Covid and gaming

[furby076]

So my group (3 years now) play every 1-2 months in person. It's a typical indoors session and lasts about 8 or so hours. Given the situation with this pandemic, I am thinking virtual game.

What are some tools (preferrably free) that you folks use? Skype is great for calling via tablets/laptops, but what is available to use a square grid for the DM and/or players to move around figurines?

[CheddarChampion]

Lots of people consider "Roll20" good.
I have not tried it personally.

[Tawmis]

We started using DISCORD with some one-off characters that we rolled to see how it goes...
It works well, it has a DICE BOT you can configure...

But yes, I've heard Roll20 is great. I have an account (they're free) but have yet to use it.

But this was just brought to my attention earlier today - step by step how to use Roll20.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBwSIBMiBempsZu8xudBXCXf2Q37U0hy0

[Dork_Forge]

I've always gamed online, primarily using Roll20 and hangouts, more recently discord and Zoom for voice (depending on what game it is sometimes just rolling real dice on the honour system). If you'd be interested in Roll20, myself and my partner are running seminars to show people how to use the platform and answer any questions they might have so that irl groups can still flourish in light of the restrictions. We currently have 86 people, just let me know if you'd be interested. :)

[BurgerBeast]

I just recently moved to online play. Roll 20 and Discord was great. Don’t overcomplicate things (unless you want to). Just draw on the grid provided and move minis around.

If you want more complexity you could optionally:

a. Load in battle maps
b. Use fog of war
c. Pre-place baddies on maps
d. Write room notes on the “DM layer” so you can see them as you play
e. Track hp on screen

Again, you can do much more, but there’s no need.

[Galithar]

My group just used Roll20 for our session tonight. Aside from some technical issues not related to Roll20 it went very smoothly. There is built in audio and text chat as well as dice rollers. You can even set up Macros so that you can with 1 click roll things like initiative, attack rolls, or damage and it will display the roll as well as what the roll is for.

We had 2 people that rolled actual dice and just announced it and 4 used the built in rollers. I personally dislike digital rolling, because I want to feel and hear the dice roll, but it's what would could do while I am in a self-quarantine because I may have had 2nd hand contact (contact with someone that had contact with someone with a positive test)

[Zhorn]

I'm probably going to be in the same boat if I want to get into a game now. Previously had been using a local university's tabletop club to either get into games or recruit players for games I wanted to DM. Got an email two days before the next event on campus. First game of the year is a oneshot where you can meet folks ahead of the big spruik where DMs present their games to a mass crowd of players.
But as these things are often in the 100-200 people range, the uni cracked down on it HARD. No meet ups on campus, no room bookings, no organising face-to-face gatherings... No games for Zhorn :smallfrown:

I've always favoured the in-person style of games because I started D&D as a way to get AWAY from the computer and interact with real people (yes, roleplayers ARE real people too).
Plus I like to get crafty, and homemade dungeon tiles, tokens and terrain are not that useful online.

[Gryndle]

This Friday is our game night (we meet every two weeks), and it is business as usual for us. 2 of our members play via skype as they have moved to other states. the three of us that play in person are still planning to come to my house as normal. We have taken precautions, but were pretty low risk for exposure anyway. For example, I am disabled and don't really go out, my wife works in a secured office that is essential personnel only, and they started their precautions early. Similar situations with the other two guys.

I mean the running joke is that if there is any kind of disaster (zombie apocalypse), my house is the rally point anyway. Isolation being one reason among many

[Skylivedk]

I've used roll20 for my three online campaigns, but looking at the videos now, it seems Fantasy Grounds is currently better and I'd switch to that for a new campaign

[Ekzanimus]

I am using Roll20 for 6 years and it has almost everything you can need. There are voice and text chats, dicerollers, many tools for DMing, you can upload your own tokens and maps, align them to grid, fill with fog of war, play music for your players, etc. Also there are many prebuilt character sheets for different systems - D&D 5E obviously included - with built-in tools for one-click rolling attacks, damage, spellcasting and so on. There is only one thing that Roll20 does not have - a tool for rolling dice with your hands using physics and collisions. But Roll20 is also just plain free and playable just in your browser.
Fantasy Grounds is a very complex software that does a little more than Roll20 - for example, it allows you to roll your dice with collision detection - but it must be bought.

[Christew]

Roll20 is quite good. There is a pretty steep learning curve for many of the advanced features and a pretty hefty front end workload for the GM of you want cool maps, tokens, and fog of war, but if all you need is video chat, rolling mechanics, and a gridded white board to draw on you can be up and running with almost no effort.

Lean in to theater of the mind a bit more and prep boards for big set pieces is how I normally muddle through.

[Skylivedk]

What I liked about fantasy grounds is that it has targeting and automatically adds effects from gained saving throws etc.

As mentioned: I've used roll20 so far, but going by the intro video to Fantasy Grounds, it does seem like it automates a lot more of the book keeping

[tKUUNK]

yeah roll20 is nice for mapping.
DnDbeyond is nice for character sheets.
and choose your preferred voice chat software.

My friends tend to use some combination of the above.

And for homebrew map creation- if you NEED this- plenty of options. I've settled on DungeonFog.com which I consider worth paying for. It's low cost and easy, and works fine with Roll20.

Roll20 takes some learning, so I highly recommend a test-run (get a friend to log on as a player and help you) before your first actual session, to work out any kinks before you start gaming with it.

Game now, while people are governed by fear and everything is on lock-down! As others have said, "Gamers have been preparing for this moment for years"!

[Segev]

Tabletop Simulator isn't free, but is a good physics simulator for tabletop gaming. It's on Steam.

Skype works well enough for the RPG I play remotely. If you need to, you can set up the board at your place and point your camera at it. They'll want to see it more than you, anyway. No offence to you, of course.

[Gryndle]

Tabletop Simulator isn't free, but is a good physics simulator for tabletop gaming. It's on Steam.

Skype works well enough for the RPG I play remotely. If you need to, you can set up the board at your place and point your camera at it. They'll want to see it more than you, anyway. No offence to you, of course.

that's exactly what we do for our remote players and it works pretty well.

[SpawnOfMorbo]

Lots of people consider "Roll20" good.
I have not tried it personally.

Roll 20 is good, but I stopped with the site due to the scandal revolving around squashing any negative comments and general bad behavior and the data breach didn't help.

I don't touch roll 20 anymore, though sometimes I need to quote a spell and that's the first site on a Google search, though I try to used 5esrd and 5thsrd to copy text from the srd.

Discord and other like services does just as well as roll20 for 5e.

[Ason]

As everyone else is saying, Roll20 is great. It does take extra work from the GM if you want to get your maps perfect and whatnot, and everybody needs to take some time to figure out the character sheet mechanics. But it's definitely workable.

What I've done with my groups is use Roll20 + theater of the mind. Roll20's character sheets let me handle the mechanics easy (once people are used to it, it's actually quite easy: you just click the thing on your character sheet you want to do/roll). But I'll usually just leave up a world map or city map on the screen and run dungeon-crawling in theater of the mind. That way I don't have as much prep time as a DM, and since I only use the free version of Roll20, I'd be missing some of the cooler map features anyways. Is it pretty? Not really, but when my group can't meet in person, it gets the job done without making learn Roll20 mechanics the focus of my prep time instead of prepping the actual story we'll be exploring.