Playing remotely - means & methods

[RedCloakLives!]

Our gaming group just restarted, and has gone remote. This is new to us.

We tried using zoom (some had used it at work), and various smart phones, computers, tablets. And one physical map in one location with a phone set up to aim at it, and the map was sent around to everyone ahead of time.

It worked OK for us; we did a small test combat. Looking back, I think the map was the weak point. Is there a good way to have a shared map on a computer screen, and people move their characters around on it?

What have others done; both in general, and for a map when used? What's worked well; what hasn't?

Thanks!

[Zhorn]

With restrictions on social gatherings in our area, the tabletop club I play D&D through has also shut down physical gatherings, forcing us to go remote too.

We're using a mix of discord and roll20 for the current game.
Discord for voice and text chat and general link sharing.
roll20 for battlemaps, character sheets and dice rolling.

all the bells and whistles aside, from just a simple maps and token medium, roll20 works fine. Fairly simple to upload map and token images, and the DM can assign permissions to who can move what tokens.

I much prefer a physical map and tokens, but this worked fine for our last session.
Also a huge dice-goblin, but the online rolling tool for roll20 is pretty intuitive, so serves its function well especially if you have players you can't trust to not fudge their rolls behind the camera.

[Ason]

Your big initial question to this problem is: do you still want a battle map or do you want to try theater of the mind?

If you want a battle map, the most popular solutions for providing one online are: Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and Tabletop Simulator. Of these three, Roll20 is probably the best option because its baseline features are free and offer basic DM and player tools, while a paid options merely add things like fog-of-war, extra tokens, on-site character sheet generators, and maps onto what you already have. However, if you do use Roll20, I would still encourage you to use Discord or Zoom for the voice/video aspects of your game, as Roll20's in-house voice/video chat has some issues. I cannot attest to the other two options, but they are popular alternatives.

Or you could just take this situation as an opportunity to try out theater of the mind D&D. It's tricky at first and you have to fudge on things like distance and flanking, but once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad. When I DM on Roll20 and am between paid subscriptions, I default to theater of the mind for most things and instead use Roll20 to provide regional maps, show campaign documents, manage dice rolls and character sheets, etc. Since my prep time is often limited, going theater of the mind for most of gameplay means I don't have to spend even more time digitally prepping a battlemap, which means I spend more of my limited time on other parts of my campaign. Theater of the mind can seem daunting at first, but there are some great YouTube videos out there that can introduce you to DMing that way.

[Altheus]

If you can handle theatre of the mind, Discord with a dice bot could be the way to go.

Everyone will need a mic or mobile to talk but it more or less works.

Differences are that you have to pay attention to peoples voices a lot more than you would around a table because that is the only feedback you will have about their mood. Also, recapping the state of everything after each turn helped people keep track of what's going on.