I've been using iTabletop to run a weekly game for three years now, so I have a fair handle on what makes a good VTT for my group and my kind of game (which is old school, ad hoc, make it up as you go along). I've had a quick tinker and here are my first impressions - hope this is useful. Overall this is a good product - fast, responsive and trying to be supportive of my style of play. I am totally on board with rules agnosticism. Together we can make it a great product.
Plus Points compared to iTT
- Works well on Chrome and Firefox.
- Loads fast, very fast.
- Accessible from work (whatever port is used isn’t blocked by our firewall).
- Very quick and easy to set up tokens and rooms – everything is on one screen.
- Intuitive interface, supports drag ‘n’ drop, CTRL+C / CTRL + V, etc.
- Has a working whiteboard, kind of (see below).
- Cross platform compatible (although haven’t tested it myself yet).
- Can attach text notes to the screen.
- Has built in initiative and hit point trackers.
- Has built in card decks
- Can show radii of visibility / illumination based on tokens
Minus Points compared to iTT
- Doesn’t work on IE (unless you have the Chrome frame installed).
- Can’t load up your own music / sound effects.
- Tokens and their settings do not persist between rooms and games (I think).
- Everyone has to be in the same room.
- No support for attaching PDFs or anything similar.
Needs Improvement
- Whiteboard only allows squares and freeform (no lines, polygons or circle/ellipses).
- FoW only allows square/rectangular additions and deletions.
- Zooming is a pain (but it is in iTT too).
- If you delete the room everyone is in, your campaign is FUBAR’ed and it’s start again time.
Some Suggestions
- Allow embedding of web pages within rooms, e.g. your campaign blog, a shared folder on your Dropbox, etc.
I aim to try and run my weekly Stars Without Number game using Roll20 next Wednesday. So will report back then on how it goes when being used for a real game session with all Euro located players.
Great work, guys.
