Using Roll20 without maps.

Hi,

This may seem an odd question but a group of us are hoping to play a Basic D&D campaign on Roll20 but without using many maps at all, just like we did in "The good old days"...  Is it possible to use the "Map" part of the window purely for displaying a picture and then increase the size of the players' camera windows? 

Hope this makes sense, and thanks in advance!

You can certainly use the 'map' window part for any sort of pictures. I use virtual tabletops like this more often than not. I prefer to display a blank colour or tabletop image and then drop handouts onto it as required (*).

You can't increase the space though for the player videos in Roll20, but one alternative would be to play using Roll20 in a Google Hangout, which gives you the option to switch that space between the Roll20 screen and a full image of the player currently speaking (while keeping smaller video windows of everyone active at the bottom of the screen).

(*) Incidentally, one really nice trick for this sort of play is to take a small map, rotate it slightly and add a drop shadow in a paint program, and then drop that onto a tabletop background. If you then use gaming beads images with a 3D feel as tokens, rather than portrait or overhead image tokens, this can support the feel of playing in abstract.

While a full map with FOW, a grid, and representational tokens can be very useful for tactical combat, I always feel that it detracts from the imagination involved. Players are focussed on the map and their token rather than their character and the shared 'reality' of the game.

Spyke

Nik T. said:

... to play a Basic D&D campaign on Roll20 but without using many maps at all, just like we did in "The good old days"...

You can definitely put any picture in a Roll20 page. It doesn't  need to be a map.I have a picture as the first proper page in my campaigns. Even if you have maps you need something like this to put the players on while you brief them. 

If you have a browser that supports it and you use the experimental 3D dice then they show up best against a plain background. (unless the dwarf is drawing maps on it)

I use Roll20 for a Dungeon World campaign that really doesn't use battle maps. I have some pages setup without the grid that when I am too lazy to setup a Handout I just drop images of NPCs or a overall city map (not a battle map).

Nik T. said:

Is it possible to use the "Map" part of the window purely for displaying a picture and then increase the size of the players' camera windows?  

If you mean the Webcams, set Avatars to Large (gear-> avatar size). If you mean the what the characters see, have them zoom down, not up I tend to keep my own at 50-70%.