Best Online Real Time TTRPG Set Up (for hero)?

[Deremir]

With the spring semester coming to the close I am looking for a way for my hero system group to continue playing over the summer with proper sessions rather than play by post. What tools does the playground recommend for this? Best way for everyone to communicate? best way to display the game map?

[Grod_The_Giant]

Roll20 is good if you want to use a battlemap. It's got a bunch of fancy features, but I basically just scribbed maps on the fly using the MS Paint-type interface and it worked well enough. I remember the video chat being kind of wonky, though.

If you don't need super-detailed maps, Discord is probably the best setup I've been using lately. It's been generally reliable connection-wise, it lets you jump to other channels and send private messages all in the same platform, and the persistent chatlog is nice. You can open up a map in whatever image software you like and copy-paste it into the chat to send the image, which works well enough if positioning isn't super-important.

I've also used Google Hangouts with the DM using Share Screens to show the map, but I kind of like Discord better.

[Gnoman]

A good free virtual tabletop is Maptool. Fantasy Grounds is an excellent one, but the GM has to either pay a subscription charge or buy an expensive license.