Moving to Roll20 from Offline

Hello, Having purchased the Essentials Kit, I started the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign recently. We ran one mission and then social distancing began. I am looking to move us to Roll20, and I am curious if it will be worth it to re-purchased the Essentials Kit (but this time on Roll20). We already have completed character sheets and such...I just wonder if it will be easy to have access to maps and tokens and such, or if it might be a waste of money since I have all the materials offline already. Thanks for helping this newbie!

It depends, do you value your time, or the money? Do you rather recreate all the maps, handouts, tokens and statblocks in Roll20 by copying manually from your existing sources, or pay for the thing being ready-to-play, and only having to learn the basics on how Roll20 works?

I would say if social distancing has left you with a lot of free time there's no point in dropping the extra money? The maps look nice for sure, and the NPC's being one click is incredibly convenient but if Roll20 is going to be your primary way of playing tabletop for a while investing your time in building the maps and familiarizing yourself with the platform may also be fruitful? Or just find images that are similar enough to the module maps and use those if you can't acquire the maps on there own. Then again, if money isn't a problem you would always have the kit in case you wanted to run it with other long-distant friends during these quarantined times...   

I would recommend doing Create New Game and install one of the Free, freely available Module products. The minimum oldest one is "The Master's Vault" for 5e. There might be some newer ones, I think they recently offered a demo of Curse Of Strahd or something like that. Create a New Game (on your account as GM, no one else will be in this game). Launch the game table, look around all the tabs (map Pages, GM Layer, map layer, Handouts / Characters / Journals / Monsters, tokens). This will give you a good but scaffolding-idea of what the larger module purchases would give you. In my opinion the Marketplace products are a high value, for the amount of time it saves the GM and enhances the beauty of the game screen.

That's a good idea, Gold!  The Wildemount Adventure Preview was just released for free, and would be a good one to dip your feet into.

I had purchased the essentials Kit and they have an offer where you can access the content on DND Beyond.  I am using the free account of D&D Beyond and am able to access all the maps etc.  The player maps are there and you can copy them, bring them into Roll20 and then do your population that way.  I use the Beyond materials for my review and rarely go back to the hard copy because most of the stuff is linked in Beyond.   I have ran the initial adventure, and then 2 of the 3 follow-on adventures that you get for free.  I am now starting the third and final one, Divine contention.  I enjoy the map building, dynamic Lighting and monster population process but maybe I am just weird.

If it is only a temporary solution, don't spend much money on it.  BUT If you enjoy online RPG, the essentials kit is one of the really good adventurers for that platform.