EPT
Today’s Topic: Roll20
I am an avid gamer. My gaming is largely of the video variety, but in the last year and a half or so I’ve become a frequent player of tabletop RPGs. It was back then when my friends and I started playing our homebrew Pokemon tabletop, affectionately referred to as FLC (for “Full Life Consequences” because nothing is more real than Pokemon). Our campaigns were a bit rough at first, but our characters quickly found themselves embroiled in struggles and trials that were even more fun than we imagined when we first conceived of the game. At the end of the first campaign, we all craved more, so we started planning further campaigns, all overseen by different gamemasters. Now that our party has completed two campaigns, it’s finally my turn to take up the mantle of GM. There’s only one problem: I recently moved somewhere far away from the other players. We suddenly had a dilemma: how could we continue a tabletop game with a party in Massachusetts and a GM in Missouri?
Various ideas crossed my mind, but I didn’t find the perfect solution until I encountered Roll20.net. Roll20 was first mentioned to me when members of a forum I frequent also wanted to participate in a group tabletop. Obviously, since we were all over the world, an actual tabletop would be impossible, and one person mentioned Roll20 as a possible way to do so online. Intrigued by this suggestion and still seeking a comfortable way to enjoy FLC with my pals, I jumped on the Roll20 website to see exactly what it offered. THEN IT BLEW MY FUCKING MIND.
Roll20 is nothing less than the perfect application for playing an online tabletop RPG. Sure, it’ll never be a replacement for gathering around a table in person with real dice, but it approximates the experience far better than I could have hoped. The Roll20 story is of the genre from which the best technologies arise: a group of friends want to do something but can’t due to technological limitations, then decide to overcome those limitations themselves. Only these endeavors receive the devotion and expertise that inevitably create the best products in existence. It’s obvious that Roll20 was made by people who love playing tabletop RPGs and needed to find a way to keep playing with each other at all costs. What they accomplished to reach that goal is absolutely extraordinary.
The biggest problem for online tabletop gaming is the distance between its players. Playing an RPG online requires everyone involved to digitally “be in the same room” and interact with objects essential to the campaign’s gameplay. An obvious solution for this issue is to use a combination of group video chat and a screen sharing mechanism. While using those things on their own is simple enough, combining them can be tricky. Plus, many online voice/video chat services (such as the ubiquitous Skype) charge money for group video chats, and no one wants to pay extra to game with their friends (at least, not for that part). Roll20 addresses this technological shortcoming with a universally visible “tabletop” and a well-organized group video chat implementation, both of which are in-browser. As straightforward as this sounds it’s absolutely incredible this application was both created and remains freely available. Seeing the UI for the first time made me positively giddy and showed me that the experiences I wanted to create for my players were possible even from afar. With this first step out of the way, Roll20 still needed to provide the ability to create the same worlds online that you’d create in person.
Roll20′s world creation tools are nothing short of miraculous. Normally, creating a realistic world map with tokens useful for gameplay and a compelling fantasy environment is either massively time-consuming or extremely expensive (tiny figurines cost a stupid amount for example). Roll20, however, provides a wealth of free art assets that can be used as player/character tokens, background images/maps, or portraits. While you still have the pay for the best of the best (as created by Roll20 contributors), there’s more than enough in the free category for you to develop a massive and jaw-dropping campaign. Additionally, assets can be loaded directly from a Google image search or your own PC, though they may not be optimized for the Roll20 graphical environment. Once you’ve created your characters and map, you can further edit the playing field with things like fog of war (so freaking useful), GM-exclusive text, and other useful doodles.
Finally, Roll20 makes it simple to play in any world you’ve created for your players with its wealth of simple and accessible gameplay options. Foremost among those is the ability to roll any amount of dice at any time with the click of a button or a short series of keystrokes. This makes combat faster than in an in-person session and far simplifies systems that require tons of dice rolling (such as FLC itself or another of my favorite games, Exalted). The “Turn Order” window provides a simple UI for all participants to remember which combatant is taking the next action in battle (an easy thing to forget if turns and rounds run long). Character and enemy tokens are highly customizable, allowing GMs to show health, auras, magic, or any other relevant information directly on the screen. Notes can be passed, customized cards can be drawn, range arrows can be checked, and much much much more. Roll20′s is a beautiful system, fully optimized for many standard tabletops (such as D&D or Pathfinder) but versatile enough to be perfect for homebrew creations.
The best thing about Roll20 is that I find myself craving more opportunities to use it. People with whom I wished I could play are suddenly available and scenarios that I wanted to create are no longer just pipe dreams but tasks I can accomplish with ease. And there are tons of features of Roll20 I haven’t even explored yet. I don’t know about half the useful tools they have for standard tabletop games, nor have I availed myself of the Player Finder to invite strangers from the tabletop-playing community into worlds of my own creation (or vice versa). Roll20 has already given me so much enjoyment and excitement, yet I know there’s only more ahead as I delve deeper into its features. Not that I’ll ever catch up considering the iterative upgrades that its incredible creators provide. With so much to offer tabletop-loving gamers, it’s no small wonder that Roll20.net is the best fucking thing ever.
You can find this post and quite a few more (especially ones where I fanboy about stuff) on the N3rd Dimension.
you wrote so much praise about it but didnt link it once :p
