astuertz
2022-02-03, 12:12 PM
My friends and I have been playing 5e on Roll20 for some time. I am the first member of my group to attempt to run a 3.5 game. The stark difference from a DM perspective is that 5e is heavily supported on Roll20, while 3.5 is supported mostly by the community (with an obvious heavy support from Diana P.).
Honestly, while it takes me much longer to prep my 3.5 material (monsters, spells, et cetera), I don't mind the difficult challenge. I get sucked into making macros for everything (since I used to do a lot of programming back in my day). That being said, manually creating character sheets for NPCs and monsters takes a good bit more effort than simply dragging and dropping from the Compendium when playing 5e.
For abilities, spells, attacks, and things I want to be able to go back and reference, I have a pretty standardized way of designing my macros. I think the longest process for me is customizing the spell macros to my liking, using the master list that was either designed by or heavily contributed to by Diana P. For one, I generally like taking out the Spell Check and Concentration Check part of the macro, and have instead relegated this to a separate macro. I generally like to make my macros useable by both PCs and NPCs, but this can be somewhat difficult since they use different attributess (for example, the PCs might us @{str} and the NPCs use @{npc_str}.
I did notice someone made a parser for SRD entries which I never got working (and many others couldn't either). I thought about trying to decipher and fix the original code, but since I'm not an expert programmer, I eventually concluded it would be just as much time to enter everything manually.
Either way, it is reassuring to think that once I have everything set up in one game, I can easily copy that game for later usage.
I'd also be more than happy to share some of my own advice on setting up macros on Roll20. For example, I eventually discovered that if you do a query ( ?{Query Text|Default value} ) and then use it again, it basically works like a variable. I would set up a master macro which contained these queries, and then for each monster, I would include a "call" macro which front-loaded these values. By front-loading the values, you can set the appropriate Default Value, which allows you to use the spell or ability quickly and easily by just hitting enter on each of the queries.
For things like Power Attack, I set up an Attribute called "PA" which queries the amount of power attack using the character sheet, factoring this into my attack macros where appropriate.
I also, likewise, have an attack and spell template that I use as a basis.
Lastly, I try to set up spells in a way that populate the appropriate DC, damage, duration, and so on using the queries. These could be copied onto a character sheet and altered to already contain the correct values, or use the queries to fill those values out using a call macro.
For those of you who play online, do you use Roll20 or something else? Are there any tools you use to help fascilitate the process?
A lot of people have also mentioned a lot of API scripts, but there are very few I actually use myself. I didn't really have much interest in using anything other than Group Initiative and a Calendar API. However, getting better at working with API scripts could potentially make the process faster. But again, given my programming skills, it often fills simpler just to stick to manual entry.
Honestly, while it takes me much longer to prep my 3.5 material (monsters, spells, et cetera), I don't mind the difficult challenge. I get sucked into making macros for everything (since I used to do a lot of programming back in my day). That being said, manually creating character sheets for NPCs and monsters takes a good bit more effort than simply dragging and dropping from the Compendium when playing 5e.
For abilities, spells, attacks, and things I want to be able to go back and reference, I have a pretty standardized way of designing my macros. I think the longest process for me is customizing the spell macros to my liking, using the master list that was either designed by or heavily contributed to by Diana P. For one, I generally like taking out the Spell Check and Concentration Check part of the macro, and have instead relegated this to a separate macro. I generally like to make my macros useable by both PCs and NPCs, but this can be somewhat difficult since they use different attributess (for example, the PCs might us @{str} and the NPCs use @{npc_str}.
I did notice someone made a parser for SRD entries which I never got working (and many others couldn't either). I thought about trying to decipher and fix the original code, but since I'm not an expert programmer, I eventually concluded it would be just as much time to enter everything manually.
Either way, it is reassuring to think that once I have everything set up in one game, I can easily copy that game for later usage.
I'd also be more than happy to share some of my own advice on setting up macros on Roll20. For example, I eventually discovered that if you do a query ( ?{Query Text|Default value} ) and then use it again, it basically works like a variable. I would set up a master macro which contained these queries, and then for each monster, I would include a "call" macro which front-loaded these values. By front-loading the values, you can set the appropriate Default Value, which allows you to use the spell or ability quickly and easily by just hitting enter on each of the queries.
For things like Power Attack, I set up an Attribute called "PA" which queries the amount of power attack using the character sheet, factoring this into my attack macros where appropriate.
I also, likewise, have an attack and spell template that I use as a basis.
Lastly, I try to set up spells in a way that populate the appropriate DC, damage, duration, and so on using the queries. These could be copied onto a character sheet and altered to already contain the correct values, or use the queries to fill those values out using a call macro.
For those of you who play online, do you use Roll20 or something else? Are there any tools you use to help fascilitate the process?
A lot of people have also mentioned a lot of API scripts, but there are very few I actually use myself. I didn't really have much interest in using anything other than Group Initiative and a Calendar API. However, getting better at working with API scripts could potentially make the process faster. But again, given my programming skills, it often fills simpler just to stick to manual entry.