New Gm to roll20

hey. iv been a Dm for 3.5 on paper b4 . its always been hard to get all my group together. this looks so cool and easy to get people together. just a few things though. 1. i'm no photo shop magic guy. where can i get good looking maps? 2. do i need to write a story from scratch or are their per-made starts? 3. can i make a D&D Character sheet and keep tack of it for my players on roll 20? 4. any advice would be greeatt.

Hello and Welcome xela! 1.) There is a wealth of maps floating out there on the Internet, but, thankfully, Roll20 has an Internet search feature built into it in the Art library. There is an information thread floating around these forums, but a Google search should give enough results to last a lifetime. 2.) Yes, anything you do in Roll20 will technically be from the ground up. There are no pre-made adventures for Roll20 yet. You could take a written adventure and convert/import into Roll20. I've done that with an AD&D published module and a 4e D&D published module. 3.) Currently, the developers are working on implementing a character sheet function. However, the character profile, and the tokens themselves, have spaces to include any sort of GM information. These places could be used to track character sheet information. 4.) I would definitely check out the Help Documents and video tutorials. However, my best advice would be to play around with it until you get the hang of it. The absolute beauty of Roll20 is the extremely easy User Interface. :)

thanks so much for the info. i guess i could have thought of the gm info to keep track of sheets. could you explain what you mean by import?

one more question. everything i do to the table top. is that a live few for players? example: if i change the zoom do the players see that happen live. basically do i control the table top?

Sorry, it was probably a bad word choice. What I meant was that it is up to you to take all the module's information and put into Roll20 yourself; i.e., you will have create all the maps, tokens, characters, and handouts from the module in Roll20. Yes, it is a lot of up front work, but that's the nature of VTT gaming. However, another tremendous asset of Roll20 is ability to copy a campaign. This is an excellent feature if you want to set up a written module and run through it several times with different PCs. As an example, I have coded/written the AD&D module N5: Under Illefarn into Roll20. I then copied the campaign before it has been played. In this way, I can play through the module with my current group, but I also have a pristine and untouched copy of the module to use if I want to run through it again with a different group of PCs and players.

alright thanks. i figured you meant just did it your self. i can do that. im not shy of working for my groups.

You can't change their zoom, but you can't change the focus.

Xela, Converting or importing an adventure into Roll20 usually means to scan the images and maps --this is pretty easy actually if you have a digital camera or scanner and a little bit of advice-- and manually entering the data you deem necessary for characters and non player characters. You can even type part of the narrative boxes beforehand and then copy/paste into the Text Chat Box for your players. Maybe Drohem has a different idea, but this is how I see it. You can even play without entering narrative text nor character data, just with the printed adventure in your lap or table while running the Roll20 app. Your second question: many things you do in the Roll20 app will be shared and visible for your players. Some game assets like characters, handouts, are handled by means of "permissions": that means that you need to assign what players can access to these game resources; otherwise these assets are for your GM eyes only. Currently the GM can't set or share his/her zoom level with players, but he can displace the view of a background image or map and then "force" the players view to the same place by means of pushing SHIFT+left mouse click. If you don't do this, each player will be displacing and moving things on their own. It's strongly recommended to check the Help Documents and video tutorials (<a href="http://help.roll20.net/" rel="nofollow">http://help.roll20.net/</a>). You will find most of your questions addressed there. Drohem's earlier advice is good! EDIT: @Drohem, @Jonathan the Black, I didn't see your answers while writing this reply.

Yes, absolutely, you can run a written module on the fly in Roll20 (another great feature)! I'm just one of the people who likes to have things laid out beforehand and so I 're-create' the complete module in Roll20 and then run it.