First Roll20 Game

I am about to start my first Roll20 game and I am super nervous. I'm also really excited to actually use what roll20 is able to do. So, I have GM'd many times in the past- although not the system I'm using. What I'm really nervous about is messing up the tech. So, moving things from the GM layer too early or forgetting to move my layer tabs etc.  Has anyone got any funny anecdotes about their first game. (Or any advice on how to not completely mess up?) 

Relax and have fun. =D If you don't feel completely comfortable in the interface go through the tutorial ( or again, if you've already done it ).   Make a copy of your game and run through some of your planned encounters.   Pretend your players aren't going to do what you expect ( I know, but it might happen! ) and time yourself in creating a one-off encounter with something you haven't thought of ( 2 Owlbears living in a deserted old mill that's built atop the roof of a sunken temple worshiping the return of the race of Golden Kobold Warriors who stand as tall as a mountain and will destroy the world in 4 days of terror culminating in the moon hatching the Devourer of Planes!... or something similar. =D  ). Watch some real play streams/youtubes of people on roll20 and see what they do or what problems they have. =D

For me at the start, one of my original mess-ups & underestimations was about attendance, scheduling, reliability, game-time-awareness for the players.  Game session one: Everyone shows up and has fun, everyone says "See you next week!".  Game session two arrives next week and some Players are missing, some players are late. Wait, what?! We all had fun last week and everyone said they're coming back to continue the game. Where is everybody? Turns out, reminders help, communication helps. People forget, especially at first when the game hasn't been a regular time slot, or when they might not be too invested in the game yet, or when they are not accustomed to checking Roll20 daily; or confusion about the time if you always state the time for your time zone, but they live in another time zone and get confused. TIPS: Be sure to set the "Next Game Time" on your Roll20 game page. It automatically shows the correct time for each user in their own personal time zone.  But wait! Not everyone looks at the Next Game Time.  Also make a thread in your Game Discussion Forum called "Game schedule reminder!" and post the dates, times of upcoming games, making a new post each week. If Players have Roll20 Notifications turned on for Email, they'll get an email based on your Schedule thread post. You can also use this thread to ask them to RSVP or to post if they're going to be missing a session.  Also tell them "Add the next game on your personal calendar, your home calendar, your Google calendar, etc". Are there other ways of reminding them too? Do it. Whether you collect their email address, text message, or just use the Roll20 interface, stay in touch and confirm your Player attendance one day before (or one week before) each game session that is scheduled. Happy adventuring!

Awesome advice. I actually did this. Session zero was a fortnight ago so I messaged everyone to check they were still ok to come to the first session this Thursday. I'm still waiting for a response from one player but everyone else has responded. I have to remember that not everyone lives on roll20 all day like me. XD

Gold said: Game session one: Everyone shows up and has fun, everyone says "See you next week!".  Game session two arrives next week and some Players are missing, some players are late. Wait, what?! We all had fun last week and everyone said they're coming back to continue the game. Where is everybody? This sounds eerily familiar... Follow Gold's advice!

David T. said: Gold said: Game session one: Everyone shows up and has fun, everyone says "See you next week!".  Game session two arrives next week and some Players are missing, some players are late. Wait, what?! We all had fun last week and everyone said they're coming back to continue the game. Where is everybody? This sounds eerily familiar... Follow Gold's advice! Amen to that. I have this problem, and the only game I run is for RL friends :/

The Aaron said: 2 Owlbears living in a deserted old mill that's built atop the roof of a sunken temple worshiping the return of the race of Golden Kobold Warriors who stand as tall as a mountain and will destroy the world in 4 days of terror culminating in the moon hatching the Devourer of Planes!... or something similar. =D ). I blame Pun-Pun.

Some awesome advice from people. Honestly though I had hoped this thread would end up being a funny thread with a list of bloopers and stuff people had encountered before but alas.  Any advice on the specific roll20 stuff, as so far it's mostly been game management? Not that that's a bad thing, just that I've dealt with that a lot GMing before. 

Katie, I haven't had too many moments from my end but... I did have a player at a convention-style game I used to run with a sack of 'alchemical hand grenades' be inside a wooden chest with said sack of hand grenades, get launched off a ship thereby triggering the sack of hand grenades (the player was a Kender... which is basically a kleptomaniac ADHD hobbit).  The God of Fire did decide to send him back as a barely alive cinder, purely because the God of Fire thought keeping him in the realm of the living would be far more amusing than letting the Kender "pass on".

The Aaron said: 2 Owlbears living in a deserted old mill that's built atop the roof of a sunken temple worshiping the return of the race of Golden Kobold Warriors who stand as tall as a mountain and will destroy the world in 4 days of terror culminating in the moon hatching the Devourer of Planes!...  That day was a Tuesday.  It was fun.  Oh wait, my children aren't Owlbears...

Funny or frustrating not sure, but I went through and created a really nice Dynamic Lighting layout on a map where the party was coming to try and defeat a bandit overlord that had taken control of one of the factions in the area. They could have assaulted the keep, snuck in and assassinated him, talked their way in. I had all the possibilities covered, except for one of my player's browser bugging and not respecting DL that is. Kinda ruined the whole "where is that &^%*$#@" vibe I was going for when he could see the whole map along with all the guards, and the prisoner that they were also searching high and low for in hopes of getting in good with his faction. That was not a fun encounter since they all pretty much knew what was coming at them (I'm gonna have to keep Aaron's owlbear story in reserve for times like this I think). There was also the time that my players were too clever for their own good and snuck into the cannibals' den through a secret entrance. I had planned for this eventuality, because you know - I'd put a secret entrance in the base, so obviously it was a possibility. What I hadn't planned for was that the sorcerous-magus in the party would burn all of his 2nd level spells (they were level 5 at the time) to maintain alter self impersonating a cannibal for several minutes or that the swashbuckler in the group would nat 20 his disguise roll which allowed them to fool the mindless undead guards the cannibals had near the secret entrance. they explored the whole den, but didn't look for any more secret doors (because obviously cannibals will only have the one). They met all of the cannibals and then went back to the room they first entered and talked their way into the head cannibal's room where they proceeded to show why a wizard(necormancer) should stay at range. This of course brought the undead that guarded the secret door in to the battle, but they still weren't worried (there were only 4 of them after all and they had a cleric and a paladin). Of course, they failed to think of the fact that battle noises carry through walls, which alerted all of the enemies to their presence. Instead of the slow build to the climactic fight, we wound up with the largest brawl I've ever seen inside a 5x5 square room. Nearly had a TPK there.

Well, talking about funny or frustrating moments in Roll20... The very first game I ran on Roll20 was in person.  I have a group of friends from college that (prior to using Roll20) would meet once a year for a weekend of gaming.  Someone has to GM (and more often than not, that someone is me) so I prepared a series of encounters, a plot, highlights from the last few thousand years of history, npcs, etc.  The game dealt with a party who had become folk heroes and champions of the realm due to some prior event and were now the A-Team for the realm's king, sent to deal with issues.  Pretty standard fare.  The plot  involved getting sent by the king to look into rumors in a duchy to the east, and the various goings on there. To get the ball rolling in situ, I went with an opening gambit (ala James Bond) where the party is on a walled keep that spans the only traversable gap in the northern mountain range preparing to receive an orc force that scouts said were headed for the walls. It started to diverge from there... the players really got into the defense role and devised various plans and strategies, turning what was supposed to be "a roving band of orcs dispatched by just the players" into "Helm's Deep".  I had a big green page on Roll20 where I had drug in the PCs and the orcs, just a scoreboard sort of thing where only I could see it and track initiative and health and roll the attacks and such.  As their plans got larger and larger, I kept having to resize the page and drag in more and more units, building Warhammer-esque squads on both sides.  Eventually I probably had 800 tokens arrayed across a 200 x 200 page.  With 5 players, on each of their turns they made an extra d20 roll adjusted by an appropriate stat to see how their various squads did that round (Fighter had warriors on the walls, Ranger had archers on the towers, Cleric had healers in the courtyard, Mage had squads with boiling oil, etc).  That battle took us the entire weekend, with lots of little twists and turns and sub-engagements and an epic giant-growthed, roid-raging, hill giant towering above the keep smashing and such.   We had a blast and never touched the prepared plot.  The players decided to take the plunge into online gaming with Roll20 a that point.  I asked them what the part would do now that the north had been defended, looking forward to running all my prepped plot down south in the kingdom... ...they unanimously decided to go north. 3 years later and we still haven't gone back to the kingdom.  As an introduction to Roll20, it was a blast.  Having set up Orcs as characters, it was trivial to build from a few orcs in a raiding party to a full on epic war machine rolling up to the keep.  And the best part about having set up in Roll20 to run the local game, by the time those players had driven back to their homes (some 3 hours away or so), we played a short encounter with 3 of them that evening with almost no time needed to get rolling.  (I think it took longer to get my less technical friend online than it took to jump into playing. =D)