My first attempt at online DMing!

[Gerrtt]

Hey everyone! I'm super jazzed because today I ran my first session of an online game with friends from 3 different states. We're using Roll20 and we had a lot of fun.

I'm wondering if anyone else uses it and has any ideas for streamlining it and making things run as smoothly as possible.

[Kudaku]

Hi there, welcome to the fold :)

Tips...

If you connect the tokens to characters in the journal and add attributes to their character sheets you can have HP tracked consistently across different pages.

Adding to that, I usually have a "backup page" where I have several copies of the party tokens prepared ahead of time with different settings (such as vision range for day/night/underground) pre-saved. On another page I save spell templates so I can copy/paste them into the game whenever someone drops a fireball etc.

You can write dice rolls in short form by adding brackets to the command, this'll shorten the result so it takes up less space in the chat box.

A long form (using /roll D20+7 Perception) will look something like this:
Game Master (GM): rolling d20+7 Perception
(8)+7
= 15

A short form using brackets ( [[d20+7]] Perception will look like this:
15 Perception

This is especially useful when you roll many rolls at once (such as a full attack/damage macro with multiple attacks, or when you roll perception checks for the entire party at once). If you need to see the full spread of roll(s) hover over the number result.

/gmroll will roll results as normal but only the player using it and the GM will see the result. Helpful for when one of your players is being sneaky.

The biggest issue I had with Roll20 when starting out was making maps fit the Roll20 grid - there are several guides on how to make this work more fluently on the Roll20 forum, which also has lots of other useful advice.

I think that's about all I can think of right now, let me know if there's anything that you want to know more about :smallsmile:

[Scumbaggery]

Be wary of the draw feature. My players would draw things both amusing and disturbing whenever we took a 5 minute break.

Including, but not limited to:

1. Classic Wolverine
2. Spider-man
3. Morrigan spamming Soul Fists
4. Flying Genitalia
5. A bear with chainsaw hands armwrestling an octopus made out of genitalia

[old school man]

I have as of yet to try this but I wish you well and a long good and happy campaign.:smallsmile:




John