What helped you the most when learning to DM on roll20?

Topic. I've DM'd for years with pencil and paper, and I've played plenty of games on roll20. Yet learning to DM on roll20 (as I'm doing now) has been one of the most frustrating things I've done in a long time, and I spent most of last month dealing with the IRS and identity theft issues. I've tried the onsite tutorial, reading the wiki, and watching youtube explanations so far, and my head is just swimming. I feel so utterly overwhelmed by it all. Like, I'm not sure if I should be buying tables and maps off the market place, looking for gifs, or learning one of the half dozen map making programs in the website's link section. Anyone else start out this way? What helped you to make sense of it all, your lightbulb moment where it all clicked together? 

I searched up Roll20 when my in person pnp group had some members move across the country.  We needed some way to keep playing.... I started a test game to show everyone and, before we got together the last time, played with the drawing tool a little and the turn order tool. My group started that way; just using the Roll20 tabletop like a white board.  We talked over voice chat and drew pictures on the page to represent the rooms.  Then we started using randomly found tokens for the characters and monsters.  We didn't even have character sheet or macros at first. Simple as can be and we had a bunch of fun sessions that way. The next step for us was one of the many number of random map generator programs out there; run several iterations until we liked it and then export it as a jpg and drop it into roll20 to use.  We used just the fog of war with that and the reveal tool to display sections as we needed to. That's still what one of my friends who gms does.  I like playing with maps so after a while I started taking modules that I was using and scanning the maps in and importing them into GIMP and cleaning them up so we could use them in Roll20.  And I started playing with the dynamic lighting and stuff. Now I've been working through some of the GiMP tutorials I've found to help improve my maps and add color to them and items etc (though I still do a lot of searching for images to use so I don't have to make everything from scratch. It is not wrong to start simple and just learn the various tools by using them as you go; I'd bet many (most) folk have done that. :)

One of the things that sets roll20 apart from an actual table top is the amount of preparation you can have done beforehand.  Unless you have a 30x30 foot table at home with your players and yourself suspended above it by wires you can never really have as much laid out and read to go as you can in Roll20 and the ability to add DM notes just adds to that so the first thing that I found out is that it paid to have a bit more mapping ready to go than I would at a traditional table top.  I also like having images ready to give folks something to look at while they chat or to set the mood if tactical or travel maps aren't called for at the time.  As far as what maps to use you should buy all my maps and make me wealthy how did you do it in person?  If you like high quality pre-made maps or construction with fancy tiles the marketplace is for you.  If you just liked to draw you maps by hand, there's no reason you can't do that with the simple drawing tools in Roll20, use one of the outside programs listed, or draw it on a piece of paper and take a good picture of your map and upload it.

Use these until they're instinctive: <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Advanced_Shortcuts" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Advanced_Shortcuts</a>

Ask someone that has run a quality game you've played in to give you a walk-through of DMing. Both would log into your Roll20 game as DMs and let your former DM give you notes (and show you some of Roll20's functions) as you build your game. (Have all text and anything you definitely want to have in the game ready to cut & paste or upload as a courtesy to the person. They are there to facilitate your actual game construction. The creative stuff needs to be all ready to go beforehand). It would save you massive time if someone could give you comprehensive answers to your questions on the spot. No YouTube tutorial or text is ever going to do that.

For me it revolved around getting my game organised and working before I worried too much about aesthetics. Messing around with a test game is an invaluable way for new and experienced DM's alike, making journals and handouts work for you in terms of revealing some things to some people and keeping other things just for your eyes etc etc... For maps you can either find things online that will suit your purposes and plan your encounter around them, use the marketplace to look for the many fine options available there, or make your own; either in game using the drawing tools and various tokens or using an external program, i personally favour GIMP. In terms of the overwhelming learning curve, just take your time and let it come naturally. The forums exist to help explain things that give you trouble so while I will always advocate the wiki don't be afraid to ask questions here if something isn't quite clicking. Searching the forums for others who have posted the same things will always help too as you won't be the first person to need help in any given area I'm sure. TL/DR: You can do everything you do for pen/paper DM'ing here, just take your time to get used to the VTT, it will revolutionise your life =D

Start out simple, you can use Roll20 the same way you play tabletop. The rest will come in time. :) And Tokentool rocks!&nbsp;

I just plunged into the deep end and thrashed around. Aaron and Matt were very helpful when it got frustrating, there were some very good You Tube Tutorials, some of the information is out of date now two and a half years on. Roll 20 has become a lot more stable, but the level of complexity has also increased. You can do a lot more and you can dive down some serious rabbit holes as well. PM me if you need help, I will GM you into one of my games, so you can see what I do. Warning I have serious O.C.Details, you might find my rabbit hole goes deeper than you wish to go.

Hmmm, Let me think back when I joined roll20 in 2012. I just came off from using openrpg/traipse so I was familiar with gaming online. There was less features on roll20 then than there is now. Back then we did not have community sheets, dynamic lighting, and the api along with more bugs and crashes (there are many around that remember then) but my lightbulb moment was learning how to macro and linking the default tokens to the character sheet. Once I learned that, I expanded on my understanding of roll20. I will second or third the comments, keep it simple and start small. Do not try to learn everything at once. Take your time (I spent the first 200hrs on roll20 just playing with a test game and all the stuff inside it) so just relax and don't rush.

These&nbsp; tutorials helped me a lot. (How to handle party splitting, Token-&gt;character sheet interaction, Map layouts, Multi-image tokens, etc). Other than that, I just trudged thru it. &nbsp;Be sure to check out the API scripts...they help a TON! I put in a whole lot of pre-game prep doing map making, npc character sheet and token creation, storyline quest, side quests, etc. &nbsp;As has already been stated, you can do so much pre-game, that the game flow is way faster in VTT for me than in TT. I have purchased quite a lot of art from the Marketplace...those $3-$5 add up fast, but having a good library to pull from makes life a whole lot easier. I have a large library of npc character sheets with tokens ready so that I can quickly create random encounters. It just takes time...

Dustin said: Ask someone that has run a quality game you've played in to give you a walk-through of DMing. Both would log into your Roll20 game as DMs and let your former DM give you notes (and show you some of Roll20's functions) as you build your game. (Have all text and anything you definitely want to have in the game ready to cut & paste or upload as a courtesy to the person. They are there to facilitate your actual game construction. The creative stuff needs to be all ready to go beforehand). It would save you massive time if someone could give you comprehensive answers to your questions on the spot. No YouTube tutorial or text is ever going to do that. A DM's workshop by some of the experienced Roll20 DMs would be a whole lot of awesome...

Knox said: A DM's workshop by some of the experienced Roll20 DMs would be a whole lot of awesome... Rol20con has panels listed and one of them is GMing on Roll20 at 5pm (pacific).

My first breakthrough was realizing I can just create a new campaign to mess around with. If you don't invite anyone, it doesn't matter what it looks like. So you've got a safe space to learn the tools. My second breakthrough was learning to make dice rolling macros and telling players where to find those macros (under the gear tab). Inline rolls are great! Queries are great! eg: [[1d20+?{Modifier to add}]] My third breakthrough was learning how the polygon tool works. There's no simple eraser tool like in digital painting programs. If you're making hand-drawn maps with the built-in drawing tools, make them in small sections, so it's easy to delete a section. Another big breakthrough was that tokens don't equal characters. They just represent them. If you change a token's lighting or permissions, you have to remember to add it back to the character sheet under "default token". My players love dynamic lighting. As a GM, you can press ctrl-L with a token selected to see what they see.

I have learned a couple of things from my game sessions. &nbsp;I have found that players stay for a couple of sessions, then leave, and come back a couple of weeks later. &nbsp;You have some players there every session on time like clockwork, and some that you don't know if they will show up for the session or not. &nbsp;With one-shot games this is not really much of an issue. &nbsp;I find that to combat this issue you can do several things. &nbsp;Inside the game you can run a straight published module (which I don't use much because I believe that some players may have read them, which will lessen their enjoyment of the game.). The second way to counteract the fluidity of players coming in and out is to have a story planned out with several places in the game where you can bring in a player at any moment. &nbsp;I like to have my games character driven. &nbsp;I have planned events and encounters, and give players an idea of what is going on in the world an let them decide what they want to do and where they want to go. &nbsp;I use character goals and backgrounds to give players opportunities in the game. &nbsp;Good communication between game master and players is key to running a smooth game. &nbsp;I have several forum threads in my game such as feedback, suggestions, adventure log, loot log, a campfire thread for characters to interact and introduce each other and for me to post pertinent updates to what's going on, and stickys such as character creation.

al e. said: I just plunged into the deep end and thrashed around. Aaron and Matt were very helpful when it got frustrating. Same here, how I got into it, and learned what I could and couldn't do. Made a test campaign, and started smashing button, sliding sliders, and checking checkboxes to see what they did. The upside of that is some of it I wasn't sure what use it was, and ended up using it in a totally different (and more useful to me) way than expected, since I went into it without any idea of what its intended purpose was. More of a "hmm thats a neat feature, what can I use this for" vs looking up in the wiki and going "Ah, this is what this is used for". And I second The Aaron being helpful. Hes helped me numerous times on scripts or in general. And you cant find a more friendly and patient guy while he does it! I think one time he spent a good 60 minutes trying to explain some obscure abstract javascript concept to me that I was trying to figure out how to use.

a 3rd upvote for Aaron specifically, and the community in general when you need help. I have yet to run into any downright unhelpful responses to questions or posts. As for actually answering your question; The game I'm running (my first game as GM, and only 2nd game on Roll20) is running some friends through the Iron Gods AP from Paizo. I know that not everyone likes using published material, and to those who can come up with a story on the fly and with prior planning I salute you and envy you, but as a new GM and new to using Roll20 it was a big help to have most of the campaign world already sketched out and encounters reasonably balanced and designed so that I can focus on how to prep a given session in Roll20 without having to also worry about how to prep the session from a GM standpoint. Now that we've got several sessions (and many near player deaths) out of the way I'm comfortable enough with the Roll20 systems from prepping what was spelled out in the first AP book to prep the rest of the campaign from a much more freeform and customized for my players manner. So I guess, really my experience was kinda like Al e. and DXWARLOCK, started using Roll 20 under the assumption that I could do anything I would need for the AP at a basic level, and found some interesting and fun ways to use VTT systems to do things that couldn't easily be done at the table once I was comfortable with how to do it at a basic level.

Foremost in my mind is learning how long it takes to prep a VTT vs. a physical game. I can pick up a module book or pdf and a few generic tokens and run a decent physical game without too much prep... just reading the adventure over and getting monster stats together. In roll20, largely because of all wonderful tools we have at our disposal, there's a certain level of expectation.&nbsp; Folks seem disappointed if you don't have graphical maps setup and monster tokens ready to go.&nbsp; Dynamic Lighting and complex macros / API are still considered Extras in most games I play.&nbsp; No character sheets and hand-drawn maps with basic /roll dice just seems... quaint now.&nbsp; I've learned to keep a collection of images, maptiles, tokens, macro snippets, etc on my computer "Just in case". That being said, I wouldn't trade Roll20 for anything. It's just a lot more prep work on the GM's side than a traditional game. On the other hand;&nbsp; Just because you HAVE a tool doesn't mean you have to use it.&nbsp; I've spent an inordinate amount of time crafting macros and token_tables for NPC that only get used once before I learned to keep things generic and re-usable.&nbsp; While you *CAN* have all your adventure notes and descriptions and monster stats in-game, it's still often easier just to have them up on your screen elsewhere or on paper in front of you. And lastly; I learned that it's therapeutic to keep a few useless d00 dice on my desk for those occasions I feel the need to throw my dice across the room for trying to kill me.&nbsp; There's some things that a VTT just *CAN'T* replicate!

Mark G. said: And lastly; I learned that it's therapeutic to keep a few useless d00 dice on my desk for those occasions I feel the need to throw my dice across the room for trying to kill me.&nbsp; There's some things that a VTT just *CAN'T* replicate! Just don't throw those dice at your monitor otherwise you might damage it and not even hit your target. :D

Found this thread late, so I don't have a lot to add to what's already been said... just a few short points, from having used Roll20 for over 3 years now: 1) Start small & simple, until you're familiar with running a game within Roll20. It's very different from running a face-to-face game. 2) Practice using the DM tools until you're very comfortable with them. Does wonders for the smooth flow of your game 3) Don't stress if you mess up during a game you're running. I've found that players are very forgiving, they're just glad to be in a game. 4) If Roll20 looks like it's going to work for you and you plan to run games for the long-term, consider getting a subscription account. The dynamic lighting tools alone are worth the price.

Brett E. said: 4) If Roll20 looks like it's going to work for you and you plan to run games for the long-term, consider getting a subscription account. The dynamic lighting tools alone are worth the price. Transmogrifier is what originally tipped the scales for me. &nbsp;Being able to easily move content between my games is incredibly awesome.&nbsp;

Transmogrifier is what originally tipped the scales for me. &nbsp;Being able to easily move content between my games is incredibly awesome. And here, everyone else was putting their money on API access :)

Mark G. said: Transmogrifier is what originally tipped the scales for me. &nbsp;Being able to easily move content between my games is incredibly awesome. And here, everyone else was putting their money on API access :) Shocking, right? =D &nbsp;API is far and away the best part of of Pro in my opinion, but Transmogrifier is immediately useful to anyone, and it was what I needed at the time. =D

Mark G. said: Transmogrifier is what originally tipped the scales for me. &nbsp;Being able to easily move content between my games is incredibly awesome. And here, everyone else was putting their money on API access :) Perhaps, but API access had its money on The Aaron!

My nuggets of wisdom: Play a game or two if you haven't. That should let you know how some of the things might be applied and managed. Prep up front means a better experience for everyone. Have maps and tokens ready for whatever the scenario might turn into (as best you can). You might get to a mental space early on where you feel like "there's too much prep work required!" but once you get the hang of it, its not that bad. It is OK to dip your toes in with a minimum of prep and tool use, and ease into those things more as you find things that work for you and make your games better.In time you will decide for yourself what stuff you can and cannot live without before starting it up. While the interface is pretty easy, creating macros to make common die rolls or commands a one-click event will make things easier. This can wait until you fool around in there and try to run a game and then decide what really bogged things down versus added to the experience. All game systems are different and so it is with Roll20 that some systems have a lot more community support than others. If you play uncommon systems, you might have more work to do to leverage all of Roll20's possibilities. Or you can be like me and say "I can't code to save my life" and just do your best. I personally don't use the character sheets too much. Or any API. I have a separate application for character sheets and only a couple of macros. It works like a champ.

The Aaron said: Brett E. said: 4) If Roll20 looks like it's going to work for you and you plan to run games for the long-term, consider getting a subscription account. The dynamic lighting tools alone are worth the price. Transmogrifier is what originally tipped the scales for me. &nbsp;Being able to easily move content between my games is incredibly awesome.&nbsp; Yeah, there's that too, I love the transmogrifier... I've mentioned this before, but I always initially build my encounter maps on what I call my campaign "template". Then when it's finished, I use the transmogrifier to copy it over to a "live" campaign. This is the campaign used for actual game play, where the player characters will interact with the map, move stuff around, kill monsters, etc. The map can be modified based on player actions, but I always still have the original, unaltered version on my template campaign.

Other GM's and the roll20 community - hands down. &nbsp;Ask questions of other GM's, and get helped. &nbsp;The community on roll20 is a resource like no other. &nbsp;Without it, we would be limited to other online resources or having to restrict yourself to local game groups/game stores. &nbsp;The online resources besides roll20 are most likely too much to handle, sometimes unhelpful, and not as interactive. &nbsp;You might be lucky with the game store or group, but if you aren't...that's the only rpg you have. With Roll20 there are a bunch of people who want to run and play rpg games. &nbsp;One can join, one can ask a fellow gm, one can experiment, and one can learn. &nbsp;One can have interaction with other players and gm's on a larger scale, smaller scale, and a more personal even 1 on 1 scale. I've gone to a game store and started with a physical group, but the amount of people on roll20 changed everything. &nbsp;A personal thanks for the roll20 staff, moderators, and other people I might not know are involved in helping to make the community. &nbsp;Thanks to the community for generally being friendly. &nbsp;Furthermore, thanks to the fellow GM's I sought who have gone through this before and I've enjoyed discussions with. &nbsp;The help I got from the community has overwhelmingly been valuable and comforting. Use the community - that was the biggest help for me.