I started using Roll20 when I moved from my group in January. The VTT is really good. When creating your PCs and NPCs, you can drag entries from the SRD into the inventory, spellbook, or NPC and have a big part of the content filled in for you. I am a Pro subscriber on Roll20 and have purchased Tomb of Horrors and Storm King's Thunder on that platform as well as run my own custom campaigns.
D&D 5E What platform to play 5E Online?
- Thread starter uriel222
- Start date
GameOgre
Adventurer
I just started DMing on Roll20 about 2 months ago because I had to in order to play with my group.
The first two weeks was rough I'm not going to lie to you. It took many many hours of watching videos and trying stuff out until I could get a handle on it. During that Time I ran mostly theater of the mind games because my skills were low.
After about two weeks things slowly started working better as I figured out more and more stuff.
Fast forward two months and I prefer roll20 over even our face to face games. We play with video on so you get to hang and socialize like always but with the added features of roll20 to call on and roll20's store bought modules make everything so easy and nice. At least buy the monster manual for all the monsters & tokens.
After about a month(once you have decided to stick with it or not) get a monthly sub account and go pro. The bells and whistles are nice.
I think probably Fantasy Ground is nice as well and right this minute they seem to actually be cheaper. I suspect that soon Roll20 will lower their prices to match and so end up cheaper again but who knows.
The first two weeks was rough I'm not going to lie to you. It took many many hours of watching videos and trying stuff out until I could get a handle on it. During that Time I ran mostly theater of the mind games because my skills were low.
After about two weeks things slowly started working better as I figured out more and more stuff.
Fast forward two months and I prefer roll20 over even our face to face games. We play with video on so you get to hang and socialize like always but with the added features of roll20 to call on and roll20's store bought modules make everything so easy and nice. At least buy the monster manual for all the monsters & tokens.
After about a month(once you have decided to stick with it or not) get a monthly sub account and go pro. The bells and whistles are nice.
I think probably Fantasy Ground is nice as well and right this minute they seem to actually be cheaper. I suspect that soon Roll20 will lower their prices to match and so end up cheaper again but who knows.
Yeah, I'm really hoping that Roll20 gets on the reduced price bandwagon with Fantasy Grounds and D&D Beyond soon. I just can't bring myself to spend $50 on digitial copies of books I already own (even if in reality the time saved versus manually putting everything from them in is probably worth it.)
clearstream
(He, Him)
I'm finding Fantasy Grounds extremely good. The combat tracker works well. You can apply fog of war over a map and then reveal it as players explore.
Xaelvaen
Stuck in the 90s
I use Maptools, found at http://www.rptools.net/.
Free, open source, and an amazing community of content creators. You can create your own campaign frameworks, or get them from other users who've already done all the scripting by hand. Obviously, it doesn't have all the content of the pay vtts; you'll have to do a lot of your own work. However, it's also ridiculously powerful with customizable macros, so you can play the game how you want, not how other programmers want you to. Like all things on the internet, you're trading money and time; if you have more time than money, Maptools is the way to go.
Edit: On the note of Fog of War, Maptools has it built in, including the ability to have tokens automatically reveal fog of war based on line of sight.
Free, open source, and an amazing community of content creators. You can create your own campaign frameworks, or get them from other users who've already done all the scripting by hand. Obviously, it doesn't have all the content of the pay vtts; you'll have to do a lot of your own work. However, it's also ridiculously powerful with customizable macros, so you can play the game how you want, not how other programmers want you to. Like all things on the internet, you're trading money and time; if you have more time than money, Maptools is the way to go.
Edit: On the note of Fog of War, Maptools has it built in, including the ability to have tokens automatically reveal fog of war based on line of sight.
NotRussellCrowe
Explorer
Hello.
I don't believe that Fantasy Grounds is overly difficult to use, at least I didn't find it that way. The DM functions are more complex than the player functions but overall to run a game I do not think it takes much extra effort. Lots of people use Photoshop/GIMP to create their maps and I would say that Photoshop/GIMP are more complex than Fantasy Grounds.
Also if you're playing 5e then Fantasy Grounds has all the modules, in fact they are the only VTT that has everything Wizards has put out for 5e, and then some! They have the Player's Handbook, all the adventures, and I think they have some of the playtest adventures too.
As well, all the official 5e content is nearly half the price that Roll20 sells them for. So the one-time cost of a license for Fantasy Grounds is quickly gone when you factor in all the savings from buying modules. If you know you want all the modules you can save even more and buy them in one big bundle. Doing it this way will also give you a larger discount on new products when they come out.
Happy gaming!
I don't believe that Fantasy Grounds is overly difficult to use, at least I didn't find it that way. The DM functions are more complex than the player functions but overall to run a game I do not think it takes much extra effort. Lots of people use Photoshop/GIMP to create their maps and I would say that Photoshop/GIMP are more complex than Fantasy Grounds.
Also if you're playing 5e then Fantasy Grounds has all the modules, in fact they are the only VTT that has everything Wizards has put out for 5e, and then some! They have the Player's Handbook, all the adventures, and I think they have some of the playtest adventures too.
As well, all the official 5e content is nearly half the price that Roll20 sells them for. So the one-time cost of a license for Fantasy Grounds is quickly gone when you factor in all the savings from buying modules. If you know you want all the modules you can save even more and buy them in one big bundle. Doing it this way will also give you a larger discount on new products when they come out.
Happy gaming!
Dax Doomslayer
Adventurer
I agree with this sentiment. You can use as much or as little automation as you'd like with FG. I was up and running pretty quick but I did watch a couple of YouTube videos to help me along. The complexity comes with how much automation you want to use. I love the fact that a lot of the trivial stuff can be automatized and I found it worth it to me to use those functions. However, if you just run it like you would your table when you are face to face that works perfectly fine too. Like I said before, everyone has different criteria, likes and dislikes. I found that FG hit the mark for me and my group best when I did my comparisons. Any tool that gets more people playing is good either way!
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