Please advise!

My friends and I are currently playing D&D 5e at my home with the Rise of Tiamat expansion.  Unfortunately, I am moving in the next month about 2 hours north of where we play and am considering some alternatives for our weekly sessions.  One of those alternatives is Roll20.  I had a few questions and concerns that I hope the community can answer. Please advise me on the following: 1).  Another desktop application I have considered is from the Steam store called Fantasy Grounds.  However, it is rather expensive and each module, while coming prepared and ready to go, seems to keep adding to the cost.  I also noted that roll20 has some additional content you can purchase.  My question is, what are the advantages to roll20 over Fantasy Grounds?  Other than just the cost difference (cost is not much of a consideration because if I go with Roll20, i will be purchasing a yearly subscription).  Does each player require a Roll20 subscription for the assets to become available to them if they are just players?  Or is the subscription more for the DM than the players? 2).  Is 5e D&D compatible with roll20?  Are there any resources currently available (I know WoTC is a big stick in the mud when it comes to copyrighted materials and can be quite a nuisance). 3).  How difficult is it for DM's to set up and get their games rolling?  How many hours per week do you feel you are spending to prepare the sessions? 4).  Are purchased assets in your library shared in your sessions?  Can other players see them or will it require them to purchase them as well? 5).  Are there any mentoring resources availabe? Please help me decide which is the best way to go for me and my players.

Hello and Welcome! Let me try to answer your questions to the best of my ability. 1.) Roll20 is free, open, and fairly easy to use when compared to the competition. Assets purchased are only usable by the person who purchased them but, they are really only needed by the DM. You can also import your own materials, tokens, images, maps...ect. So you don't actually need to purchase the packs, though allot of them are very well done and worth the investment if you have the extra money. A subscription is nice because it gives you access to more space to store game files and gives you access to some of the more advanced features. But honestly I would say its only beneficial in its current state for the DM. 2.) Roll20 is an Agnostic tool. You can use it to play any RPG or even board game. Currently there are API and Character sheet resources that make playing D&D 5e very easy on Roll20.  3.) Its pretty straight forward and the tutorial which was recently added helps allot. I spend a decent amount of time prepping my games, but I try to keep at least 3 sessions ahead of the players. If you have material saved you can also copy and paste text.  4.) Everyone who joins the session can see the assets you drop on to the table. So only the person using them needs to purchase. 5.) The tutorials help allot. You can also look on youtube for sessions recorded while using Roll20. One of the groups I belong to has two separate campaigns on weekends that we stream and upload to  youtube . This should give you some idea of how it plays. Plus feel free to ask questions on the forums, the community here is really great. If all else fails I been known to help new players get acclimated from time to time. So worse case send me a PM and I will help you out. I hope that answers your questions and again Welcome to Roll 20. 

Although I have zero experience with Fantasy Grounds, the D&D section of the twitch.TV website is basically a tribute to roll20.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Dungeons%20%26%20Dragons" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Dungeons%20%26%20Dragons</a>

If the creator of a campaign on Roll20 has a subscription, there is almost no reason for the players in that campaign to have a subscription. (Unless, of course, they're also running their own campaigns!) Pretty much all you get as a player out of a subscription is more image storage space, which as a player you need very &nbsp;little of; players can use their own storage space to upload character avatars, and that's about it (again, unless they're running their own game(s) in addition to the one they're playing in). If the creator does not have a subscription, the player can benefit from the lack of ads that a subscription gives. In some ways, Roll20 gives you more freedom than Fantasy Grounds. On-the-fly mapmaking is easier on Roll20, and if the campaign creator has a Pro subscription, the Roll20 API is more easily accessible, even if all you do is use someone else's scripts. In other ways, Fantasy Grounds does more than Roll20. FG rulesets have much more comprehensive customization available to them, as the ruleset author can manipulate FG's interface, not just its behavior. Unfortunately, FG rulesets are fairly atomic, as opposed to the modular nature of Roll20 API scripts -- you can't really mix & match stuff unless you get into the ruleset authoring yourself, which requires learning Lua Script. (On the other hand, FG ruleset authoring doesn't require any extra investment, while just using the Roll20 API requires a Pro subscription.) Absolutely. While the Orr Group does not have licensing deals with Wizards for 5e content like SmiteWorks does, Roll20 is designed to be system-agnostic. You can play 99% of all tabletop games on Roll20 if you're willing to work at it, and probably 90% without any serious effort/scripts required. This absolutely includes D&D 5e, and in general any game system which has a&nbsp; community character sheet published. The D&D family in particular is easy to use on Roll20, as the site was first designed to facilitate the developers playing 4e long-distance. The Roll20 Marketplace includes modules for prebuilt game content, however there are currently no 5e modules available. Setup is fairly easy, depending on how involved you want to get of course. The introduction of community character sheets has made this even easier for any system with a published sheet. How much time you spend as the GM in preparation each week depends on the quality of game you're looking to provide, the system you're playing to some extent, and how railroaded the campaign is. A fully sandboxed campaign where the players can go anywhere and do anything is going to take a lot more time to prepare for than a rail-shooter where the players move from point A to point B killing everything in between. Some systems lend themselves more to on-the-fly campaign development than others. Anything you put on the map can be seen by everyone in the game, whether it's something they've purchased or not. (Well, unless you put it on the GM layer, only visible to GMs!)