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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8227840" data-attributes="member: 20564">I'm using Zoom and a shared-edit Google Draw page for images and battlemaps.  Because I improv a lot and only homebrew, I prep a lot in the area around but slightly outside what I think they will be doing, so I have ideas for NPC, events, and encounters that I can populate at a moments notice.  With the computer it's faster to do that then with my physical books because I can look up stat blocks online for many things.While playing online I find that I use more images, so I also have a bunch more of those prepped and organized that I can pull up to show the players, and then shrink down to token size for the battlemap.I also have a number of extra maps with grids - there are plenty of cheap patreons out there with great battle maps in addition to what people release for free.  So it's more constrained than just sketching on my chessex battlemap with wet erase, but not by too much and it's quicker to deploy and often as more interesting/varied terrain then I would do for an improv otherwise.  (Set piece battles are separate, those I have everything ready to go and will often feature more elaborate terrain.)Zoom has very good audio/visual including good with multiple people speaking at once.  I have no problem with voices, and play with multiple players and DMs who use them.  I have one game on Discord with a boosted server for better sound and that's not bad though not quite the same.  Also many of whom I game with do things like players using PC portraits as backgrounds, and DMs using appropriate ambient scenery as backgrounds.  We did have a player use FaceRig for one session to replace their face with an animated one, but that was limited success and we didn't repeat.As a side note, I am also running an in-person game for my kids and their cousins, who are in our COVID circle.  So I am keeping those skills sharp and have a reference for what the difference are.  I find I need to emote like I'm on stage to consistently get emotions across on Zoom, while I can be more subtle in person.BTW, I do play with a DM who uses Roll20 (and Zoom).  Seems like it has some nice toys, plus it rolls online (we use physical dice and trust), but nary a session goes by where there's not a technical issue with someone's token, or the initiative tracker, or with him thinking we can see things we can't and that messing stuff up.  It's a learning curve thing, I expect we'll get past it.</blockquote>

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