D&D General Best VTT for the most players?

[R_J_K75]

Tokens don't link to character sheets when you drag them from the journal unless you have already linked the token to the character before you link the character sheet to the token - just bizarre lack of common sense functionality.

That explains why it took me a half hour and I had to delete a previously created character then re-create and re-assign everything yesterday just so it was visable and useable to the player. I have found it to be oddly designed and finicky too at times. You are correct Ive noticed too that the design thought process seems backwards. It works but I sometimes need to fight the urge to throw my computer against the wall.

 

[R_J_K75]

My usual response to this kind of situation in Roll20 is to refresh the page.

Ive closed the program re-opened, refreshed while the page is open and nothing works. Strange that theres a 250% cap on zoom level. Possible that I have something setup up wrong but IDK its on the screen to the grid size I want it, each square = 60 miles so I dont see why it wont work. Only thing I can think of is to fit the page size to the picture.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I've found Roll20 to be very oddly designed.

It's both very unintuitive and very finicky. To get dynamic lighting or tokens to work you have to click so many options and often you have to do them in the right order. For example, players can't see the names of each others tokens unless you go in and click show nameplate (which seems obvious) but then you have to go into advanced options and also give them permission to see the name plate. There's a lot of stuff like that - GMs have to do an awful lot for the players - and while I can see how that might suit some GM styles it seems an odd choice to frontload that level of control as the default. Another example, with dynamic lighting you can set a player's token to emit light but no one can see it unless you also grant player's permission to 'see' the light.

Tokens don't link to character sheets when you drag them from the journal unless you have already linked the token to the character before you link the character sheet to the token - just bizarre lack of common sense functionality.

Even the character sheets seem to be a bizarre kludgy workaround for the fact that macros are overly complicated. If they had a good interface for setting macros then character sheets wouldn't really be necessary and house rules would be much simpler.

Global settings. You can globally set token options so that any bewly created token inherits the global preferences. You do this in the game settings, not from inside the VTT. As for why the choices were made, Roll20 supports a large number of games and styles of play. I, frex, rarely have named tokens so it would be more painful to me to have names on by default.

For character sheets, I'm not sure what your issue is? You can do sheets and nacros, and add bew macris directly to the sheet, or to a token, or to a player, or all three. They don't really fight each other, so I don't follow tge issue.

Which, I don't have to. I'm not interested in selling you on Roll20, you do you and find tge best tool for you. If I can help, groovy, but I'm not shilling.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ive closed the program re-opened, refreshed while the page is open and nothing works. Strange that theres a 250% cap on zoom level. Possible that I have something setup up wrong but IDK its on the screen to the grid size I want it, each square = 60 miles so I dont see why it wont work. Only thing I can think of is to fit the page size to the picture.

So, I did some quick poking and think I may have found your issue. In the map page settings, the very first set of things are the number of units for width and height and how many pixels that is. If you're doing default, then the number of pixels should be 70x the number of units. If you have a lesser number in there, then the image will not zoom in fully. This is because the number of pixels sets the image size at 100% zoom. If you've set it up for 30 units width at 70 pixels per unit, then at 100% it will be 2100 pixels wide. When you zoom to 250%, it'll be 840 pixels wide, still a reasonable viewing size. If, however, you've set it to be 30 units at 7 pixels per unit, then it's only 210 pixels wide at 100% and 8.4 pixels at 250%. The browser doesn't do that, so it limits the size of the image to something it understands better, so you get a postage stamp sized 100% and a small envelope sized zoomed image.

Check your pixels per unit and make the pixel width/height in the settings is large enough. It should be 70 pixels times the unit size of each to be the default.

Hope this helps and is actually your issue.

EDIT: sorry, this is what happens when you're typing from memory of a problem rather than refreshing it. The pixel per unit is fixed. But you can use very small unit/pixel sizes and it will cause the zoom problem. I used an image that is normally 36x24 (WxH) units, which translates to 2,420 x 1,680 pixels. I took the trailing zero off of the pixel counts for both width and height, and replicated your zoom issue. But, contrary to my above, this fixes the units to 3.6 x 2.4 units and doesn't change the pixels per unit. Mea culpa, should have refreshed my memory by looking before posting instead of a fuzzy memory from last night.

 

[R_J_K75]

So, I did some quick poking and think I may have found your issue. In the map page settings, the very first set of things are the number of units for width and height and how many pixels that is. If you're doing default, then the number of pixels should be 70x the number of units. If you have a lesser number in there, then the image will not zoom in fully. This is because the number of pixels sets the image size at 100% zoom. If you've set it up for 30 units width at 70 pixels per unit, then at 100% it will be 2100 pixels wide. When you zoom to 250%, it'll be 840 pixels wide, still a reasonable viewing size. If, however, you've set it to be 30 units at 7 pixels per unit, then it's only 210 pixels wide at 100% and 8.4 pixels at 250%. The browser doesn't do that, so it limits the size of the image to something it understands better, so you get a postage stamp sized 100% and a small envelope sized zoomed image.

Check your pixels per unit and make the pixel width/height in the settings is large enough. It should be 70 pixels times the unit size of each to be the default.

Hope this helps and is actually your issue.

EDIT: sorry, this is what happens when you're typing from memory of a problem rather than refreshing it. The pixel per unit is fixed. But you can use very small unit/pixel sizes and it will cause the zoom problem. I used an image that is normally 36x24 (WxH) units, which translates to 2,420 x 1,680 pixels. I took the trailing zero off of the pixel counts for both width and height, and replicated your zoom issue. But, contrary to my above, this fixes the units to 3.6 x 2.4 units and doesn't change the pixels per unit. Mea culpa, should have refreshed my memory by looking before posting instead of a fuzzy memory from last night.

Thanks for the help and doing the leg work I really appreciate it. Im in the middle of something else right now but going to try these suggestions later today so I'll let you know what I find out.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Thanks for the help and doing the leg work I really appreciate it. Im in the middle of something else right now but going to try these suggestions later today so I'll let you know what I find out.

No problem, I ran last night and after the game was curious and already there. 5 minutes of playing around. I hope it helps.

 

[ART!]

Roll20 seems to be the most popular, so more players will be familiar with it, but I tried out Astral recently and I found it much more intuitive.

 

[LordEntrails]

I wonder why it matters what VTT gives you the access to the most players? Are you looking to sell a product and you want the biggest market space? If you are just looking for players to GM to, you won't find a shortage of players on any platform, they all have more players than GMs.

I’d say it is worth the subscription IF you will be using Roll20 for a significant time.

Isn't this a reason to not want a subscription and to prefer one-time pricing? The longer you pay a subscription, the more it costs you. They are, imo, great for short term need or even trials, but not for long term usage.

 

[darjr]

I thought I stated my reasons?

I run a lot of “public” games and one of the issues that seem to come up is players would show up but be unable to use the DMs tech of choice or want to have tactical play when the DM wasn’t able to do for thier lack of tech.

 

[R_J_K75]

No problem, I ran last night and after the game was curious and already there. 5 minutes of playing around. I hope it helps.

Reading your post made me take a step back and try again. I looked at the pixels of the image I was trying to use which were 812 x 473. Under the page settings I entered those into the second (px) box. I switched the page scale to 60 miles, and reduced the cell width by .25 and that shrunk the grid to match the scale on the 3E FRCS map so I just used the reference point f Westgate to Urmlaspyr which is 60 miles and it came out right. See the pics. I cant articulate what I did or figure out how to do it again, I think I'll just have to use trial and error for each image until I do figure it out.