Tell us about your first experience!

Haven't actually run a game yet, but noticed when making macros - is there a way to write something in chat (for archiving) that only you see? For example, as the DM, I want to make a "perceive" macro that rolls spot and listen checks for all my players without them seeing, but I don't just want a list of numbers, either - I want to be able to say, "Name: Listen: Spot: " I tried whispering to myself, but it wouldn't let me. I feel like that'd be a fine workaround - but, in general, I don't see a way to print text that only you can see before a roll (i.e. besides "/gr ", but rather "text /gr ). I also can't get word-document resources to upload (2007, on Windows, on Firefox). Is there a trick to this, or, as of yet, can resources only be images, etc.? I'd also prefer a way to re-order stuff (macros, characters, songs, etc.), if there isn't one I've missed already. Oh, and I'd like it if my settings (like voice/video reception, type of display of other characters, etc.) could be preserved from login to login. Geez, I keep coming up with additional suggestions. This was supposed to only be the first one. On the whole, though, this is exceptional. Haven't hit any huge errors, yet - just desires for more features. Great job, and keep up the good work!

My first experience was just last night. I was interested in both how Roll20 worked, and how Roll20 would handle a game like MWP's Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. MHR requires you to be able to physically track a lot of things – distinctions, plot points, assets, complications, stress and not just die totals, but the *type* of die rolled. I was concerned at how Roll20 would be able to track these sorts of things. The game opened with my players (taking on the roles of Colossus and Wolverine) travelling to The Raft, a high-security SHIELD prison built for detaining supervillans. There had been a recent break out at The Raft, and Colossus and Wolverine had been called in to tour the facility, check security refits and rebuilds, and generally just use their expertise to make sure everything looked kosher. While there, an alert signal sounded, coming from the detainment cell of the villain known as The Mad Thinker. [i]This entire scene was essentially a Transition Scene, building up to the action and laying some groundwork for the rest of the story[/i] The Mad Thinker wanted an audience so he could blather on about some master plan that nobody would be able to stop him from achieving. There was some back and forth (including a comment from Wolverine suggesting that he just carve open the Thinker's head and look for the master plan himself), but it was cut short with a loud crash and several explosions from somewhere above on ground level. Alerts sounded that there was an intruder of some kind of the Landing Deck. Colossus and Wolverine got back to ground level to find The Mad Thinker's Awesome Android tearing the place apart. [i]This is where we got into using Roll20 in earnest.[/i] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/tkG5U.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/tkG5U.png</a> We used the coloured dots to track plot points (which limited us to 5, but the players should be using them up regularly and shouldn't be collecting more than that). The grey square was a drawing I created to store the Scene Distinctions (specific traits about the area that the players can use in their actions), and the orange square was to be used for tracking Assets and Complications that may get created throughout the action. I used the text tool so simply add in the various dice that got collected into my Doom Pool, which is used against the heroes throughout the game. All of these were collected in the top corner, away from the action. Wolverine's enhanced reflexes allowed him to go first, and as per the Marvel rules, the player could choose anybody to go. He chose Colossus, so Colossus attempted a support action to pick up Wolverine and chuck him at the android. The support was a success, so Wolverine got to use Colossus's strength trait in his attack roll, which came next (and failed miserably). The android reacted and shot poor Wolverine out of the air with its energy blasters. This left the android's turn, where he used his blasters again, targeting both heroes at once – but they either ignored the hit (Colossus) or dodged out of the way (Wolverine). Wolverine's reaction was an extraordinary success, which gave the android the complication of "Flanked". I added this to the orange box on the map. As per the rules, as I (controlling the android) went last, I chose who got to go first at the beginning of the next round, so I chose myself. The android swung a backhand at Wolverine, but missed so badly that another complication got added – this time, Wolverine's player created the "Off Balance" complication which I added into the orange box. Flanked had been removed already because Wolverine had made use of the complication when dodging the android's punch. Colossus then attacked, and delivered a mighty smash that gave the android d12 physical stress (the highest amount that can be delivered in one hit). Using the health trackers, I added in "d12", which the players could see. As an android, it couldn't take mental or emotional stress, so one more hit with even a measly d4 could take the android out of the action. We had started late, so it had gotten much later by this point and we needed to stop. I found that Roll20, with some heavy user interaction, can track all the variables required for a game of Marvel Heroic. The drawing tool is a little clunky (I would like it to retain it's colour fill / line settings instead of defaulting back to red), and I found that sometimes the text tool would retain it's settings, sometimes it wouldn't. Dice tracking works if you are rolling a die pool like this; 1d8+1d10+1d8+1d8, instead of like this; 3d8+1d10. This way you can see which die rolled which result, which is important in a game of Marvel. Voice and video was a little clunky off the start, and I found that I couldn't seem to select the "allow" button when trying to give it access to my camera. Also, for some reason it disabled my headset, so I needed to go into my control panel and re-enable it. Voice was laggy (probably a 3-5 second delay), to the point that in the future I might just have my players turn off their voice and video and use Skype instead. The biggest issue, though, was not with Roll20. None of us were that familiar with the system, so we did spend a lot of time looking at the rules. We'll do this again!

2nd impressions - after a few play sessions. just to keep as short as possible: 1. voice - skype, built-in thing doesn't (always) work. so I don't even bother with jukebox (also can't give my own sounds so...) 2. takes a few mins to ask all players to turn off everything in-game (video&audio) as roll20 doesn't remember settings and/or GM has no control over the campaign on settings' level too... 3. still missing _BADLY_ the feature to organize handouts, or at least a damn alphabetic order... I have a short quest with not so many handouts but it takes lots of time to find the handout I want to give to players. very annoying. would be a nightmare with longer campaigns 3b. also would be great to have a single-click solution to share handouts and characters with all players (ie default behavior instead of "edit", select item, save) 3c. would be useful if newly shared characters and handouts would pop open automatically on players' side instead of making GMs telling them they've got a new item, find it under this or that name and open by themselves (also can't scare them by a 'horroristic' photo popping in the face which would give an idea why the Sanity loss applies :) 4. would be great to have full control on players' screen. if I want them to stare at a handout I mean it, but they sometimes forget to open the one I want, and, see point 3, they also need to fiddle around as handouts are shuffled 5. no way to store quest details for myself to remember dates, times, what comes after what, which NPC can tell this or that information, etc. So I had to create a google doc... shame :) 6. can't have a handout that has a pdf/word doc/etc as it's content, which players could open and read through even if a few pages -or more!- long (also created google docs, a screenshot from 1st page's 1st half and note on handout to share the according google doc with players == time consuming + 3rd party involved) 7. better character sheets needed. at least being able to draw a table, select font, separated section for things change all the time (HP, mana, etc). nothing complex or "magic"... but it's a pain I have to type things in a word doc and copypaste to add text with monospace font to char. sheet so text doesn't "fall apart" on screen some -IMHO useful- enhancements: a. selecting (GM only!) default dices for the game (d4, d6, d20, etc) and those icons appear on players' screen. so if I say "roll d20" players don't have to click to chat tab and type every time. if skill is e.g. level 6, I'm sure we can add it to roll result; and it's fast. I think this would be an easy to add feature as "dice icon" would just be a macro doing a "/r 1dX" b. much-much later: fully developed charsheets where I can select "blocks" such as "skills", "abilities", "spells", etc and configure every item within the 'block' to roll as it should (e.g. Ride macro would say /r 1d20+[#actual dex bonus]+[#actual skill level] and it picks up variables so ends up in e.g. /r 1d20+2+4) would be very useful for player characters c. higher quality chapter editor: ways more icons/tokens/backgrounds/etc to select from, easier UI, much less amount of bugs -e.g. bring front/send back is really a mess...-; attaching monsters to a particular chapter so I just click in a checkbox, monster pops up where I placed it when I designed the chapter last but not least, d. GMs' ability to share their stuff! e.g. I have a bunch of characters, handouts, etc now. if I could share those in the community (in HUN and/or translating to ENG) GMs putting together a new quest could find it useful. e.g. "my my, I need and old dude who looks scary..." NOW: google, image search 'old man scary', look up a nice looking photo, copy, maybe edit to remove some edges, ppl from background..., place to roll20 char/handout, write some text for players like 'a spooky old dude staring at you', and mostly ur done THEN: look up within roll20 for the same thing, click one of the already made chars/handouts designed for the purpose, press import button, done (maybe change desc. by GM's taste). Uhm. Hope these stuff help. Cheers ;)

still missing _BADLY_ the feature to organize handouts, or at least a damn alphabetic order... I have a short quest with not so many handouts but it takes lots of time to find the handout I want to give to players. very annoying. would be a nightmare with longer campaigns 3b. also would be great to have a single-click solution to share handouts and characters with all players (ie default behavior instead of "edit", select item, save) 3c. would be useful if newly shared characters and handouts would pop open automatically on players' side instead of making GMs telling them they've got a new item, find it under this or that name and open by themselves (also can't scare them by a 'horroristic' photo popping in the face which would give an idea why the Sanity loss applies :) I guess this is not a surprise, but I strongly endorse this comment. Organisation and management of handouts is awful. So bad as to be crippling. The task of assigning multiple handouts to different players is way too fiddly and time-consuming, especially when it comes to checking that you have got everything right (which you won't have, because it is so damned fiddly). And you can't even start until the players have joined the game. This sucks! 1) The GM needs to be able to organise handouts so that he or she can find the damned one he or she wants when time comes to hand it out. Listing handouts alphabetically by title is the minimum acceptable standard of organisation. 2) Handouts need to attach to characters, not to players, so that a GM can distribute handouts before players join the game. 3) The GM needs to be able to look at a character (or player, if you insist) and see a complete list of the handouts attached to it, so that he can check, character by character, that every character has all and only the handouts that it out to have. 4) Ideally, the GM ought to be able to look at the list of handouts and see who has what. But if that isn't practical, he or she really has to be able to check a handout to see which characters have it without having to open it, click its "edit" button, scroll to the bottom of the edit window, and click two close boxes when he or she is done. 5) The GM should not need to burrow down to the bottom of a handout's "edit" window to hand it out. That ought to be done at the highest level, without even having to open the handout.

It was longer than I expected, but I'm sure most of that had to do with our newb questions, our very patient and knowledgeable DM, and technical difficulties due to Skype and the Roll app. Other than that it was a lot of fun. I was having a little trouble thinking like a roleplayer, but soon it was really fun figuring out ways to overcome obstacles and foes and brainstorming plans of action.

First full session using Roll20 last night. Really impressed and the players (8 people) all seemed very happy with the change over. We had one guy who periodically got kicked but he had a lousy internet connection on his end in the boondocks. I may have added to his woes by having such large maps -- so I plan on taking the advice from the optimisation tips posted last night in the future. OpenTok was giving us fits when we all logged in so we had to move the game to Hangouts. Nice to know theres a fall back when that happens. Very happy. Everyone's in for another go at it next week. Found the handouts feature to be very useful. I have a lot of new players to the game (Hackmaster new edition) so I scanned a lot of the essential tables/info and gave them out as handouts that players could pop up when doing certain things. Was nice to see them actually using them in game. Also nice for encouraging veteran players to use some of the optional rules (like combat maneuvers) by placing that info at their finger tips. I assigned standard meanings to the color token pips -- made a labeled graphic and put that i handouts as well so we're all on the same page. Blue pip on a token -- I know that guy is using a shield. Love the flexibility of the system and its simplicity. I fun he game exactly as I would face to face so its a great way to be able to move back and forth without having to relearn things.

I was introduced to roll20 by the group I'm in using it to playtest DnDNext, having used it for an hour or so I was interested in how it could be used as a DM in 4e so spent a few hours "messing about" and came up with a small 4 encounter game and tested it with 2 friends. We only used text-chat as my mic doesnt work well but we had great fun for 3 hours. I have since spent more time fetting used to the way to set screens up and have now recreated the Lair Assault game (Spider Killer) as well as a communal Fortune Card Set ready to test with a larger group. All I can say is that if your willing to put the effort into prepping on roll20 it can be an awesome tool. Keep up the excellent work guys!

loved my first experience GM'ing Pathfinder with roll20.net. The players enjoyed it, and I was wizzing along once I got used to the controls. I dunno if there are already, but hotkeys for switching layers or switching to the select tool would be great. The only thing my players wanted was a way to save macros to their character, and then import that character to the campaign. As a GM, i'd love a way to be able to import or export macros from one campaign to another. The idea I saw on the dice roller suggestion section of having macros tied to tokens would rock. If i were able to have a little GM Toolbox, fill it with the tokens I'll need for the game, assign them the Macros I want, and then be able to carry that over to the next campaign. The biggest thing I wanted was a way to have a player's token be carried over from map to map. I kept on selecting their tokens from the previous map and hitting copy, pasting them into the next map, and then arranging them before I moved the Player bookmark to the new map.

I've started using Roll20 as a virtual tabletop in conjunction with a play-by-post D&D4e game that I'm running. For the most part, it's great in that scenario, but there are two things that could be improved: 1. Provide better token labeling. Both my players and I sometimes have trouble remembering which monster token is which. If I have several of the same type of monster in play, I will use the same token. The only way to tell which is which right now is to hover over the name in the turn-tracker or to open up the details view. It would be nice to have a better at-a-glance label; perhaps just some mouseover text on the tokens themselves. 2. Remember preferences for audio/video chat. Since we do play-by-post, we don't actually use the audio/video chat functionality. It'd be nice to roll out of bed in the morning and check in on the game before I shower without having the app want to broadcast my bed-head every time I launch it. :-) (Technically the plugin makes me click "allow" first, but the interface gets wonky if you turn off audio/video chat before clicking allow, and clicking deny seems to put it in a loop of just asking again.)

My third game with D20. I am adapting my game to the system now, and am generally very pleased with the rolls, the macros, and I'm absolutely in love with the server, so that if my internet drops, that game is still there. The common bugs about the text tool not working consistently were only minor bumps in the road. What I am glad to see is that some of our complaints have already been fixed! The map is now free floating and much easier to manipulate! Thanks, guys!

My first experience may be atypical, but it was great. I'm not using it for strictly online play, but to enhance a standard face 2 face game. It is GREAT. I use other programs for initiative & combat tracking, anyway. Being able to minimize chat icons to just names helps a lot. I just wish there was a way to maximize the face 2 face experience using this, but I couldn't begin to tell you how.

This was the first program I've used to host an online/Skype game and was extremely surprised how well it went. Like some others, we had problems with the audio/video, but just switched to Skype. I think the program is very user friendly. I found myself wishing it had a feature, only to find after a bit of searching that it did! Because of schedules and relocations, our group has been idle for about a year, now we're back to a regular game. Awesome program, great work!

Can we get rid of the image snap tool for the map layer? Makes loads of sense for the layer with the tokens, but really annoying on the map layer.

Only a player do can't comment on the GM specifics, but we played a 2 hour session of a DND campaign we started (and almost cancelled because of the bad experience) on screen monkey. My one piece of advice is to keep it simple - so far so good on that front. Dont let features and bells and whistles detract from the ease of creating characters and moving them around quickly and easily - that's the key to a solid VTT experience.

it would be cool to just add buttons for what dice needs rolling and a picture of said dice perhaps in another window you can minimize somewhere close to the camera of the players or up top by the file holder to kill the typing downtime <-------------LAZY and to see the dice rolling in another window would bring the table top feel to the computer rolls

Last week did my first run through of a D&D 3.5 campaign after spending weeks perfecting every little thing, and uploading maps I made using Dundjinni (get it! it works so well with this!). Just want to say how amazing this program really is, I was able to do everything I wanted, ran everything smoothly and every single one of my players said it was a great asset to our game (we live all over the place and used to just play with no VT over google+). Also had a bug not long ago, fixed hours later. You guys are some of the best keep it up so I can give you all my money!

DM'd a short session of D&D last week. T'was a great, positive first experience. Very easy going on the DM, and I was able to cook up a battle map in no time. I love that there's not a steep learning curve. Handy for new dad's who're hard pressed to find the time to learn. Just jump in, spend maybe 5 to 10 minutes exploring the functions, and voilà, let's adventure! I also love the simplicity in creating macros, maps, and tokens. I agree with Flo, simplicity has definitely been its appeal. Adding extra features and whatnot is fine (optional content?), so long as it doesn't interfere with the smoothness and simplicity that makes Roll20 a pleasurable experience.

I first saw this project when it started back in May and I was so excited. For the past two nights I have been playing with my group and I have to say this is awesome! It has really brought my group together. It has caused some of the shy players to actually open up and start to role-play. I have to say this is the best thing that has ever happened to online RPG's in a long time!

First experience...Hands down, greatest thing I've ever done on my computer conscience. We used pregenned 4E characters, DND, and played a test campaign. It was awesome. Made friends I'll never lose if I can help it. Video and audio quality was equal to that I get on Skype or Mumble. The campaign creation is also a blast. Not having to google every three seconds, or go straight into a book to find and recreate a map is great. I can search one, or just upload my own direct to here. So simple. Excellent work guys, keep it.

Tried to use the site from an iPad. Disappointed that it isn't supported yet. Hope that app gets working soon! ;)

Me and some friends have for a long time wished to play DnD, but never really found the time where all 4-6 of us could come together under one roof, and get the game in motions. Thanks to Roll20.net, we've actually had over 3 successfully self-made campaign! I find the "map creator incredibly fun, and well though-through, but its quite laggy sometimes, and I've got a pretty good character. Also, still not enough tokens in my opinion, but its the beta after all. Cant be too demanding now, can we? ;) I wish there were a "spray" option, as making roads with squares alone is a bit troublesome. I've found some options though, but it still is a bit ichy to use. Is there a dedicated site where users can add dungeon tiles so others can download and use them? If not, you should make a section on this site for that! Im not that much of a drawer, but I've found myself picking up the pen'n'paper more often now, that I got something to work towards. Might even download/buy photoshop to get the juice done!

I DM'd a short session of 4E a week ago to get the players acquainted with Roll20. Fashioned the encounter around a few of some of the Roll20 features, so the players got to have fun while learning the ropes. All in all, the core functionality here is superb and I've even been able to run non-miniature systems like Shotgun Diaries in a streamlined manner with a little tweaking. Roll20 has now become my go-to site for tabletop gaming since I'm really busy and can't meet up with my players very often - we now use Roll20 to meet up online and we have a group site for general chat and discussion as well. You guys here at Roll20 have done a good job. Kudos to you.

I would love to give my reflections on Roll20. I am currently DMing a session that started using MSN messenger, and now I am using this to add in the "tabletop" dimension to my D&D campaign. I am loving the Token system and the Map Drag and Drop system, this makes my current Map Generator not obsolete. Many of the elements you guys added to this system have truly made the experience game changing in nature and enjoyable overall. I do have some requests for how we are finding out Game play. Recently I started experimenting with auras and Health Bars. I find the Bar system amazing, and i helps with my Psion's PP system. But I was wondering if you guys could make an aura system so that players can set certain aura's (Like Melee range and Spell Range) with the option to have the DM turn it off on his screen. I feel this would really help a few of my players use the system better and use measurements better. On another note I think adding a "Treasure Counter" would be a great addition to my campaign at least. I am finding that we lose track of treasure and spend time looking back through old logs to find what we collected. I am continuing my campaign in the future through this site. I am finding it much better than our previous MSN campaign, and I am glad to offer up any further bugs, or recommendations through this thread.

My friend is running a 3.5 game. Overall I really like how roll 20 works. The only real issue was every so often one of the players would drop out on the video/audio chat. But that's more his fault than anyone else. Roll20 is awesome, thanks for making it. I would never have been able to game this summer without it!!!

If I'm being completely honest, this is a solid 4/10. I had to jump through hoops to get an avatar. I never heard of this Gravatar thing before, so I had to sign up to some third-party website just to get a picture for myself. Then I get into a friend's campaign. To my dismay, I can't upload my character's token. Instead, I have to first send it to the GM and have -them- upload my own token for me. Once I had that set up, I got down to making macros. This is probably where Roll20 endeared itself to me the most; you can have macros say text as well as roll dice! Unfortunately, I found that Roll20's syntax can't take "/me's" so I can't, say, make a macro that says "Bob's armor takes the hit!" or the like. In addition, I couldn't find any way of saving or loading macro sets; you need to either just use one set of macros for all your games or keep deleting and making macros for each game you're in. One of the players I was with found the drawing tools and we tried them out. They were fairly well-done but I found you couldn't move or erase another player's drawings. Finally, we had been talking for awhile and I wanted to check something that happened earlier. That's when I found that Roll20 makes chat logs upside down, having the earliest messages at the bottom and the most recent messages at the top. And it turns out that these bizarre chat archives aren't even saved to the player's account; only the GM seems to have full access to the logs. All in all, Roll20 feels like it could, one day, be an excellent resource. But after looking over the beta for a couple hours, we dropped it and went back to Gametable.

- First off I should state that our group isn't playing across the internet...we gather once a week at my house for about 3-4 hrs. So in fact we are using Roll20 as a map/virtual TT instead of a dry erasable type map w/mini's. I hope in future rev's the designers continue to consider options that allow for better "old school" game play. That said our first experience was generally positive. I'm still getting familiar with the Roll20 capabilities so obviously I was a little slow with it...especially when I tried an impromptu goblin ambush. It was painfully slow, again mostly because of my non-expertise. But when we used the maps that I had prepared ahead of the game, things were much smoother. One of the things I discovered was that using a detailed village map (instead of hand drawing it) had the groups rogue up on the roof tops within seconds. She agreed that she might not have considered that option without the map staring her in the face. Sometime after creating the goblin map on the fly, I was unable to add any tokens to the Turn Tracker. Not sure what happened here...but after the game it still was not working. I even left the iMac we use for game night and tried calling it up on my PC laptop...still no worky. Eventually I closed the tracker and restarted it and it worked fine...lesson learned. One of the players complained that he felt the actual game play screen was too small. After reading other posts I've tried using the browsers full screen (iMac/Firefox) and that should help considerably. Since we aren't using the chat feature I would love to see an "auto-hide" feature on the chat/token bar for even more screen space. Also, I think having a way of storing the PC group as an entity that can be easily placed onto any map would help (using cut/paste is ok...I'm just looking at ways to streamline). Overall we had a good time and I see us using Roll20 more and more!

I have searched the forums as best I could but cant find anything saying how much "space" we get for our campaigns? Anyone know.

I have searched the forums as best I could but cant find anything saying how much "space" we get for our campaigns? Anyone know. You should be able to find the info by going to <a href="http://app.roll20.net/account" rel="nofollow">http://app.roll20.net/account</a> Or, by clicking your name in the top right corner, and going to "my account" from the app. It will show your current user level (User, mentor, etc) and your used/remaining space. The quotas aren't strictly enforced during the beta, and once we've officially launched there will be a mechanism in place for users to upgrade their space. Also remember, that any tokens, maps etc found from search or the marketplace ( <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/</a> ) do NOT count towards your quota, only things that you've specifically uploaded.

I ran my first campaign Saturday and I have to say I really like what has been done so far. The handouts and character journal was very useful. And I think I spent most of my time in this section. The only issue I had with it is that if I copy something from a open office document and pasted it in, it would sometimes have crazy formatting that I could not fix without deleting everything and re-pasting it. This was especially true if I copied something from a table and pasted into a text field. The tokens did the job pretty effectively, but I would liked my players to be able to select a token and see the names without having to have use the turn window. I thoroughly enjoyed the Jukebox and the Web Search Features and they where easy enough to use that I actually used background music for the first time for any campaign. Creating NPCs and giving them a token was fast and easy because of the search. The one thing that I found frustrating are the macro's. GMing with multiple monsters and NPC was a little bit of a pain. It would be nice to have something that integrated which token or tokens I have selected when I run a macro. I ended up just have a note pad open and pasting different NPCs macro into the chat. Also, when I started type the hash tag it would sometimes cause my chrome browser to flip the horizontal scroll on and off and change the focus from the chat window. So far I'm extremely excite about using roll20. I really hope to see a lot more done with the macros to make roll20 perfect. Edit: almost forgot. We had a bit of a learning curve getting started so we had double entries for players, so being able to easily delete players from a campaign would be nice.

Thanks Ken, found it :)

We are using this as a tabletop substitute only. It works great for that. 1. Loved that it's Web-based: Avoiding having to have a client installed on everyone's machines (e.g., MapTools) is a huge boon. We did more java/.NET troubleshooting than playing with some of the other VTTs. Very easy to access from any machine anywhere. 2. The Token system is pretty cool. Easy to assign. It would be nice to see (or have the option to add) more condition markers. We play 4E and there are more conditions than you shake a quarterstaff at. Also, a way to indicate a 3D environment (even if it's a tag that says "10" to indicate height) that follows the tokens would be a nice feature that is lacking in other VTTs. 3. The Jukebox is OK, but it would be nice to add your own sounds. I really like roll20, I hope it's around for a long time.

Hey guys, So I had my first session of Deadlands last night using the system with some friends. There for 4 of us, but one had to bail early. It took about 90 minutes to get the audio to work. We believe this was because one of our friends was playing from a hotel so the ports or something were not right. As far as everything else is concerned. I've learned to make sure all my maps are relatively the same size so when I copy over tokens they are not huge/super tiny. Most of my suggestions are things that I am sure people have already said: 1. It would be fantastic if the ruler did not disappear after you let it go. That way you can measure and then move units accordingly. If your not using a grid, the only other option is for each player to have two tokens on top of each other. The top one is for moving, and the bottom one has the radius of how far it can move. A little annoying. 2. It would of course be great to be able to roll 2 different dies at the same time and have them not add up.

I played my first game last night over roll20. It was actually my first VTT game ever. I assembled a group in the forums here and we set up character sheets and got everything ready. Game night came and I passed out the link for the game to an anxious group of players. Unfortunately, video was the only thing that worked for anyone. There was no audio at all. After messing with the options and using txt chat, we decided to launch it in a G+ hangout. Then the app would not load in the hangout at all. I used the roll20 site to launch the hangout but it repeatedly failed to launch and gave me a generic error so there was nothing I could do there. After that we decided to go back to the original roll20 game with Skype in the background. That worked pretty well I suppose but Skype repeatedly dropped our call and we had to keep redialing every few minutes. Overall, we did not have a great experience. We wasted like two hours just trying to be able to hear eachother. Then by that point, no one wanted to play because we were all frustrated. Now then. I love the resource center and the easy map manipulation is really amazing so you guys get major props for that! I was able to setup tokens and initiative order in like 15 seconds. Thats a serious time saver right there!! Also the dice rolling was smooth and we didnt have any problems with that aspect of the VTT. Unfortunately, we didnt get as far into gameplay as I would have liked. I would like to give this a much better review. Looking forward to seeing this come out of beta and into its maximum potential! All the best, Jacob.

Played a mostly un-planned RP using MYTHIC rules last week with my wife, who was using the laptop in our room, my friend who's roughly 2000 miles east of me, my other friend who's 200 miles south, and my friend who's 5000 miles west (japan). We didn't use videochat, but typing everything worked just fine. I feel that the drawing tools could do with some development, but I was still easily able to sketch up a cave for my heroes to explore, even as we explored it. When we came against a weird beast, I was able to quickly find a suitable token via the search function, and we could get right into the action with prettymuch no delay. I'm sure as the database of tokens builds up, playing games on the fly will be even easier. My main problem with the program so far is bringing up player stats. A more intuitive way for the GM to find out what player 2's BRAWN level is would be great. Like maybe pullout tabs on the side of the screen. This would be really helpful for reference charts too.

I haven't gotten to use it for actual play yet, but I did get a couple of friends to hop on and we just played around for a while seeing what all we could do. I think that tuesday will be the day that we plan on running through a quick combat to see how well it works, but I have no doubts that it will be exactly what we need. I'm terribly excited, and I'll post again when I have actual experience.

I've been mentioning to my players that I was considering using some kind of virtual table top to make the game run a bit more smoothly. I live in Japan and the rest of my players are in one location so they have to argue rulings with a 40 inch tv. We started off with an online whiteboard that allowed me to post images and draw lines. It was clumsy, but it worked...barely. One day the site went down so as a quick fix, I shared my screen and used photoshop as an impromptu battle map and made new layers for player tokens and the like. It worked well, but my players had to call out where they wanted to move and they could see how many enemies there were thanks to the layer palette. I've been looking at other tools which had lots of features, but I was having trouble figuring out how to use them. One of my players found Roll20 so I took a look and transferred over my campaign materials in about two hours. I'm still playing around with it, but so far we really liked the basics. One thing we liked was the fog of war, it made the dungeon a bit more unpredictable. I make my maps using RPG Cartographer then paste them together in photoshop and use the for the game. It worked well and looked good too. I'm going to get around to playing with map making on there soon. We did have some problems. The video chat didn't really work at all. I couldn't get my picture working at all and the sound didn't work either. Also we had a strange bug which revealed the map when the player accidentally highlighted the map. Another thing I noticed is that the Hp bar doesn't really pay attention to the Max and some of my players wound up with loads of extra Hp. The initiative tracker worked great and helped me avoid skipping people. An iPad or tablet version of a player client would make this program very interesting for my group! If possible, I'd also like to see some spell templates! We really enjoyed using this and I think we're going to make it a regular part of our game!!

We finally had our first sessions last night. Overall, very impressed. The interface and experience is clean, simple and robust. Almost everything is intuitive. We did find a couple of bugs - the one where I couldn't reveal the fog of war if I was zoomed beyond 70% kicked in (which was a little annoying, but easily resolved once I figured out what was happening), I also found that when I copied and pasted the player tokens from one page to the next, only one of them save the information behind the token. (sorry, it's early. I'll explain that better. I pasted the characters onto the new map and found that the name, notes, controlling player and health bars weren't included in the paste. Not the end of the world, but took a couple of minutes to improve.) There were a couple of server hiccups last night, but beta is beta so that's alright. None of them lasted more than a couple of minutes. We also ditched the in house chat and video because the sound quality was detrimental to communication. We ended up moving back to Skype. I'd love for players to be able to import macros when they join the game, and tablet compatibility would help a couple of our players too. Overall, a great table thus far. Excellent work, folks!

This seemed like the best place to put this. My group has been recording all our sessions, and while the first two recordings were botched, the rest of our games, all played through roll20, are up on youtube! <a href="http://youtu.be/R969BRbxPGw" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/R969BRbxPGw</a>

OK, one more issue that didn't happen originally: my macros now don't work properly - they do text, then rolls. For instance, with a macro that goes Attack: /r 1d20 Damage: /r 1d6 It'll say Attack: Damage: [1d20roll] [1d6roll] Note that this even happens if I make it a combination of "attack" and "damage" macros seperately, embedded into a single macro. It's really annoying.

I'm thinking that it's probably a part of the 3-d dice application, even though I don't have that on - you probably had to reprogram something that made these macros not work (since, presumably, all the dice are rolled at once.)

Also, my entire group was finally all at their computers at the same time (vacations, etc. stopped us in the meantime), and so we finally had our first legitimate session. We didn't wind up getting to a battle - it's a sandbox campaign, and so the PCs spend most of the time planning what they were going to do first - but being able to chat in and out of character so easily, as well as my being able to switch between NPCs so easily, made this easily one of the best gaming experiences I've had from the DM side of the table in quite some time. We didn't use audio (several of us don't have microphones), so we just used chat, and this slowed down the game somewhat, but probably made it better in the process by giving me more time to think. Even without using any functions of it besides having a map image to discuss up and being able to talk in the form of NPCs with the chat - the only dice that were rolled were two profession(brewer) checks to see how good the beer one of the PCs made was - this was still one of the best sessions I've ever had.

The biggest thing for me was not having names on the tokens. We had our first Roll20 session last night. We've been using Maptools for a couple of years now so the group are familiar with using VTT's and it was mostly getting used to the differences in the way Roll20 works. I have to concur with Ken though - having the option to have the name of the token shown below the token would make life so much easier. We also found that the audio was slightly laggy when compared with our usual Skype setup. It was only noticeable after a while but got sufficiently annoying that we switched back to using Skype.

Very intuitive and easy to use. Biggest surprise was how easy it is to just take pretty much any image, drag and drop, re-size, and make it part of your campaign. Brilliant! My only issue is that more people don't know about this. I posted a link here on Paizo's forums though. Hopefully it will get some people interested. One guy checked it out and commented in the same thread saying he was very impressed.

<blockquote rel="Blaeringr" My only issue is that more people don't know about this. That's one of my biggest issues too.

First session last night. Been with my gaming group about 10 years, since grad school, some of them have been playing together longer than that. We've done a number of tabletop campaigns off and on, usually a set weeknight after work every other week. Weekends are usually too busy to schedule a regular group. Most of us live reasonably close to each other, but with careers, time, and most of us having small kids now, we recently reached the point where we just couldn't field a full party any more on a regular basis. So, made the jump to online using Roll20. Our session was a husband/wife co-GM team (one runs the story, the other wrote most of it and runs the mechanics) and five players. We all ran voice, most of us were on video too, and we were using both PC and Mac. Great work guys. We had a short session, couple hours, and most of our problems were just being rusty not having gamed since December. We're using Savage Worlds/Deadlands and the dice system was great having support for the exploding rolls we need in that ruleset. Absolutely love all the flexibility with creating dice macros. Video/voice took a few minutes as people were logging in to sort out with some relogs because some audio wasn't working, but once we got it going, it was robust for the rest of the session. Liked having playing cards which are used a lot in SW. As longtime tabletop gamers, we were amazed at just how well things went. We've done some MMOs together too using in-game or Ventrillo voice, and having the video here was just a higher level of engagement for the whole group over just voice. We were laughing and joking just like we would around a table. Some of the feedback from the group on our personal board the next day: "I was surprised at how well that worked" "we really had the same "dickin' around with friends" feel of a tabletop session." "Smashing success" "much more awesome then I initially thought it would be" "Over Vent alone, it's too easy not to get engaged. Seeing people did make me feel like I was hanging out with the friends." Most of my suggestions I've seen before: 1) Be able to select and delete text without clearing all drawings 2) Give players a “Clear Drawings” option that clears just what they’ve drawn 3) Some way to assign tokens to players across the campaign in a persistent way so the tokens move automatically when you change maps and when players come back the next time, the tokens permissions are still assigned to individuals. 4) Option to have your text/rolls in the chat window show up in your player assigned color for easier identification. 5) "Paint" tiles when making a map 6) Multiple GMs, or more likely just have the main GM be able to assign GM level view and control permissions to another person as a co-GM 7) generally just more flexibility in customizing the displays on tokens Keep up the good work, love to see some of these suggestions in future updates to make it even better. I've been RP gaming since 1987 and without a good online option, I wouldn't be able to do it any more. Thanks.

Hey guys, 2. It would of course be great to be able to roll 2 different dies at the same time and have them not add up. You can: set a macro with a return between each die. For instance: "/roll 1d8 /roll 1d8" will output two separate d8 rolls and give you the result of each die separately. Or you could even fancier and label things. This macro: "Main hand attack (sword) /roll 1d20+8 Damage /roll 2d8" will label the rolls so you can do your attack and damage with one click of a macro button.

My group finally got on after working on several maps to get used to the editor. I always try to wing my games, so suddenly I found myself building scenario I hadnt predicted and found it really easy to set up bandits on a road chasing a player through the trees in less time then it would have taken me just to set up minis in real life. Needless to say, the first few battles have been a grand thing indeed. My party loves roll20 and is looking forward to many more games. Ive been a D&D player since I was 17, almost 12 yrs now, and this is the fastest and more useful single tool ive ever found to make my games quicker. And ive been hunting new tools for all those years. oh, and they captured the bandit leader, turned him in for a small local bounty on his head when he pleaded for his life. got hired to investigate why a scouting party didnt make it back from dealing with some zombies at the hundred+ year old graveyard. They wormed their way down into a crypt and found skeletal mages holding a negative energy rift open and almost died in the lightning explosion. They also found a survivor who had to kill her own father so he didnt return.

Hellos to all the Roll20 Team, First heard about Roll20 through a friend running a Conan campaign. He'd been looking for a virtual table and stumbled on yours. I've been GM'ing a GURPS Rome campaign for something like the last 20 years (it had been on hiatus for the last two, mostly due to RL and a touch of creative burnout). I was toying with starting again, but was not looking forward to using obtuse instruments like RPTools (IMO). I was taken aback by the Roll20 approach, which is MUCH more user friendly. I can drop hex maps quickly, add tokens, and get started in a few minutes. The creating/adding of dice macros is effortless, the player handouts are a neat feature to spark player interest, and the Jukebox feature is awesome. Though there is a fair amount of combat (players/NPC's as well as mass combat), our game replies on roleplaying and atmosphere. My only hope is that the sound effect and ambient sound/music libraries will be expanded soon (in that vein -- the ability to upload our own tracks which can be played back and looped would be phenomenal). Our first session went great -- the players logged in, we looked over some of the features, started off on a map, and we were playing in no time. I was so impressed by the product that I signed up as a supporter. More substantive suggestions and feedback in weeks to come. In the meantime, I hope the Roll20 Team will keep up the great work! si post fata venit gloria non propero (If glory comes after death, I'm not in a hurry)

Ran my first roll20 game last Sunday and plan to use it again this coming Sunday. I don't think last Sunday was really a fair test because there was a lot of getting people setup to use it, etc., instead of being a normal game night. Still, things went pretty well. We've been using Maptools for the last 2 years and although it has worked well and I created a very detailed framework for our game, we were having more and more problems with clients crashing, locking up, having errors, etc. It really doesn't seem like they are able to keep the program updated, let alone add new features. It had gotten to the point where a few weeks ago I decided it was time to start looking for something else. I'd looked at both Fantasy Grounds and Battlegrounds, but neither really suited my needs (especially since I use a customized form of GURPS). Roll20 really needs a GM-configurable character sheet with dice roll integration, but other than that I'm really pleased so far. From the GM side I think roll20 has a lot of advantages over Maptools. I'm hoping that this Sunday's game will be a better test of the system and, if all works out, I will be subscribing soon!

welcome trigan, what system do yew play? they are testing character sheets as we speak!