to mark out the travel distances both overland and by sea. Kind of like... a really drawn out play-by-mail sort of resource strategy game for criminal and political masterminds, with the board stored on Roll20. Then, using it in tandem with gDocs, we'll keep track of their resource purchases, sales, accrued dividends, and assassinations. Other than that.. may throw a few Call of Cthulhu games in the mix. Oh, and we have an entirely token based economy game I may try to reproduce on here. Every turn as it goes through the group, each player has to add a new rule regarding how the game is played. It sounds boring when its worded like that, but my group never named it, and it gets pretty wacky pretty fast.

Deightine, have you ever played "Nomic"? Your rule-adding game reminds me of it.

Another Dungeon World here, or some of the other AW hacks.

This program is a godsend for me. My buddies and I used to play Paladium on a fairly regular basis waaay back in the day. Now we are living in NY, Boston, St. Paul and San Diego. Our plan is to make a weekly gaming night.

Deightine, have you ever played "Nomic"? Your rule-adding game reminds me of it. Never heard of Nomic previously, but I just looked it up. It is actually similar to what I came up with, except the one we play involves never changing an existing rule, never contradicting an existing rule, and never directing the flow of tokens (the currency we use in play) to one's self by name. We did it at first as an example of rule-creep and how it can destroy a game, while teaching some of the newer members of my crew how to do game design. I've done some research on Hofstadter and Suber before but never run into this. Thanks for the head's up!

I'm just messing around with it right now.

I love how many Call of Cthulu players are in this forum. I've seen like a dozen people mention that game, and I'd never imagined it was very widely played. It's not my primary, but I enjoy a good CoC game on occasion. I too plan to try out Pathfinder for starters, and that's my primary game that I run. I'll probably throw in a Quantum (which just got funding on Kickstarter as well, and should be released publicly in the next couple months) since I'm eager to test both that game and Roll20. If I could find players through the forums or something like that, I'd love to see if a Millenium's End game could be played through Roll20.

I doubt I'd use it for anything too rules intensive (say, D&D 4th); but that's not as much because Roll20 can't handle it or anything, but more because I've automated that game in MapTool and being that deep in the guts left me kinda bored with the game. That said, I would still probably lean in the direction of rules lighter games, because Roll20 seems to favor them a bit in my estimation and because its just less overhead for me to run them. The first one I'll be running is Barbarians of Lemuria.

I plan on using it for Shadowrun, and a few homebrew games that I've been working on, nothing particularly fancy.

My plans, provided i can get my friends and my schedules to sync is to play various games. Because of that we basically get in a Vent server and we normally play one shots or very very very short campaigns. We play Call of Cuthulu DnD (ADnD, 3.5, 4e depending on mood) shadowrun 3E (never got into 4E much for some reason) Warhammer 40k RPGS (dark heresy, deathwatch, black crusade, rogue trader) owod Then anything else one of us wants to try.

I'm probably going to test run this with a game of Pathfinder we have going on at the moment (we have 2 campaigns just recently started, each set in the same setting at the same time - the game I'm running is pretty off-the-cuff with characters finding their own adventures and everything is generated randomly, second campaign is the offical Kingmaker campaign being run by my best friend) so i thought might make it easier to have mine run on Roll20 to add another level of distinction. Also once I get a library of gubinz together I'll try running a games of Eclipse Phase and some 40K RPGS (Dark Heresy and Deathwatch), definitely looking into starting the older 40K games GORKAMORKA and TITANICUS on Roll20 as well, seeing as tokens can quickly be found/made for the games. Burning Wheel and Fireborn might get a go as well, maybe even Starwars D20 or the old Go West version, but first things first XD

I doubt I'd use it for anything too rules intensive (say, D&D 4th); but that's not as much because Roll20 can't handle it or anything, but more because I've automated that game in MapTool and being that deep in the guts left me kinda bored with the game. That said, I would still probably lean in the direction of rules lighter games, because Roll20 seems to favor them a bit in my estimation and because its just less overhead for me to run them. The first one I'll be running is Barbarians of Lemuria. Personally I feel like Rules-Intensive and Storytelling often end up at opposite ends of a single spectrum. Maybe not 100% of the time, but very often.

That is sometimes true in my experience as well. Personally, I tend not to try to come at it with the idea that we have a story to tell from the start, but try to shift my mindset to the idea that the story is what you tell after all the things happened. It has quelled my inner Railroader, at least. :D

After years of doing both types, I'd say the rules intensive stuff can be some of the most fun as a game, while the storytelling games tend to be the most fulfilling as an activity among friends. It's weird how the division works there. I try for happy-medium.

I'm actually looking forward to using this with the Pathfinder DnD system.

I'm starting of with a single 7th Sea session on 20 May (so that my players have enough time to build characters and I can finish writing the damn thing) if that runs well I might try and roll that into a campaign, otherwise I'll start something else.

I'm a gamemaster for an online Dresden Files RPG group. We geographically dispersed (4 time zones last I counted) and typically play via a chat room. Our current campaign in set in an alternate (but modern) San Francisco, and I have a wealth of maps and background information that I typically post on MediaFire. When I heard about your application, I thought it could really be a godsend in terms of letting us all be "on the same page." One of our difficulties is that we spend a lot of time just describing what's going on. It would make the game flow much better if everyone could just look at the same map. The video/voice options are icing on that cake, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm planning on using Roll20 for some of the d20 games that exist out there (4e mostly, but maybe 3.5/Pathfinder). At the same time, I'll be trying it out with Ironclaw, if only because the Roll20 platform can make it super easy to get people in to demo the game if I were streaming it, and that can make it a lot of fun for either designers or enthusiasts to show off new game systems to new players. Honestly, as soon as measurements are tracked while moving a token, this will be very feasible to pull off. :)

I'm working on getting a group of old friends together for a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game, though I can see me doing other GURPS stuff on Roll20. My other preferred systems right now are EABA, though FATE looks interesting. I haven't playing Fiasco yet, though I'm curious about it, and I *love* that Fiasco layout. The idea of just simple board games on Roll20 is really interesting, like if you could pay a small fee to get to play Monopoly or something using Roll20 as the platform.

After years of doing both types, I'd say the rules intensive stuff can be some of the most fun as a game, while the storytelling games tend to be the most fulfilling as an activity among friends. It's weird how the division works there. I try for happy-medium. I hadn't quite thought of it that way, but I like your point. I played a Millenium's End game, and while the large quantity of realism they aimed for in combat was cumbersome to learn, it also provided an element of excitement. Touche.

I hadn't quite thought of it that way, but I like your point. I played a Millenium's End game, and while the large quantity of realism they aimed for in combat was cumbersome to learn, it also provided an element of excitement. Since spending a good bit of time sparring with Agemegos, I've come to see the games on sort of a continuum. Every game I can think of lands somewhere along the line; I own dozens of games and have played literally hundreds by now. So this was sort of revelatory for me: Theater Story Game Mixed Format Simulation (D&D) War Games/Video Games A lot of the games that get billed as RPGs and easily get converted over to video games, etc, are in the Simulation section of the continuum. D&D evolved from a war game, Chainmail, in the late 70s. It was a minis game that became more story oriented as it aged, then as it hit 3rd edition, with the addition of Feats and such, became very character-centric rather than "kill-it-kill-it-for-XPs!" Then with 4th, it regressed to something like a mix of 1st edition and 2nd edition, with all of the trappings of 3rd edition. Shadowrun, Palladium, Palladium: Rifts, etc, land here. Then you get your mixed format games like WhiteWolf's traditional products, which use troupe play techniques (from theater) and a lot of characterization, backstory, social intrigue, etc. But they rely on the backbone of the system to keep players from running roughshod over each other. But its heavier on simulation than on theatrics. On the other side of the coin are games normally associated with story gaming like Apocalypse World or Dogs in the Vineyard, which have some system, but largely just to keep the details straight. Some of the LARPs land in here as well, dashed about in the mix. Then you go off into Story Games proper, where it becomes all about the narrative, or emotions (Flowers for Mara) or impromptu theater. A lot less system if any really at all; mostly just a lot of handouts and background information to keep everyone's part of the story straight. Then you hit the almost purely theater end, where you get the hardcore LARP, historical re-enactment, etc. There are fake personas, costuming, social rules of conduct, but usually little written down. You may as well be playing a script. But the unfortunate part of trying to make an online gaming solution is that we all, no matter which selection you put us in, recognize ourselves as some sort of 'gamer'... and so a product aimed at Gamers, well, it should be aimed at me, right? And you. And that other guy. But the people at the two extremes (Theater vs. War Games) are so far removed from each other that their needs are very different, and although you could do them on Roll20, you may as well just use a vid-conferencing system for the Theatrical types, and specially prepared sites for the war gamers. Touche. Eh, just my opinions. But it's nice to get a comp'd ego boost every now and then. :)

Personally I feel like Rules-Intensive and Storytelling often end up at opposite ends of a single spectrum. Maybe not 100% of the time, but very often. A year ago, familiar mostly with games in which the rules are intended as representation and resolution procedures for things and events in the game world, I would have agreed with you. But I have since become aware of a lot of RPGs (many of them, I understand, coming out of the Forge directly or at one remove) in which the rules attempt to mechanise and tokenise theme, conflict, stakes, motives, motifs, and tension—gamising narrative as traditional games gamised simulation. There is definitely a continuum from the most formal games in which player 'moves' are all defined and regulated by rules to the most informal that amount essentially to storytelling jam sessions in which the players' knowledge defines and their craft regulates characters' actions. But that is a process dimension separate from the aesthetical gamism/narrativism/simulationism trichotomy. This is not to say that there aren't some story mechanics that I have been aware of for a long time, such as Storypath cards and James Bond 007 's Hero Points, Survival Points, and wonderful plot-focussed encounter system. It's rather that games like Dogs in the Vineyard that are built around story-mechanics rather than simulation mechanics are new to me.

It really is awkward that one can't see where the "quote" and "edit" links are in this forum when viewing it on an iPad. What is the supposed advantage of making them mouse over text rather than honest, visible links? A "delete comment" facility might have its uses, too.

It really is awkward that one can't see where the "quote" and "edit" links are in this forum when viewing it on an iPad. What is the supposed advantage of making them mouse over text rather than honest, visible links? A "delete comment" facility might have its uses, too. I've gotten surprisingly good at guessing where the links are (although I just about flagged you just now by accident) It gets a lot harder when it's your own post, since then there's also an edit button as well.

Thanks!

Savage Worlds here with the possibility of Star Wars Saga, Cortex, Shadowrun or even Mechwarrior in the future

For my first roll20 campaign as my first time as DM will be doing a campaign using the Legend system for the first time (a lot of firsts). After that depends on how each does well. roll20 working well might lead for other campaigns in other setting, whether not I am the DM in them depends on how I end up running, and whether or not we go back to Legend from time to time or never again depends on whether people like it or not. So hoping for the best.

i looking for the rest of a group to play in Terrah a steampunk setting for pathfinder. it's kickstarter is almost over.

I'm playing D&D 4e with my group. :)

I'm playing D&D 4e with my group. :) Likewise. :) Even though I plan on trying out some WoD at one time or another.

I look forward to running some Labyrinth Lord. A little Diaspora and Legends of Anglerre too. Mostly a whole lot of Warrior, Rogue and Mage. The big community of Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu fans is nice, as I haven't been able to play them in years. Maybe some old-school Gamma World.

The incoming weeks are going to be a FATE-o-RAMA with my friends back in Venezuela. I haven't seen them in a year and a half and I'm excited to GM for them again!