Social Distancing and Dragons

[Ratskinner]

So the Discord theater of the mind based approach is the first thing I've hit on.

Can someone with experience review Fantasy Grounds and/or Roll 20 and talk about what it takes to make it work, and work better than just a chat room?

My group has just transitioned to Roll20. We use Discord for the voice chat, because Roll20 seems to really lag with that on. We use D&DBeyond for character gen, and a Chrome extension called Beyond 20 to link them to Roll20. Its a bit of a bear for the GM, if you don't want to spend a bunch of money. Luckily, one of our guys had a bunch of stuff on D&DBeyond already, so he could share it with us. Tonight was only our second session, and it went fairly well, once we got everybody on the same page.

Edit: the Fog of War/Dynamic Lighting is totally worth it. Players were griping a bit, but it was totally engrossing for the effect that it had on limiting their information.

 

[Celebrim]

So I'm necroing my own thread because the topic is still relevant to me.

My main group began meeting online when the entroublement began and we've been playing mostly Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars D6 theater of mind style with a few one delves into things like Star Trek 2D20 and Aliens. We probably would have been meeting face to face again, but as we are all software developers we all find ourselves in a completely changed industry. Not only are no two of us working at the same office anymore, but most of us don't even have an office we are working out of. So remote has just become the most convenient way to meet. However, for the last 6-7 months the rate at which we can get together has drastically declined due to real life just hammering everyone.

I'm thinking of running a Gygaxian Haven/Delve or West Marches style game for the weeks when we all can't get together since this seems to be the best way to accommodate a group with varying composition. But that is best played IMO on a battle map because its narrowly focused on tactical fun, and that means finding a virtual tabletop.

So, with three years of social distancing under the forums collective belt, hopefully there are a lot of expert opinions out there on how to make this work.

a) What's the best virtual tabletop? Roll20 is the famous one but apparently, I have to pay at the "Pro" level to use custom character sheets, and that's almost certainly going to be a must for me.
b) If I go with Roll20, what is the best tileset for making maps and how hard it is to compose and save maps for future use? I'll probably be doing a mad funhouse style mega dungeon with standard theming.