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Saturday, February 9, 2013

Tonight Will Be My First Attempt at Running an RPG Session Using Roll20 - Any Hints or Suggestions for the Newb?

Nearly 2 weeks ago, right after out last session of Rappan Arthuk and just before +Joshuha Owen announced the merger of Table Top Forge into Roll20, I had decided to give Roll20 a try. I really wanted to try out the map interface with the Fog of War feature, as redrawing my party's map week after week was getting - tedious.

Now I have 4 map pages set up with fog of war, a handful of handouts" prepped and even a macro or two prepared.

I fully expect a learning curve (and I'm excited to think about the types of sound effects I can mix into things down the line) and unforeseen difficulties to crop up tonight, as basically the whole group will be new to the interface

Any helpful hints, secrets, self made user guides or the like I should be looking for?

7 comments:

  1. I've run two sessions now with Roll20 through Google+ (you can also run it right there @ Roll20). When playing through Google+, it is a piece of cake. Now we were doing Chargen for Pendragon with just a map for the background and rolling dice, but it was bad at all. Three people, no lag. Good luck with it.

    If it goes well and you plan on doing something else through it, post about it! I'd love to get into one of your games. Otherwise I've got to track you down next time I'm in Spuyten Duyvil visiting the in-laws.

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    1. @John, I intend to run a Tunnels & Trolls session this coming Friday night - aiming to run T&T once a month or so using G+ / Roll20

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  3. One thing I do is copy and paste the creature details from a pdf into the gm notes section on tokens. This reduces look up time in game and an easy reference.

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  4. Know the difference between a / and a \. I frequently mess that up when trying to roll the dice. Most of my time spent swearing cause I keep doing it wrong.

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  5. My best advice is also very basic and simple: don't overprep. With all the media out there, it's very tempting to bring your game up to an early-video-game level of play experience. For my playstyle at least, doing so reduces the power of spoken descriptions, and ultimately takes away a lot of what makes TTRPGs great. YMMV, of course.

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    1. you are absolutely right, what I really need from a virtual table is a diceroller, a place to show drawings and maps (and I should buy a graphic tablet), and eventually to show picture of monsters/place, more is a different game IMO

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