Getting the boys back together

[Turik2100]

I've been in and out of several different D&D groups and not one of them holds a magic wand of illumination to my original group. About a year and a half ago we all split up to attend different colleges, the worst part was my long time friend of 17 years moved to Wyoming to attend the University. My friend emailed me the other day and sent me a link to a Youtube channel of a group of people playing D&D using a virtual table top, the place was called roll20.net. I've been watching this youtube channel and the program seems to look fine, but I'm not entirely sold yet. So I was wondering if anyone has used roll20 and what they think of it.

Sorry for the sob story

 

[Lindeloef]

I used roll20.net a little. It is a solid program for VTT. You can do some small macros that help along the ride, but I personally don't like the user interface. Though that may be cause I am used to Maptool which is far superior in what I need out of a VTT (=personal taste). But Maptool is more complex than roll20 as far as I encountered.

So if you just want a simple program to run your sessions, roll20 does the job well.

 

[Oryan77]

Back when I was researching which software to use, Maptool was the winner hands down. It was free, had better features, and the interface was clean.

I use Maptool and I love it. The support forums for it are really good too. You'll get an answer to any questions within minutes.

It's also free, which is a plus. And there are tons of things you can do with it if you start getting into custom macros that people have made. I actually use it for our face to face game displaying it on my 42" LCD TV. Once you learn it well enough where you are not holding up the game with technical issues (usually due to the user not knowing how to use it) then it improves the gaming experience 100%. I could rant all day long about the things that I love about it. I can't recommend it enough.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I use roll20 and ... it's okay. I find it a bit clunky to get stuff drawn but I imagine that a lot of that will go away once I play with it more. There are so many times though when I felt "Gee, I could have had this done if we were all at the table together". I've had a few issues were the app crashed and I wasn't able to move my character and had to reload the page. But, it's free so you get what you paid for.

 

[athos]

I prefer OpenRPG which is free and I have been using for 8 years or so. Roll20 I just started using about a month ago and have no complaints so far, seems to be adequate for online gaming. Maptools I tried a couple years ago and could never get it to work quite right.

The thing I like most about OpenRPG is the lobby. While waiting for your game to start, you can hang out on the server and meet new people, I don't think the other VTT's have this feature, at least not when I used them.

Good luck getting the group back together,

Dan

 

[Turik2100]

thanks for the feedback, I'll try out the different VTTs. Hopefully the guys and I can enjoy playing D&D together once again.

 

[GMMichael]

Penandpapergames has a good-looking chat room and white board that I haven't tried out yet. It should work great if you can be flexible with your grid movement.

 

[Gilladian]

Roll20 is simple and fun to use, but has a few clunky moments. Do as much drawing ahead of time as possible. Use a rules light system for the best result. It is my preferred table for Dungeon World and 5e.

Maptool requires a good bit more finesse to use, and you HAVE to do your mapping essentially all ahead. Much better support for really complex rules. We used it for 4e and it worked well up to about 10th level.

 

[Lindeloef]

[MENTION=2093]Gilladian[/MENTION]
I am curious, Our group is about to hit level 10 and above soon. Why does maptool stop working well at that level?

 

[Gilladian]

Oh, mostly because we were writing all our own macros and it became too burdensome to figure out how to do each one... we never tried to find any pre-created resource sets for 4e (did they call them frameworks? something like that) because we'd tried for 3e and never found one that worked well for us.

I'm sure that if you were dedicated enough to either write all your own macros, or searched for and found a workable set from elsewhere, maptools would function at all levels. We just weren't dedicated enough to do it.