How do you format your sessions

I've been looking to use Roll20 for a while but I've been having some trouble setting up my sessions. From someone who's done tabletop for years, how do you handle RP, do you have a separate page for it or is it just done over the battle screens. As well, if the PCs enter an area you don't have a page prepared for, how do you handle that or does that end the session until you can make up the new page?   

I always keep my chat log above my battle screen. My players enjoy acting in-character in combat, and I love narrating the scene. If there's immediate combat, I swap over to a battle map for everyone to use. Otherwise I tend to leave some scenery or a map of the area for my players to visualise during roleplay segments. If they encounter significant NPCs or items, I have handouts at the ready. A good way to handle OOC and IC chatter is to have players use ( ) for OOC. This is a quick and easy method for both the players and the Gamemaster to notify they are speaking as the player and separating it from the in-character RP. I find as long as everyone is paying attention, very rarely do issues arise. Preparation is the solution to the second problem. Honestly Roll20 really requires the gamemaster to put in the extra work to have everything ready. You can't as easily improvise your session as you can at a real table. You can draw maps and use placeholder tokens if a crisis happens, but otherwise it is on you to get everything ready. When preparing your session, think of what kind of areas the players can trail off to outside your intended story. Is your game taking place in a urban area? Have a few maps at the ready of various indoor and outdoor locations in a city. Wandering the fields? Have a few hills, woodland and open plains. Have tokens and NPCs ready for on the fly deployment. My maps always have monsters or encounters ready for my players. Roll20 rewards preparation and gathering your resources ahead of time. Make sure you have tokens made. Make sure you have map assets. Make sure you have reference sheets for rules and creatures. Organise your resources so you know where to find everything both on Roll20 and anything you have offline. You can also Archive anything you aren't immediately using but don't want to delete on roll20 to prevent clutter. Perfect for maps or NPCs that are just on standby for emergency case. Roll20 has a huge marketplace for maps. If you're playing fantasy, I absolutely adore Gabriel Pickard's work and recommend it if you need generic maps of any scenery, or to create your own unique locations. Again, preparation is what will get you through the day. In the rare situation I don't have a map ready for my players, I just quickly notify them there is a small preparation time. I scrounge up a map from my collection, make quick tokens and print out papers of the immediate situation. It takes me roughly 15-30 minutes to make an emergency preparation, but my players are generally patient when such a crisis happens. Just be open to your players that sometimes it is impossible to prepare for anything. Also a good time for them to get snacks or what-not.

Thanks, It was a bit jarring to start at first, but I'm starting to get used to it. Right now as a free user its a bit hard to build the kind of maps that I want to make, but I can certainly make do with the free pieces for now. I'll try out this style of play as my group makes the transition from tabletop to roll20  

Tall Tree said: I've been looking to use Roll20 for a while but I've been having some trouble setting up my sessions. From someone who's done tabletop for years, how do you handle RP, do you have a separate page for it or is it just done over the battle screens. As well, if the PCs enter an area you don't have a page prepared for, how do you handle that or does that end the session until you can make up the new page?    My GM tends to cut between in-game and forum. For my own games, I tend to do forum between sessions, and text-chat in sessions with a 'relevant background' on display. So if they were in "New York" then I'd probably have a map of the New York Subways up with other places marked in.

I usually run all text based games, instead of voice games, and it is all about the prep usually. I've reduced my work load tremendously when I shifted to a more narrative, descriptive, style of play instead of tactical, map use, style. I use images of locations for the most part but when I do use a map, such as for combat, it is more for referencing the distance, range, and terrain instead of everyone moving round by round. In a recent game I lost track of that and fell back into the round counting which did not set well with me but it did work.

Well, i use a different approach, all of the scenes in my D&D games are created using various art sources, especially  Gabriel Pickard This is very time consuming and should only be attempted by people with serious OCD. For my sci-fi games I will build key locations, but tend to just describe situations where a meter this way or that will not matter.

I like to use lots of pictures. If my players are in town, I'll generally have a map of the town on the screen. If they enter a tavern, I may bring up a page with a picture of the interior of a tavern on it. If the players get into a bar brawl and I don't have a tavern battlemap prepared, we just use theatre of the mind with the backdrop of whatever picture is currently on the screen. I also generally have several generic battlemaps archived that I can bring out a moment's notice. 2 or 3 forest maps, a road, and a generic tavern are archived into every game I DM. I generally use maps that I have purchased via the Roll20 marketplace (I have a combination of pre-made and ones that you put together yourself) but I also sometimes find specific maps online using pinterest or a google search. For ease of use though, the Roll20 marketplace assets can't be beat. Along the same lines, having a few prepared monsters ready means that your players don't have to wait while you type in stats. If you need an emergency encounter, you can just pull out your "generic forest map" and add the owlbear that you've had sitting in your monsters folder. If the players go waaaay off the material that I have prepared, I generally bring them over to the splash page or to the world map and we do everything in our imaginations. If it's a combat that is too complicated for theatre of the mind, we use a blank page with the grid. I generally build 10 minute breaks into our sessions so that everyone can stretch their legs - and allow me to set up a combat. It never takes me more than 5 minutes to pull in the monsters and maps. It also never hurts to over-prepare. Anything that doesn't get used is a tool for you for later in the game. Spend a few hours preparing a magical fairy grove and your players teleport into town, missing the encounter entirely? Now you've got a great encounter ready to go for the next time that they unexpectedly enter a forest, complete with battle map and fully statted creatures! 

I make lots of maps. Lots. I make my own (and many of them are on the MP) as well as use other artists like Gabriel P, David H, Russ H, and Brass Badger. I personally like the Top Down Tokens because it reminds me of Mini's from my IRL games, and would strongly suggest Devin Night, David North, or Graemation for those. Some people prefer the retro JRPG look, and if you enjoy that style of look, check out Zeshio and Dsurion over at the MP for amazing Pixel Art! Skyler J. said: ......Organise your resources so you know where to find everything both on Roll20 and anything you have offline. You can also Archive anything you aren't immediately using but don't want to delete on roll20 to prevent clutter. Perfect for maps or NPCs that are just on standby for emergency case. As for what Skyler J mentioned earlier with Archiving pages, a really amazing feature on the Pro Level is the Transmognifier tool. You can set up a campaign just for your maps and have the Dynamic Lighting already set up and ready to go, and use the Transmognifier to drag maps over to your campaign you use to play. This avoids using Archived folders and keeps your map pages clean and organized! Trust me, having 500 maps of everything can be a pain to sort through in live game, so having that tool saves space and stress. Personally I use a lot of tables as well for randomized encounters and things like that, as I run a fair amount of West March campaigns. It's a good topic (tables) to explore on the wiki to help save time when you don't plan everything possible, as you can rely on the dice to make things, and you can customize your table to be fit to your setting. For instance, I have a table set up for Forest Encounters, Desert Encounters, Urban Encounter, etc. all with macros set to roll up my randoms at a seconds notice, and it really saves a lot of time when you need that extra element you don't plan for. I can echo what everyone else is saying though, Roll20 really rewards those who put the prep time in, and Maps, Tokens, Tables, Transmognifier and Dynamic Lighting Tools are all very essential to my style of play. Not only do they save time and make the game run smoother, but they also enhance your setting visually and the tools help organize and make things more fluid and manageable.

How do I handle RP?: If the scene is going to be all RP I usually leave the players on the town or region map depending and share NPC pages to the players. For scenes where there are lots of NPC's (e.g. Tavern) then I usually make a map if I have time beforehand. What do I do when PC's enter an area I haven't prepared for?: I usually have a few generic maps for the adventure (forest trail, ruins, campsite) that I can use for most encounters/areas. Example: if players decide they are going to search out of town for missing villagers and I don't have anything, I usually just pull up a dungeon/cave from somewhere else and quickly change some monsters/npcs. I think the key to this is a it of prep and a few generic maps.

You can also draw on a blank page, created ahead or quickly created as you go. If you have character sheets with associated default tokens you can drag them to the page. This lacks the eye candy of those wonderfully crafted map tiles but is quick and dirty.

Like others have posted here, my games never leave the tabletop view. I use top-down icons and every location in the adventure has its own map. I also have a few generic maps standing by, for situations like a random encounter in the forest, for example. Both roleplaying and combat takes place on these maps. This approach may not suit everyone's style of play, but I enjoy it. For me, creating the maps and encounters is almost as much fun as actually playing.

al e. said: Well, i use a different approach, all of the scenes in my D&D games are created using various art sources, especially  Gabriel Pickard This is very time consuming and should only be attempted by people with serious OCD. This is more or less - the same approach I use. :) I have no life. But I make great maps.