Tools & Apps for online RPG conferencing

[AkaKageWarrior]

Hello,

in times of the Plague when "social distancing" is required, we still want to play D&D / Pathfinder.
So let's try it online... but how?

Any good apps & tools & whatever to play online with about 5 players (with hopefully good enough internet speed)?
Should be compatible on several OS / platforms like Windows, Android, and iOS.

If there is a thread about this, please share.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Look for threads with VTT or Virtual Table Top.

 

[ART!]

I am finding Roll20 to be a bit of a mess for newbies. How-To's and instructions are all over the place - both in terms of instructions and in terms of where the information is, and some of the info sources are outdated,no longer supported, etc.

Between starting up a new game, this dang virus, and all the other stresses of life, I don't need the aggravation.

I'm seriously considering Astral VTT, or finding something else.

 

[Zhaleskra]

One more vote to support pinning/stickying VTT as a hot topic.

 

[LordEntrails]

If you are looking at Fantasy Grounds as your VTT, then look at FG College and sign up for any of their free classes. They have classes on all sorts of topics, from getting started, creating characters, to advanced GMing topics.

 

[Fanaelialae]

If you don't mind theater of the mind you could also simply use something like Discord/Skype for either chat or video conferencing. I'm not certain whether they support rolling dice in chat out-of-the-box, but I'm fairly confident that there are add ons that do just that.

 

[AkaKageWarrior]

Thanks to you guys!
Last weekend we tried roll20 - and good that we tested one evening before the actual session...
roll20 looks good, I like the options, being used to CAD programs it wasn't hard for me to learn the basic stuff to run the VTT for my player.
But the communication didn't work, so we stopped using that part of roll20 and used Google Hangouts.
That all went quite smoothly, though good headsets for better speech quaility are recommended...

 

[Len]

Voice chat is definitely a problem with Roll20. We had exactly the same problem last week and used Discord for voice.

 

[uzirath]

Voice chat is definitely a problem with Roll20. We had exactly the same problem last week and used Discord for voice.

My group has been lucky so far. We've had two sessions running GURPS with Roll20 (plus one tech demo) with no problems. I wonder how it scales up with the number of users? So far it has been five of us, but we have two more players who will be joining in the coming weeks.

 

[Nebulous]

We have had good success with Roll20 and Discord so far. I admit the first two sessions were crappy, I just couldn't get a hang of the new software, but I practiced every day until the third session and it was a night and day difference, I could actually run it fairly close to the speed of an in person game. If i could get a hang of all the macro and shortcut keys and automation it would actually be faster than in person.