What programs do you use when playing on-line?

[almeidafreak]

Two monitors, Foundry VTT (best VTT ever) in one of them and PDFs / Excel Sheets on the other, doesn't get better than that.

 

[Scott Christian]

Discord for video/voice and memes
Roll20 for maps, minis, character sheets (keep inventory and notes on character sheets)

Been playing around but haven't attempted yet these two:

Let's Role · Where your stories come to life

Play any of your favourite TableTop RPGs directly in your browser, using pictures, pdfs, music, sfx and video.

lets-role.com

And backed this, so ready to try and test it out:

Role: A New Kind of Platform For The RPG Community

Discover new games from passionate creators, meet new friends, and adventure together. Anyone can play, everyone is welcome.

www.kickstarter.com

I get the feeling Role and Let's Role might be more friendly to homebrew games and games that involve cards, like one of ours does.

PS - Not knocking Roll20. It is good. Just not user friendly for everyone, especially GM's that like a lot of visuals. So we're looking to explore other areas. But Roll20 has been a godsend during this pandemic.

 

[Azzy]

Going to try Astral when Beyond20 works with it (next Beyond20 update)

Ooh... I can't wait until that happens. I took a look at Astral and liked what I've seen, but my group being invested with TTS, I haven't decided to use it. With a D&D Beyond integration, it's very tempting.

 

[billd91]

This info is for the Thursday night D&D game (we are currently alternating between a friend running his D&D campaign and me running Age of Worms updated for 5e):

We use Roll20 and Google Meet for the active online stuff. He just uses Google Meet, I use both.
Most of us use Hero Lab for our 5e characters.

Then for prep, I also use:
Word for writing things up and transcribing stat blocks for editing - something I've done even for face to face games
Excel for treasure generation and encounter building
GIMP to edit maps and tokens

 

[Zaukrie]

Oh, and dungeondraft to make maps and token stamp2 to make tokens.

I also use 2 monitors....and sometimes my iPad.

My youtube channel will have the shortest/easiest tutorial ever for tokenstamp2 soon, once I remember how to edit video (its been three months+)

 

[Blue]

All of them: Zoom for video/audio. Worth the subscription (just one needs it). Discord isn't bad but nothign seems to equal Zoom for multiple people speaking at once. For non-D&D games, that's often everything.

Google Draw: For some games, we throw up images of battlemaps and everyone has a colored circle icon they can move, sometimes married with an icon to make it more a personalized token. (Need to share the Edit link.) For others we use it for "crime boards" where we list all of the NPCs and factions and interconnections and relationships. At the least, it's a place to throw up images if there's nothing else.

Roll20: One of the games D&D games I'm in uses Roll20. I've been considering if I want to move over. The DM has more technical issues then just Google Draw, but ti also speeds things up when character sheets are updated and such.

Fantasy Grounds/MapTools: I haven't actually used either for a couple of years. Was in games on both. They were both okay, and have had plenty of time to advance since then.

 

[cbwjm]

Played last night and we used dndbeyond for our character sheets, zoom to talk and see each other, and roll20 to see what's happening in combat.

 

[Todd Roybark]

I've been using a combo of Zoom and Google Draw and it is working surprisingly well.
Zoom is stable even on a mobile phone, which opens up play space options.

Google Draw or Google Whiteboard are simple to use. You can drop your map in. Create some clouds for Fog of War concealment and pull back the clouds as the party explores.
It took a minute to make spell effect templates.
It feels pretty close to being in person on the Battlemat.

 

[delericho]

One game uses Zoom, the other uses Teams.

In both cases, I'll typically have a bunch of books and character sheets open in Acrobat, and possibly some other references in Word or whatever.

One of the games I host is run with work colleagues in a lunch hour. That blocks access to pretty much anything specifically designed for gaming - including this site. (It's also why electronic copies of the books in PDF, specifically, are really good for me, but most other formats are useless.) And having gotten into the habit of managing without, I've not bothered to try them for the other.