Game Developer learning the roll20 ropes - Dual GMing?

Hi! This is Josh Wardrop, I'm the lead designer at Arcknight Games and an avid tabletop roleplayer. I haven't played any VTT or roll20 yet, but we've been converting some of our maps into the roll20 format and I wanted to come check the system out first hand. If anyone has a long-standing game I could sit in on, that'd be great, but I also wondered if there was support for some sort of "Dual GM" setup? I'd be interested in having another experienced roll20 GM create and host a campaign that we support. We could supply art, direction, plot hooks, backstory etc. I also wonder if I could drop in/out as various NPCs to actively add an extra element to the game. You know, a primary/mechanical GM, and a drunk errr flavorful GM. Also, it seems pretty clear that roll20 allows mods to support various tabletop systems. Is it hard to do these things? We'd really be happy to get some more exposure for our tabletop engine we've been developing. It's years in the making and years out still, but it's also fully playable and we've had amazing feedback. Let me know what you guys think about my ideas, if it's possible/not possible, etc. Or you could also just say hi. Also, if it is a bit of work to convert a game system (especially on in development with regular changes) into a playable roll20 setup, perhaps it would be work for hire. If this type of thing interests you, let me know!

Also I'll probably be around for the next few hours if anyone wants to text-chat in skype. It's certainly faster to talk about most things.

Howdy Joshua! I looked at your website, and from what I see your product should integrate quite well with the Roll20 systems. I've sent you a Private Message to discuss meeting up to see what I can do to help you out. -Phnord.

What's your dice system like? That would pretty much be the only thing that might require the API to accomplish. Most systems can work with the base die roller, while others may require rollable tables. A very very few require the API, and those can generally be calculated by the players by seeing the dice results themselves (even if the results of the roll can't be automatically computed by the roller). If you're willing and permitted to share how conflicts are resolved with dice in your system, I'm sure we could figure out what kind of macro would be needed for someone playing your system on Roll20. Anything beyond the dice, the API is pretty much a convenience thing, doing things like automation and beautification.

I'm hoping the dice mechanics can be set up with macros and linked into a character sheet or other way we could quickly click what we need. I've heard that the new 'character sheet' allows people to click a skill, and automatically roll the related die and add the correct modifiers (say a d20 +6, or a d20 +2) The MAIN thing our game uses is a dice pool structure that ROLLS the value of your skill. So if you have 8 skill, you roll a d8, if you have 12 skill, you roll a d12, and if you have higher than 12 you roll d12+dX where x your skill-12, etc. This makes it so that with a 13 in a skill, you're really getting a d12+1 (d12+d1 which of course always rolls a 1). In theory, if you had 9 skill you should be rolling a d9, and we tend to resolve this by rolling a d10 and rerolling 10s, or some other agreed upon tiebreaker for odd dice, but in a VTT system it should literally roll d9 or d11 since it can mathematically handle this.

Hmm... that one will be tricky. I'll see what I can come up with. Is there a limit to how high a skill can go? For example, can you hit 24 to roll 2d12? 30 to roll 2d12+d6? Nevermind, I gone one that should work regardless: /r [[floor(@{The-Attribute} / 12)]]d12 + 1d(@{The-Attribute} % 12) (where "The-Attribute" is some attribute on the character sheet). On the main server, this doesn't currently work correctly for 12, 24, 36, etc. because a d0 results in a 1 (thus, a skill at 12 is rolling the same value as a skill at 13). However, once the changes on the dev server roll out, d0 will be 0, and all will be right with the world. When creating a character sheet (and someone from your group would need to, since you've got a brand spankin' new game), a button to roll "The-Attribute" would use HTML like this: <!-- Plain roll button: --> <button type="roll" name="roll_TheAttribute" value="/r [[floor(@{The-Attribute} / 12)]]d12 + 1d(@{The-Attribute} % 12)"></button> <!-- Roll button which is also a token action: --> <button class="tokenaction" type="roll" name="roll_TheAttribute" value="/r [[floor(@{The-Attribute} / 12)]]d12 + 1d(@{The-Attribute} % 12)"></button> <!-- Roll button which sends the result to the currently-selected token's initiative: --> <button type="roll" name="roll_TheAttribute" value="/r [[floor(@{The-Attribute} / 12)]]d12 + 1d(@{The-Attribute} % 12) &{tracker}"></button> <!-- Roll button that also has an emote: --> <button type="roll" name="roll_TheAttribute" value="/me throws dice at his problems\n/r [[floor(@{The-Attribute} / 12)]]d12 + 1d(@{The-Attribute} % 12)"></button> Hope that helps! =)

Yes! I think that's amazingly helpful! hehe you guys rock! See, this is why I want to help roll20 as much as I do =D

This was very helpful in terms of giving me a hint about pulling attributes from the character sheet for use in the macros. Thanks.