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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 7966421" data-attributes="member: 50987">All three of our gaming groups have switched over to Roll20.The first group, in which my wife is the DM and I'm one of seven players, tried to use FantasyGrounds.  Unfortunately, not everyone in our gaming group could meet the software requirements, or they were using work laptops and didn't have permission to install the software, or they were behind a firewall and couldn't connect, or they were using a Chromebook or a Mac, or, or.  There was always a work-around for the tech issues, but those always took time to troubleshoot and diagnose and I'm the only one with any kind of background in IT.We ended up using Roll20, since it was the one VTT platform that everyone could access reliably (and even then, it wasn't perfect.)  Tomorrow night we are running our second VTT game, and my wife is really excited about the sets of assets she purchased.The second group, in which I'm one of five players and all of us have a background in IT, is playing our fourth VTT game tonight.  We did a test run of Roll20 back in late February, where one of our buddies put together a Call of Cthulhu one-shot and ran us through it.  A couple weeks later we shifted back to our regular 5E game (we are in the late chapters of "Storm King's Thunder"), and it was a pretty rocky transition.  We have a lot of house-rules and some custom character features, so it wasn't as simple as "clicking and dragging" as the online tutorials imply.  It took us several days to just get our 13th level characters imported into Roll20, and some of us are still missing some elements of the game.But three weeks later, we are doing pretty good.  There are still the occasional tech issues (lagging, glitchy lighting, loss of camera or sound), but they pass after a minute or two.  And being able to play D&D literally from the comfort of our own homes is very nice.  I suspect we will permanently move this campaign to VTT even after the pandemic.My third gaming group, in which I'm the DM and I have five other players, will play its third game this weekend on Roll20.  It's a "couples D&D" game, where my wife and I play every Sunday with two other couples...a Sunday Brunch Game, we call it.  So the whole point of this campaign was to hang out face-to-face with our married friends, drink some wine, eat some quiche or whatever, and roll some dice.  I worried that the VTT would really mess up that formula for us.Since my wife and I already had the Roll20 thing going for her gaming group, I pitched it to the others and we got it set up.  I don't run a published campaign setting and I really enjoy the creative side of being a DM, so there was a huge learning curve.  The fun part of being a DM is drawing my own maps, inventing my own monsters and magic items, and writing interesting NPCs...I've been doing it for years, and I have a certain way that I like to do them.  So having to re-learn how to work digitally has taken a lot of time and practice.  (And just when I thought I had the hang of it, they go and change Dynamic Lighting!  Aaargh!)-----Anyway.  That's how we are rocking the VTT in my gaming groups.  Roll20 has been great for us, but it isn't the magical solution that some folks say it is.   It's difficult to master, and puts a lot on the shoulders of the DM.  It also uses a lot of bandwidth, especially if you are using the built-in audio and video.And FantasyGrounds looks amazing, but it requires a level of hardware and expertise that some of us didn't have.  I can't say much more about it, because we never successfully ran a game with it.</blockquote>

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