On the other hand, you generally don’t need Roll20 for simple social encounters. Even if they somehow bypass it, it’s better to be prepared. (This is especially true since your conception of the battlefield may be quite different than another player’s.) If you suspect your players are going to get into combat in a certain area, you should design that area and populate it with the necessary foes. Positioning, environmental obstacles, movement speed and weapon ranges are all vital, and it’s extremely hard to keep track of all this in your head. (You can, but it’s exhausting for both the players and the GM.)įirst off, you should use Roll20 for combat encounters. Just as you wouldn’t necessarily make a battle map and make your players measure their movement speed for every encounter in a game, you don’t need to play out an entire session in Roll20. Having spent a fair amount of time in Roll20 over the past few weeks, I’ve found that it can enhance a tabletop RPG -but it can also drag the experience down. If you find you don’t want the Roll20 voice chat, it’s easy enough to mute. Voice chat works well enough, although my groups still prefer to use Discord instead. I’ve never found video chat necessary, and it can eat up a lot of bandwidth. If you can do all of these, you’re at least 80% of the way there.įurthermore, Roll20 has built-in voice and video chat. Reveal the map as players encounter new territory. Program dice rolls for each character, unless you plan to roll in real life (and you trust your players to do so). Import assets into your art library for level features and character tokens. To give you the bare-bones version of what you’ll need to learn: Use the draw tool to design maps. These include an overview of the toolkit, a brief video on designing maps, and a long, comprehensive walkthrough of the entire Roll20 system. As such, some additional resources I’ve found useful are the Roll 20 Crash Course, as well as walkthrough videos from the Roll20 team.
Roll20 compendium trial#
Roll20 is a complicated program, and learning it requires a lot of trial and error, even with the long, complex tutorial. (If players can see the whole map from scratch, it obviously spoils a lot of the surprises they’d find while exploring.) Players don’t really need to go through the whole thing, but GMs should, particularly since part of the tutorial covers revealing parts of the map to players over time. The tutorial walks you through creating a map, adding character tokens, roll dice, program macros, add music to your game and so forth. While I can’t explain every feature of Roll20 (partially because there are a lot of features, and I haven’t explored them all yet), the built-in tutorial is a great place to start. (I am not knocking this idea, incidentally it saves a lot of work, and players are going to conjure up something elaborate in their imaginations, anyway.) You could also get artistic and deck out a map with gorgeous custom artwork, elaborate character models and complex level designs. If you just need to keep track of player location and combat distance, you could get by with a bunch of colored dots on featureless gray tiles.
Essentially, the program is a digital mapmaking tool, which lets you design areas on a grid, then move player “tokens” around them. Whether you’re a GM or a player, you’ll still need to understand Roll20’s basic controls.
It’s a pretty standard username/password/profile setup. If you do, you can dive right in and create an account. In any case, if you don’t have a group, you can use Roll20’s Join a Game feature. It’s basically a game of make-believe, but with rules and continuity. If it sounds complicated, try watching a session online, or playing in one yourself you’ll “get” how it works within a few minutes. The GM can buy licensed adventures from the RPG’s publisher, or create his or her own. You roll dice to resolve any encounter that’s in doubt, whether it’s fighting off a horde of goblins, or talking your way past a recalcitrant town guard. One of your friends acts as the Dungeon Master or Game Master (DM or GM), who guides the rest of the players through a story. You create a character who inhabits this fantasy world, such as a clever human wizard, a brave dwarven fighter or a cunning elven ranger. You and three to five of your friends pick a game - for example, Dungeons & Dragons. As discussed above, now is a great time to get involved, especially since they provide both entertainment and social interaction at a time when both are sorely needed.īriefly, a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) is sort of the halfway point between a board game and an improvisational theater group. Let’s take a step back, though, and assume that you’ve never tried a tabletop RPG before.
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