My lot used to beat random encounters up! 
No, just kidding. 
Usually I just named the leader, who would have something useful to tell the party.
And I tried to think what professions the party might want to consult and had them ready too.
Maybe my plots were just too simple, as I could usually predict what the party would ask in advance. 
D&D has always been at least somewhat fiddly about movement, distance, and positioning – after all, it has, at its original roots, a miniatures wargame. But starting with 3E, it really went more strongly towards the need for using a battle grid and minis/tokens to clearly define the battlefield.
Hypothetically, one can play 5E (or any previous edition) without a battle grid, and the 5E Players’ Handbook even lists “using a grid” as an optional variant, but in my experience, playing D&D (or its variants) as “theater of the mind,” and not using a grid, leads to confusion and disagreement between the players and GM. The combat rules are just too reliant on precise distances and measurements.
We have a semi-regular group we do tabletop gaming with online via Roll20. The main GM has a Zoom account she uses to host chat to save on Roll20 bandwidth. If you turn off audio/video on Roll20, it typically fixes the connection issues. So Discord/Zoom/Teams/etc. are recommended for chat.
That’s exactly what our D&D group did; we use Discord for voice chat, and don’t usually turn on the video cameras.
It cuts down on the connection issues with Roll20, for sure, but we still run into a fair share of other technical glitches with Roll20, between the program’s finicky settings around map lighting and displaying for the GM versus the players, and the two aforementioned players with general technical challenges (one with lousy rural broadband, the other trying to run Roll20 on an older iPad).
Part of it too is for some reason in the late 90s the PNP turned from the medieval style to more modern/futuristic games like cyberpunk and Shadowrun
then when online services started it split between people who just wanted to RP in chatrooms like aols “red dragon inn” and the ones who didn’t played things like the online Neverwinter nights and later EverQuest and such
and then came 5th ed which helped make d&D popular again … Rumor has it that at some point they’re going to release new 5E dragonlance books which will be instering …
Oh yeah - we tried the dynamic lighting thing for about half an hour, and then went back to the simple Hide/Reveal Areas. Much simpler.
I agree - but you probably don’t need much more than a printed hex map or a diagram.
Here’s a crude effort I’m using in an Internet message board game:
Not when you’re dropping the house on your ally. (In this case, it was actually releasing a crane that held a ship full of water, so it plummeted 50’ to the ground; the ally was floating unconscious in the water, and the 50’ drop finished him off).
OK, now I’m fascinated by the real-world physics of this. What would happen to a person floating in a large tank of water that was dropped 50 feet?
When I was running an online covid campaign, I acquired some premium maps that came with a dynamic lighting layer already sorted. It was still fiddly from the DM perspective since you have to make sure all the player tokens are set up right, but the players thought it was cool as hell.
It definitely ratcheted up the tension of exploration, but the best thing about it was never having to adjudicate what a particular player could see. If you can see an enemy token, so can your character.
Still, never really cool enough for me to spend a bunch of time drawing my own dynamic lighting layers except for verrrry simple use cases.
This is covered in great detail on page 548 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Okay, not really. It’s one of those situations where you gotta make up rules on the fly. I didn’t know, either–but we all agreed that the poor saps inside would not be happy. I think I just applied normal falling damage.
Here’s a Reddit thread that addresses the question; they basically say it’s gonna be a shock wave/water hammer, and not be fun for anyone involved.
Clearly we need a revival of Mythbusters to test this out.
You can definitely store character sheets in Roll20 (and view them as the GM). I’ve used it for Starfinder and Pathfinder and have to assume 5e has significantly more support available by virtue of market share. Depending on the sheets, you might also be able to roll attacks off them, mark conditions to have the modifiers included in your rolls, etc. Again, that has to be easier with 5e’s advantage/disadvantage system than a bunch of fiddly -2 for this, +1 for that mods
My GMs play around with the dynamic lighting. It’s sorta cool but also sorta broken and annoying and I wouldn’t care much if they stopped but, hey, if they want to play with it then I’m not gonna suggest that they don’t.
We use Roll20s audio and I’m sure there’s a reason why we don’t default to Discord (we did one night when it was really flaky on Roll20) but, again, I just go with it. We don’t do video though via any means.
For a 5e game, maybe D&D Beyond’s client would work better since it’s designed for 5e from the ground up. I’ll also say that for all of Roll20’s obnoxiousness, it’s way better than Fantasy Grounds.
I played a few 5e one shots where the DM said “We’ll just use Theater of the Mind for this” and, every time, we wound up with minis or coins or bottle caps on the table to mark approximations just because so many spells/skills are location dependent. I haven’t played a true TotM game since 1e
I keep my character sheets in D&D Beyond, which has a great character creator, and can roll attacks (and spells) off them into Roll20 using the Beyond20 extension. It helps that we have digital licenses to all the books, though.
D&D Beyond has some tech issues when it comes to the character sheets, hopefully the buyout by Wizards will get this addressed.
I haven’t encountered any, at least not recently. What problems have you had?
Anything varied from the rules are hard to update/edit in. The font controls are very poor. I’m trying to think of the other issues, we only have 2 players that use D&D Beyond and they always have the most issues of everyone playing. I do think it is mostly UA stuff that causes the issues though.
I still make my characters & NPCs in Word. So any issues, at least they’re purely my fault.
That’s the exact opposite of my experience. I’ve never played any roleplaying game with minis and grids. Maps as handouts, sure, and dungeon maps , but not grids for combat.
I mean, what’s my job as DM, if not to keep all that in my head.
Only if you’re a stickler for that kind of thing.
I find that playing without a grid tends to lean more towards generic actions like “I hit whoever’s closest to me” rather than using tactical movement.
Describing the room/scene, acting as NPCs including dialogue, creating interesting stories and hooks, intelligently playing adversaries, etc etc
In my opinion, arguing who was in range of that Fireball or whether or not the rogue was in range to sneak attack is probably on the bottom tier of things you need your DM to be doing and if a map and some tokens can eliminate that and free up the DM for other things, so much the better.