Warning: Wall of Text. :) [tldr; It worked great. If you do table top RPGs I recommend trying it out at least once.] Sunday I ran a 3 hour game of Paranoia on Roll20.net. Overall I am very impressed. I only used free features and the default audio. I started with an idea for a short adventure for up to 5 troubleshooter players. I’ll spare you the details of the game system, but it’s probably my favorite game to GM. In short it’s a sci-fi game with lasers, robots and clones. Overall, I am damn impressed. To be fair there were rough edges in places. However, easy things were easy, and hard things seemed possible. It would be easy for an engine like this to be too focused on one game system and prevent you doing some simple things that would be better for other systems. Instead I found a very broad generic system that lets me do what I want with it. Some features that could be automated are left as manual, but that means you control them completely. Getting started and making maps First, I watched the GM intro video. It gives a good overview but it glosses over a lot of details. I started by making a map for the starting area. Roll20 has a lot of great map assets for fantasy games, but it’s a little lacking in Sci-fi. Using the built in search engine I was able to find some tiles that were suitable. I spent some time in Paint.Net making them into tiles and loaded them into the game. Roll20 has a way to scale maps to fit the grid. I used that initially, but quickly realized I didn’t want to resize every single tile every time I placed it. I could have built the map in some other application and uploaded one image and just resized once, but I found the interface on Roll20 to be perfect for laying out tiles. So I scrapped my tiles then resized them to 70x70 squares like Roll20 uses and started over. Loading images and managing your library is pretty easy so this wasn’t too big a chore. With the right sized tiles I was able to create maps quickly. The controls for resizing the map aren’t terribly discoverable, so I didn’t realize I could even do it. Even know that I think the default map size is probably about right. It’s big enough to have a few rooms but small enough not get the players easily lost. If you were dead set on having a huge dungeon in one map, you can. Setup Once my maps were done I moved on to the token layer and placed some enemies. Editing stats for tokens is easy and you can control how much information the players will. I enabled the green bar to track HP and gave the robots some hit points. After I spent some more time in Paint.Net making some heads for character pawns I put the characters tokens into the game. Adding tokens is super easy and they have some very nice features. Icons for status effects and whatever can be added. I’m not sure if new icons can be loaded, that would be nice. I found the built in set to be non-specific for the most part. Icons that more clearly indicated dizziness, blindness or other typical status effects would be nice. The colored dots are nice since you can make them mean whatever you want. Making character sheets is pretty easy. You go to the Journal and add a new one. You can add whatever attributes you like. After that you can add skills (which are backed by Macros). For Paranoia you get a few primary attributes and the skills feed off them. For example “Laser Pistol” skill is added to the Violence attribute whenever the player wants to fire a laser. The player then rolls 1d20 and tries to come in under the total. My Shoot-Laser skill looks like this: /me fires a laser pistol in anger /roll (1d20 * -1) +@{Violence} + 4 I’m not wild about adding 4 to the end (that’s the laser skill) but I didn’t want to crap up the character sheets with skills-as-attributes. It works but it would be nice if there were secondary attributes of some kind. After tediously creating a few character sheets, I realized I could just copy a template sheet and change the details. One problem I had is that I decided I wanted to add a skill to every sheet after I got done. I wish there was a “copy to -> [character]” dropdown for the skills so I could clone skills more easily. Once I got all the characters done it was time to play. I wasn’t sure how I would assign characters to players, but once some players joined it was easy to do from the journal. I made character sheets with Macros for the key NPCs and added a bunch of notes I refered to during the game. This was awesome. I also added some tokens for special equipment with extensive notes about the items. The players were able to see the tokens and pick the equipment they wanted by moving it around. When they used it I was able to refer back to the notes easily. (They didn't keep the actual tokens, we just noted it on the character sheet.) Starting the game The LFG feature on the website is nice. I posted a notice 2 hours before the game and lucked into a random playing joining up with me and my friend. Not only did he have an excellent accent, but he was a great player and added a lot to the game. My friend’s connection wasn't very good. We had some issues with the built in video, but when we stuck to just audio it worked well enough. People often use Google+ or Skype and I can see why. For a pickup game I wanted to stick to the defaults. I had one serious issue once the players joined. The character sheets I made had vanished from the Journal! (Panic time…) I left and rejoined and they came back. However doing that severed my audio connection with my friend. He had to leave and rejoin. Later I determined he probably could have just toggled his audio sharing from the controls. Once we got that sorted, I easily assigned players to characters. It wasn't clear how that would work until they joined, but once they did it all made sense. Gameplay Once we got the issues sorted out we started the game. Thanks to my prep, testing and the general good design of Roll20 I felt like the game went smoothly. I even felt confident enough to whip up a simple map on the fly on another page while the players were on another map puzzling over what they would do next. As you move from page to page, you can copy-paste tokens to move them along. This works pretty good. I feel the interface could somehow be smoother. Maybe a bucket in the control bar I can drop tokens into? I dunno but this was the one part of the game where I felt like the players were waiting on me to move the fiddly bits around. I liked the auras. Drop a grenade token, give a an aura for blast radius. Easy-peasy. Paranoia is a game of secrets. Two players were peppering me with whispers. I was able to keep up, but with 4-5 players it could have got rough. It might be nice to have more advanced chat options. Maybe tabs to organize all the whispers would be nice. Overall the game went well. I was probably a little too nice to the players. They only died once each. You need 3 or 4 players to get the real blood-baths this game is famous for. J If you would like to play Paranoia on the weekend sometime shoot me a PM. I’m all set up and have a 3-4 hour session all ready to go. I’ll likely move to Google+ since I hear that works really well for audio. Areas for improvement The Wiki is a little thin in places. Hopefully the users will flesh it out some more. It would be nice to have some follow-up videos. One showing a GM running a game in progress would be most welcome. I found some on Youtube, but they were focused on the game they were playing. It would be nice to have a “sample” game with players showing all the typical steps. Like assigning players to characters, tokens to characters, adding edit permissions, dealing with handouts, etc. Transparent drawing tools would be nice. I wanted to color code parts of the map with transparency, but I had to make do with outlines.
