Roll20, at my tabletop

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Raleel

The Lemon LeCroix of Mythras
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so, through a unique set of events (host’s 11 year old son is filling in for a player and hears us mention a projector around the time of the host’s birthday and host’s spouse texts me about it while I’m literally in wilderness on a hike to ask for projector advice while at Best Buy ), our gaming location will now have a projector. This is great for us. We have a spare Apple TV, so we can project all kinds of stuff, as well as a chrome cast for the poor souls without Apple.

The question is - how much do I want Roll20 at my game? I expect that we will be able to do a GM screen and a player screen, and if we really wanted to everyone could have their own.

I love maps. I love terrain. I love minis. I don’t really care if it’s on a projector or not (I have plenty of physical stuff but of course a 3d printer is on my list after I make sure the spouse gets a washer and dryer)). We’ll be doing classic Fantasy I expect, and a Pirate game (yar, all ye take 50 more points in sailor, yarrr, and ye get ye some firearms, yarrr). Do I want to to pay? Is it worth it? I can see dynamic lighting, and I could use that effectively (fuck your I will creep the shit out of you, players, you will be so paranoid you will be stabbing each other), but not sure about the next tier.

Btw, end result was don’t buy at Best Buy, give him permission to buy a projector, let him pick, and he’s also looking at remote controlled color changing lights so we can Red alert as is needed. Also a ceiling mount and a screen and I probably should buy some chocolate for the spouse.
 
Dynamic lighting is beyond my personal can't-be-bothered line. I've used MapTool on projectors (or old monitors on the table) for regular maps, and that wen't pretty well, but with every application I've seen (Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, MapTool etc.), adding lighting information to the setup is way too much effort for poor little me.
 
Yea, I’ve done it before, and it is fun, and it is also time consuming.
 
Yea, I’ve done it before, and it is fun, and it is also time consuming.
That is why I don't use these kind of interfaces. They add a lot of prep time. They also inhibit my ability to improvise as they depend on maps being prepared in detail and all NPCs being completely statted out. They seem to slow play a little too.

Still, a friend of mine runs everything with Fantasy Grounds, and I always have a good time as a player. It's more a case of them not suiting my GM style than anything else. My friend tends to run tightly focused adventures that run for about a month about once a year or so. He has Fantasy Grounds prepped and ready to go for the adventure. I tend more towards sprawling campaigns on a weekly to bi-weekly basis. They would be an enormous hassle to translate to a computer interface.

I guess my point is that they are good, but be sure they will suit the kind of campaign you want to run and be sure you can keep up with the needed prep. Since you are already a dedicated maps, models and minis person, you will probably be fine.
 
I've got a rather light MapTool setup, and it actually saves me some time from preparing maps myself. I can quickly download something or sketch it, way faster than grabbing my battlemat during play and then drawing some walls and caves. I don't stat NPCs, although I use some convenient buttons to record damage (focus NPC icon, press +1/+5 a few times) or assign weapons ("Which guards had maces again?").

Up to that level, it saves me some prep time, beyond that we're approaching "painting minis" territory. Which also brings me quite close to "I need to write a better/faster/web-based version of that", which only leads to SAN loss and Perl scripts.

These days, I just grab high resolution images or copy stuff from adventure PDFs, then overlay my own hex grids (if using GURPS), but in the past I've had a lot of fun with simple tools like GridMapper or ANAMap.
 
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