We had our first game tonight (pushed off from last night due to real life, but we managed to pull it together). One player was my brother, joining in from several hundred miles away; the other was my son, joining in from his computer in another room. We started a one-shot game of Barbarians of Lemuria , which is a fairly rules-light game (mostly, everything is "roll 2d6 + modifiers, and see if you beat 9") and there are only a few more fiddly areas.
Overall, things went okay. We had a bear of a time getting our headsets to work with our computers, but that has nothing to do with Roll20 and everything to do with counterintuitive sound bullcrap on our machines.
Upsides:
1. Easy to create maps and new pages; no sweat here. I wish I could tile a background on the map as an option instead of a fixed color, but that's not any sort of dealbreaker.
2. Communication was crisp and clear, once our headset issues were sorted. We don't have cameras, but sound was not a problem.
3. I was able to find adequate terrain and tokens, although due to the search issue earlier today I had to upload quite a few of my own things to a "storage" map and use them from there.
4. Dice rolling worked as advertised, and was simple enough to explain. Nobody had any errors or unexpected results with the dice.
5. The new layer switching and movement options are superb. Just exactly what I was hoping for.
6. The system was rock-solid: no glitches, no failures, no lag.
7. The journal system, and especially the handouts, were a huge hit. My brother, when I showed him the handouts I'd created and what the journal did, just said, "Man, that's _coooooool_."
8. The fog of war worked as expected.
9. We went gridless for this one, but I had no issues with gridded maps either.
10. We had a lot of fun, and bad guys were destroyed in the name of adventure.
Downsides:
1. We simply don't like having to type to execute dice rolls. The first few times of course it was not a burden, but it rapidly went from that to "sigh, not again" - in other words, it became a big deal, and not in a good way. Whether typing a /roll command or typing a #macroname command both took up time and slowed our game down.
My brother's comment on this matter was this:
If I could make one single change right now, I'd make the list of macros in the Settings window be a list of clickable buttons, which would run the macro and send the output to chat, rather than a simple list of what's been created. This program is great, it could just provide a little smoothness to the rolling process. I don't want a big scripting engine, I just want it to show me a button to click, or a link, next to the macros I write so I don't have to type #something in the chat window - I can just click on the macro name.
Taking into account that we both come from a MapTool background, where macros were in fact buttons that automatically executed the dice rolls contained therein, we're a bit spoiled. But, I also think that change - providing a way to just execute the macro from the list, rather than typing it, would be wonderful. The less typing I have to do, the better.
2. I had inconsistent results with group copy/pasting. It worked maybe 2 times out of 10; most of the time if I tried it it would copy one token, or none. I may just not have the trick down, or maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. I'll have to investigate it again.
3. Scrolling, zooming, and panning the map: I'm very used to being able to use the mouse to pan and zoom (e.g., hold down right mouse to pan, and use the scroll wheel to zoom), and I often did that out of habit and was surprised when it didn't work.
4. I couldn't figure out if there was a way to "force players to my view," which would be handy to make players see the same part of the screen I'm seeing. Not a huge problem, but would be a handy tool.
5. I'd almost rather the radial menu circles (the ones that correspond to bars) not have any icons, or have a small set of icons from which to choose (like, say, a shield, a heart, a sword, lightning, etc.), instead of just the heart monitor, the green heart, and the lightning bolt. Again, a tiny quibble, but I had to explain what each circle represented and tell them to ignore the icons.
As a final note, we did not use the Turn Tracker at all - we use an initiative method where the person who just completed their turn designates which character (on either side) goes next, so turn tracking wasn't necessary.
But! We had a great time, and it was a solid and fun experience. Roll20 is something I would like to continue using, and I can see improvement happening regularly. It handily does what it's aimed to do, no doubt. I would like to see measures taken to reduce the amount of dice roll or macro typing needed in chat, but otherwise, I have very few major complaints.
