The jukebox feature is something I was super excited about when first reading about Roll20. I had used SoundCloud before, and thought it would be a really great tool to integrate. However, I find myself (and my players) wanting a bit more when we play.
One feature that I would like to see is the ability to tag songs - sort of like how tokens work now. I know that I can just leave them in the playlist, but that starts to take up space after a while. I also thought for a while about how Roll20 could legally and efficiently offer up more music choice. One solution I thought of was the ability to stream YouTube audio. There are actually some really nice apps available now that let you do just this, so it made me wonder if something like this could be integrated into Roll20.
<a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-turn-youtube-personal-dj/" rel="nofollow">http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-turn-youtube-personal-dj/</a>
One problem would probably be multiple people listening to the same track. Another might be bandwidth issues, or issues with streaming - nobody wants to crash Roll20 under the weight of thousands of users streaming YouTube music. There's also the legal issue which is a bit of a gray area I think.
Let me stop right here and just say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with SoundCloud. The free and open source movement is great and I fully support it. The only things I'm suggesting are options to allow for more choice. If I had to only use SoundCloud it wouldn't really decrease my enjoyment of the tool that much, just make it a little bit harder to have my players listen to things they like.
Now on to my next suggestion: more player control.
The one aspect of Roll20 that my players struggled with was that of control. As it stand now, the GM really has to do more work than he or she should. Maintaining player's bubbles for them is fine if they (and you) are OK with that. But what if you just don't want the hassle of having to update the player's HP? One of my players even suggested that it would make it easier for him to keep up with how HP he has left if he's doing it himself. Now, I'm not saying remove the feature of having the GM update everything, only add in the ability to give permissions to players. So, for example, I'd be able to give my players the permission to update their own bubbles, or take those permissions away if I felt like taking that control.
Another very baffling aspect of taking away player control was the fact that my players could not fill out their own bios, at least if they could they (nor I) never figured out *how*. I also never saw the ability to give them that permission aside from having certain characters show up as controlled by certain players.
This control also stems to cards as well. I can tell that the card function is in its infancy at the moment, and my group never used it officially, but it would be nice to give specific characters full control of cards (the thoughts on this spawned from the Deck of Many Things).
Finally, the ability to name tokens could be amazing. This way I could manage to name a specific, important goblin, or name my PCs so that I could find them easily. If there is already a way to do this I might have glanced over it, so I'm sorry!
So, what do you guys think? Could these things be implemented, or should we just forget these kinds of things and concentrate in another direction? I think this community can generate some amazing discussion and really improve this tool.
Anyway, those are just the suggestions and notes from my first encounter test. Like I said, this is shaping up to be an amazing tool and I can't wait to see where it goes!
