Can I run my game on Mobile broadband?

Waiting for fiber-connection internet. Wait is two months and my group has been patient so far.  I have been informed that there is a longer delay befor fiber can be installed in my area and so far I have only mobile broadband.  What mbps do i need down/upload in order for my to gamemaster for my group with Roll20 while using Discord for voice and also sending soundeffects from Syrinscape. My Mobil broadband here and now is 7-8mbps download & 3-4mbps upload. Thanks

in my opinion / guess, you should be totally fine with that amount of bandwidth! Are you using your mobile to give internet access to a computer? Roll20 does not necessarily work on a phone, but it can work fine on a computer browser that is getting its wifi signal from a strong mobile broadband hotspot like yours. There is not a set Mbps for using roll20, and yes: The more data that you use/load in your Roll20, will cause longer/slower downloads, connections, potentially lag.  If you start to become concerned about your bandwidth, I'd certainly say that a lightweight roll20 game is more-likely to work smoothly, and a very data-graphics-sound-heavy Roll20 table would tend to choke your connection more often. For example don't use Jukebox (sound files) to save bandwidth if necessary.

I have run Roll20 games + discord over a phone hotspot before.  It has been a couple years, so it isn't a recent experience, but it certainly worked for me when I needed it.

Hi and thank you for your replies. The full story is… I have mastered two Call of Cthulhu games so far with Roll20 and Discord for sharing graphics and broadcast sound. I use mobile phone internet with personal hotspot to my pc. The first game was on Discord entirely where I shared pictures and maps on different channels in the game group. Netconnection was around 30mbps. download. Second game I mastered was a 11 session long The Haunting where 3 players and i took our good time to define Boston and friendly NPC’s. During that game I used the Roll20 Jukebox all the time for music and som soundeffects. Discord was used for communication. Netconnection was around 30 mbps. download. and i all went smoothly. My third game is around the corner and in that regard I arranged a Session Zero. Thing was that I had made some scenes (pages) with movable NPC portraits, gif backgrounds of snowy-/rainy scenery in which i in the bottom area - had designed this tiny radar, on that I could move red blinking blibs that signified direction of sound of scatter and movement relative to the partys location. I have for this session zero also arranged some Syrinscape moody sound effects for the group to adjust to volume-wise etc. All-in-all I ran the group of 3 players through the test game/session zero on Roll20, with Discord for comms and Syrinscape for music/effects in the background. The test game consisted of:  5 pages each in the size of 35 * 48 with a 2 second looping gif-background,  the movable tokens, fog of war and dynamic lighting (did not use roll20 jukebox because i went with Syrinscape instead) and for each of the three characters i had filled out a copy of the official Roll20 Call of Cthulhu Character sheets.  Netconnection was around 30 mbps. download. The experience was: Good clean crisp sound from Syrincape,.. everyone was amazed. When I moved my “Players” tab from page to page in roll20 some players just had the black page area without loading the background, tokes or anything from the new page i just moved them to. They refreshed/reloaded the browser and it worked. But it made us all a bit uneasy that the players were not taken to the same page without some have to refresh. The Official Roll20 Call of Cthulhu Character sheet seemed like it was a monster of its own,.. meaning “bandwith heavy”. When testing it on my own before session zero, the dice-rolling of that sheet was okey,.. but with me and 3 players connected it became very clunky, slow and gave results completely out of sync between the players and i. Some had to wait up to 5-6 seconds before the dice results came up on their chat log. That was quite frustrating since the resolution of a die roll should be a synced experience for all players in the game. Discord comms went smooth while testing and it was nice to know we at least could rely on a steady comms if things should go awry in Roll20. Now I am preparing the third game and based on the session zero I have made some adjustments: The third game has at least 12 pages of which 10 of them are with 2 sec. gif-looping backgrounds. The other 2 pages are top-down maps. I’d like to make more but can manage with what i’ve got for now.  Reading some Roll20 forum posts I learned my session zero pages are all quite big (35*48) and are the main source to draw from my bandwith (especially with looping gif-backgrounds and effect-tokens) so I scaled all the Third Game’s pages down to around 12*9. And the 2 map pages are around 25*18. I also dropped using the official roll20 call of cthulhu character sheet and now go with the community version. All good BUT… … Meanwhile my netconnection has dropped to 9-10mbps. download. I have no means to test the third game with the players before play because of spoilers etc. But it will be with the new adjustmenst, Discord for comms, Syrinscape for sound/mood FX. So that is why I started asking around in here. And the main questions still are: 1) Will i be able to run this game or should i have more bandwhith? 2) Am I as the gamemaster a Master and the Players slaves, meaning: doi need lots of upload in order to send my pages to my players or are we all just “on the same page” and only need to rely on download speed? 3) Are all my pages active during a game. Meaning does a game with fewer pages run better than a game with many. Or does Roll 20 only operate with the page i select and move players to? Again thanks a lot. Rune

Hi. Thank you for the reply. Yes I use Mobile internet personal hotspottet from phone/ipad to my laptop. My pages in the game are around 12*9 and the gifs i use for background are maximum 5-6 mb size. Then there are snow effect layers bought in the roll20 shop and lastly between 6-12 tokens per page. For effects reason i also use dynamic lighting and fog of war in order to obscure my npc/enemy token area in the bottom of most pages. Gold said: in my opinion / guess, you should be totally fine with that amount of bandwidth! Are you using your mobile to give internet access to a computer? Roll20 does not necessarily work on a phone, but it can work fine on a computer browser that is getting its wifi signal from a strong mobile broadband hotspot like yours. There is not a set Mbps for using roll20, and yes: The more data that you use/load in your Roll20, will cause longer/slower downloads, connections, potentially lag.  If you start to become concerned about your bandwidth, I'd certainly say that a lightweight roll20 game is more-likely to work smoothly, and a very data-graphics-sound-heavy Roll20 table would tend to choke your connection more often. For example don't use Jukebox (sound files) to save bandwidth if necessary.