GM User Feedback

Dear Roll20, i was genuinely unable to find any other outlet for feedback so i'm posting it here, in the closest thread i could find. above all i would like to compliment you on the effort and work that has gone into making roll20 what it is, i believe that it is genuinely one of the best services for players and GMs to enjoy roleplaying games and the work you have done is impressive. I say this to karmatically balance out the following statement. Working as a GM on Roll20 has been one of the most infuriatingly unpleasant experiences in my digital career and were you not the best option i would have long ago stopped using your service. I will conceed that i am in no way experienced with coding or the development of digital content, and as such have little grounds for comparison, but nonetheless working on developing in your system has been excrutiating and i hate it. for the last 5 days, 80% of my google search history has consisted of trying to figure out what i'm doing wrong or how to make it work, the majority of which yield little helpful advice.  For a free software i expected as much, a difficult yet functional system that nonetheless works. however after making the switch to a monthly pro membership and finding that my experience not only did not improve but got more complicated and more frustrating, i felt the need to communicate something. Today i have spent 5 hours creating two maps and three original tokens, i am in a rather sour mood and i hope that i can get across that this is no one person's fault.  For the time being i will continue to use roll20 and will continue to pay my pro membership month after month for the sake of my players who are using tablets or mobile, but i wanted to let somebody know in some official capacity that if there were any place for an official user submitted rating, it would be a 2/10. I will once again restate that i do respect roll20 and the heart and care that goes into it, but i have not had a good experience with your product.  If this post is at all out of line, or in any way violates any content rules for this thread, please feel free to have it deleted or removed, that is completely within your rights. I just wanted to make my position clear in an official way.  thank you, Signed Nikolas F.

I have found users here on the forums to be very generous with their time and expertise. Care to share some of the problems you were trying to solve and the roadblocks you encountered? Someone may be able to help you. Admittedly there are some limitations of the platform (web browser vs installed program), but the web browser makes such an easy entry point for players that I forgive the tradeoff.

i can see that, but even simply making a floor texture eats far more time than it's worth. with an inability to place tokens on diferent layers selecting tokens or textures on different levels is nigh inpossible. with a margin it's possible to loose entire structures behind forever and a scrollwheel that throws the entire map out of focus. selecting, rotating and expanding items is not user friendly and requires you to be far too zoomed in in order to reliably select the tiny corner boxes and too zoomed in to stretch or shape it at the right scale. the zoom defaults to far too close and gets uselessly zoomed in, while zoomed out is such a fine slider that a pixel of motion in or out is far too far in some cases. It takes too long to shift tokens between layers and the dynamic lighting layer is confusing and unintuitive as well as largely unused [at least in my case]. the fancy effects button is remarkably limited and is too out of the way to use, requiring another GM to use without pausing the game. token hitboxes are a mess and mooking repeated tokens removes their token actions, which are very important and a pain to use otherwise. organizing the library of assets is a catastrophe and all of the pro benefit assets are characters, as opposed to floor textures or houses or plants or anything else [i know i'm using a unique system that can't use the standard assets, but nothing for basic things? really?]. I will admit that the jukebox is amazing but it requires a few too many clicks and scrolls to use. the menu bar on the right cannot display a character sheet and the chat at once on a humanly sized screen, resulting in a situation where i have to open the sheet, use the macro, close the sheet, switch to chat and if something doesn't work, switch back to the character sheet and reopen it. Sheets are almost unforgivably taxing on systems to load with many crashes stalls and soft resets on even moderately sized maps. it also doesn't get along with the application discord and causes a crash cascade.  with more specific prompting i could come up with more specific problems i have with it [they are numerous]. Winging aside, i continue to say that roll20 is the worst best system on the web. It does what it does fairly well but i have not had a good experience and were i not already building a tabletop rpg from the groundup, i'd be designing my own software from the groundup. If i'm just thick and all of these problems have easy solutions please let me know, but none of my searches for solutions have yielded results. Thank you for your concern and polite tone. I'm all for possible solutions and am open to changes for the better. Thank you, Signed, Nikolas F.

Roll20 works best with single image maps and small details added here and there. For the level of mapbuilding you're looking at... you'd be better off making the base image of your maps in GIMP, Photoshop, or MapTool and exporting them as a single image. Then uploading that image to roll20 and adding some details here and there as needed, such as doors or chests and tables (doodads) your players are likely to interact with or move around.

Nikolas F. said: mooking repeated tokens removes their token actions, which are very important and a pain to use otherwise. Make sure you are following the  wiki steps to set up your mooks properly, they retain token actions when done in this way.

Nikolas F. said: the menu bar on the right cannot display a character sheet and the chat at once on a humanly sized screen, resulting in a situation where i have to open the sheet, use the macro, close the sheet, switch to chat and if something doesn't work, switch back to the character sheet and reopen it. If you double click the header of a character sheet you can minimise it (causing it to become somewhat transparent). Double clicking again reopens it exactly where you left off, great for testing purposes.

Nikolas F. said: the fancy effects button is remarkably limited and is too out of the way to use, requiring another GM to use without pausing the game.  You can utilise macros to run fx commands for you to speed things up, you can even put them at the end of more complex macros for attacks etc so that they can benefit from the @{selected}/@{target} aspects of those macros.

Nikolas F. said: I will admit that the jukebox is amazing but it requires a few too many clicks and scrolls to use. As a pro user you have access to the most powerful and versatile aspect of the VTT, the API. There are many quality of life scripts out there that can help with the woes of being a GM, prep is prep no matter the medium am I right?! Roll20 Audio Master for example is an excellent and powerful jukebox controlling script which allows for macros to call sounds for you or you can set up quick macros to ensure you have the right atmosphere at the right time with only a click of a button. The good news is that you don't have to be a coder to use these things, most authors are kind and considerate to luddites like myself who need a bit of spoon feeding ;) They attempt to have UI's that can help with set up, most provide instructions and detailed use case examples, some even provide videos! ALL provide the same excellent customer service that you'll see across this site, got a question? ask it and someone will answer quickly :)

Nikolas F. said: with more specific prompting i could come up with more specific problems i have with it [they are numerous].  While there are certainly limitations to the VTT at present (the woes of building a web browser based and system agnostic tool I guess) the dev team are very active, and have recently taken on many more staff. The main focus for them has to be the back end in order to continue to support any front end development but that doesn't mean that any issues you have will be there forever (patience may be required however lol). With that in mind, please feel free to list any of your numerous issues, if we (as a community) can make even a handful of them easier to live with or disappear forever, then it'll be worth the effort. As previously stated the greatest resource Roll20 has, by far, is the solid community of helpful folk. Google is handy but nothing can compete with encyclopaedic knowledge of some of the users here! Ps. The  wiki is also the answer to a lot of questions... and possible the source of some too lol.

Also, will move this to 'Specific Use' to free up one of your votes for other suggestions you might want to endorse.

Nikolas F. said: the menu bar on the right cannot display a character sheet and the chat at once on a humanly sized screen, resulting in a situation where i have to open the sheet, use the macro, close the sheet, switch to chat and if something doesn't work, switch back to the character sheet and reopen it. Nikolas F. Most of the time, I open my character sheets using shift + double click on a token, so that I always see the chat.

In three years I have seen the functionality of the site to deteriorate. The chat is virtually unuseable, the  change in the Jukebox trashed years of curated sounds, etc. I am staying for the sake of my players, but I am pretty sure the whole thing will go pear shaped one day.

Thank you all very much for your feedback. I'm slowly learning all of these features and have most of the feedback from here jotted down on a separate nonebook for reference. I am extremely grateful for the positive attitude and encouraging tone despite all of my whining, this community is one of the best i've witnessed in a long while. on the broadest possible level my most general complaint is thus: "i didn't know about any of this stuff until i was either told it by someone else [as above] or spent time researching it in the forums." which i feel is the greatest flaw above all and most leading to my general misfortune, specific features aside. I have spent almost as much time researching roll20 as i have spent developing on it and i, simply put, hate that. thank you for the feedback and i look forward to learning more. signed Nikolas F. ps. that's some real specific steps for mooking, christ

al e. said: In three years I have seen the functionality of the site to deteriorate. The chat is virtually unuseable, the  change in the Jukebox trashed years of curated sounds, etc. I am staying for the sake of my players, but I am pretty sure the whole thing will go pear shaped one day. There was nothing they could do about the Jukebox. You can only blame Soundcloud for that. As for chat being unusable... I have no idea what you're complaining about there. It's the same as ever. It hasn't changed any and I've been here since the beginning.

I think he means the video chat, which is not dependable, but then I never planned on using Roll20 for that,though it'd be nice.

The problem I have seen is that a lot of the YouTube videos by Roll20 are rather dated. A lot has changed in the past couple years. One very popular channel is Taking20 where Cody has the Roll20 Master Series . That has a lot of good tips and tricks. It's mostly focused on 5th ed D&D but is good knowledge regardless of the system you are using. DawnforgedCast has a short basic tutorial here . He shows some of the basics of getting things going. I just found this guy who has a nice short series of basics for using Roll20, I made a playlist of his stuff here . Also watching live play videos of other people's games can be useful if you have the time. Just so you can see how other people do things. I have found that there is often many ways to do things on Roll20, you just have to decide whats best for you. You can make it as complex or keep is as simple as you want and the experience can be just a rewarding. Welcome to the community, and happy gaming!