First Impressions of Roll20

Here are my first impressions on using roll20. First I have to say that my preference is always to play in person. I like the human interaction and my DM style with props etc. is just far more suited to playing in person. The situation we find ourselves in does not make in person play possible right now and our only option to continue playing was to find some way to play online. At first, we considered playing over Skype but that uses up a good bit of bandwidth and posed some sound problems. We decided to try out roll20.com and overall I think it worked well for having to play online. My overall review is positive but I’ll go through what I did and did not like.


Pros


~ I can add portraits in to set the mood, something I didn’t do in person.


~ I can import my handmade maps after scanning them onto my computer.


~ The whisper feature is great for passing DM notes.


~ 3d dice roll for those who prefer a dice roller to actual dice. I prefer real dice but Hal prefers a dice roller.


~ I control who has control of what tokens on the board.


~ The “ping” feature lets you draw someone’s attention to a specific point on the map.


~ The drawing feature makes it easy to mark the area of area effect spells. It also allows players to plot out their movements Madden style before actually making moves.


~ You can choose to use video & voice, just voice, or just chat to communicate with other players. You can enable the squares for video and have small or large screens or you can just show the nameplates of players. You can also mute a player, which comes in handy because Tyr and I are actually in the same room. This way I hear his actual voice and not his voice with a delayed computer echo.


~ I control what page players are on and I can view another page while they are on the page I assign them to.


~ Now I haven’t used this feature yet, I’ll be using it when we play next, but in theory, it seems good. It’s called fog of war and it lets you hide parts of the map and reveal sections to the PCs as you play. I had to watch a tutorial on how to use it because it’s not obvious what you need to do to make it work.


~ If we choose to in the future we can look for an additional player through roll20.


~ My players had a great experience.


Cons


~ We used voice only and it kept dropping out. We’d have to wait for it to come back, which held up game play. We’re going to download Teamspeak and give that a try. Which I find inconvenient, it just makes one more window I have to have open on my computer.


~ It takes a lot more time to set up a quest/campaign in roll20than it does to set one up for table top play.


~ Handmade maps don’t match up with the roll20 grid. There are ways to work around this but I still find it annoying.

~ Large maps are hard to use on this platform. You really need a small map that fits into the dimensions viewable on the map screen without having to scroll.


~ This is only an issue for the DM. You need too many windows open at one time and in order to see my word document where my quest is typed out I have to cover the chat box during battles or the whole screen when reading text.


~ It really is not designed for my style of DMing. If you’ve watched Chris Perkins at PAX he generally has his PCs on one map for the whole session and that works perfect with roll20. I on the other hand can go through ten maps in one session and that can be kind of cumbersome on roll20.


~ This goes along with the last con. This was a point Tyr brought up. He has to reenter his HP on every map. Time consuming and annoying. Now, technically as the DM there is a way I could make their HP carry over from one map to the next but then every time they level up I’ve got to go in and redo their token and then if I have maps already made up I’ve got to go in, delete their current tokens on those pages, and replace their tokens on those pages. I’ve got too much to handle as a DM as it is without adding that to it.


Again I have to say, nothing beats DMing in person. If you find yourself in a situation like us then roll20 is a great option.