Just ran my first session

I just finished running my first roll20 session and it all seemed to go fairly well.

I'll add player comments as they come to hand but for the moment I think I need to read up on fog of war, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to.

My other gripe was the turn order thing, it'd be nice to just be able to plug in details of who is involved in a combat (characters, bandit #1, bandit #2 etc) and have it keep track of turns without having to find and use tokens. This would be much more convenient in terms of encounters that occur which weren't planned or mapped out. It'd also be nice for it to easily track systems where characters get multiple actions in different phases. Guess I need to read up on this too.

Just got an email back from one of my players and thought I'd post it here:

From a players perspective it was good, as we mentioned yesterday the only real problems were the video/audio issues people were having. Having a better system for tracking initiative would be good, perhaps something that showed on screen for the players?

I found setting myself up a couple of macros before hand was really helpful. Adam and I had done most of our attacks as well as the rolls for our defence knacks. Might be an idea for players to be given a list of macros that it would be helpful to have set up, such as AJ's character (and all of us really) had to do a number of Wits rolls I think it would have helped to have had a macro for that, that way there is no need for either the players or the GM to consult a character sheet and then insert the command etc. Probably wouldn't want some people to get bogged down with too many though and people would need to make sure they update their macros as their characters traits improve.

I really liked how you could change who your rolls and text were coming from, so it came up under my character's name instead of mine, gave a better feeling of immersion. Was that confusing as a GM seeing rolls under the PC's names instead of the players or it didn't really make a difference?

All in all I think the system has real potential, as a player I was finding it wasn't perfect but it certainly worked.

P.S. Min really liked the idea that there wasn't roleplayers trashing our house :P

Just got feedback from another player:

Experience wise it was better than the pathfinder session I played in. Audio was much better with no screeching feedback. Although there was some lag from time to time. It would pause for 1-2 seconds before catching up. Handouts were good to have up while on the main chat panel & map screen for ease of dice computation. Character sheet wise, in the other game I played in the Char sheets were actually in word format that we could edit in session, which was handy but could be difficult to control should someone want to sekritly! add a point or two to various stats. However it would make it easier to make changes for xp-gains etc without having to email - scan - upload in between sessions and is handy for jotting down info in session. For example noting that I had 39Guilders (in game roll cause it wasn't sorted prior) and the 3guilders spent greasing Gosse's palm.
Otherwise it flowed smoothly from map to map, atmospheric music/sounds was nifty.
Hardware/mechanics of the system feedback:
What I would like to see is more intuitive control over voice/recording levels, hardware selection. Having it split over the tokbox panel and settings makes it confusing and hard to navigate. I would like to see a push to talk option added so that everyone hears what I say rather than everything happening in my immediate vicinity all the time.
While the rolling system is fantastic especially with the auto-exploding, it is a little frustrating that symbols such as ),( and - can't be used as they are denoted as mathematical triggers. So having #attack /roll 3d10!!k2 (sword) will return an error when trying to roll it.
What I would really like to see is a text name box attached to the macro, for example.
Macro: #atk
Name: Attacks (Sword)
Roll: /roll 3d10!!k2
So that when I input my macro, the chat panel responds with Luke: Attacks (sword), rolls 7+11+2=18
Currently any notification of the roll has to be placed after the roll function and make sure there are no mathematical figures included. The same scenario my macro set up looks like this
Macro: #atk
Roll: /roll3d10!!k2 attack_sword
and functions like this, Luke: Rolls 7+11+2=18 attack_sword
While this works, it is less easy to interpret what rolls are coming from whom. particularly when there are multiple characters rolling, take for example initiative.
Luke: Initiative roll, rolls 5+7=12
is easier to understand than
Luke: Rolls 5+7=12 initiative
It isn't a game breaker but would clean things up nicely and also help with multiple weapons rolls. attack sword, attack knife, parry x, parry y etc.

Thanks Riley, I'll let him know.

Second session in three days. Really excited about it (even though I've not gotten first session feedback from some players yet).

Here's a comment that came out of session 3:

The chat atm is the only thing that lets it down they use tokbox I believe and as yet there is no intuitive explanation of how to increase/decrease input/output or change what you are broadcasting