Not Dungoens & Dragons Online but a PnP D&D 5e game that I can play with friends and family online.
Is there a real easy dummy proof site that will do the trick?
On a related note,
I have seen these “educational” D&D campaigns being advertised online but they are always full.
The campaigns promise historical content, math, reading, etc. Not sure if they really deliver but folks are willing to give it a try to pry their kids away from things like shellshock eggshooter games.
I have zero experience, but I think there are some intro videos about roll20
Brian
Stranger
Any technology that allows communication can be used to play D&D. My group’s most recent session was over Zoom teleconferencing software, which worked reasonably well (though we had to be on the honor system for die rolls). Although some programs have built-in support for die rolls, maps, etc., it’s not actually necessary. On of my friends who’s been playing since the Stone Ages has even played over the phone.
20 years ago, I was in a group which played D&D on AOL Instant Messenger. One nice benefit of that was that AIM had a built-in dice-roller utility. We didn’t have maps, but it was rarely an issue.
What Chronos said; basically for your small group you can use any mailing list, bulletin board, forum, or instant messenger that allows for both announcements broadcast to the entire party and for private chats between the dungeon master and a player or among smaller groups of players (for when the party is split up).
I strongly recommend roll20 as it is web-based, no installation, allows native voice chat, lots of visual tools and I’m very pleased with the free account, as I have not upgraded to the premium.
I know about roll20 but it seemed really complicated
I know about roll20 but it seemed really complicated
I played my first adventure over Roll20 last Wednesday (with audio provided by Discord on our phones). It was my usual group - the same 2 guys I’ve been playing D&D with for 30 years - continuing the adventure we started before the virus. It went great. I was skeptical at first, but after a few minutes it felt like a regular game, only with less math.
And yes, Roll20 *is *complicated. “Fortunately” for us, our DM has just been laid off, is single and is childless, which means that he had nothing better to do than to spend a couple of days figuring out how it works, before giving the rest of us a crash course on game night. It’s actually a great system when someone else is doing the heavy lifting.
For what it’s worth, professional table top game designer Robin Laws recommends basically whatever platform you already know.
If you want something that approximates the table-top grid & minis approach, you’re pretty much stuck with the more complex platforms Stranger on a Train listed. They work pretty well and aren’t too onerous for players iff the DM is willing and able to put in the time to learn the platform and do the digital gruntwork of setting stuff up. They also have pre-made adventure modules and add-ons for purchase that do a lot of the work for the DM, but there’s still a fairly steep learning curve when you’re first starting out.
For a “theater of the mind” approach, though, you really don’t need anything more than a bog-standard conferencing or chat app. Most of them have dice-roller functions, because nerds.
Wizards of the Coast has all the Basic rules available for free to anyone. You can find them here.
I think this is good advice, especially for anyone who is looking at trying to get started playing online, and has not done so previously. My online group (which has been pretty much defunct for a couple of years now) used MapTools for years, and Roll20 for a while, too, and while Roll20 is the less complex of the two, neither of them are terribly user-friendly, especially for new users. Both platforms really do need at least one player (preferably the GM) who knows the platform well, and can set things up and trouble-shoot. Even once we all got familiar with the platform, there was still always, IMO, too much of each session which had to be devoted to dealing with technical and connectivity issues.
A friend of mine is in a 5D D&D group, which tried to use Roll20 for the first time last week; he sent me a note, asking me what my group used, as their first foray with Roll20 was extremely frustrating and confusing.
If you’re running a published adventure, I highly recommend Fantasy Grounds. I just ran my first session with it yesterday, and was really impressed. But I’m not doing a homebrew campaign - I’m running Strange Aeons for the Pathfinder system, and you can buy the entire campaign as a module for Fantasy Grounds. They’ve got all the monsters in there, fully stated and set up to work properly with their system, all the maps, monster tokens. You can even click on boxed text and have it appear in a chat window! It’s really slick, and most importantly, vastly reduces how much time you need to spend learning the software. I just needed to learn how to work the map, and, by extension, the initiative tracker, since those things are tied together in FG. Everything else we could do with paper character sheets and a Discord channel. If I’d had to learn how to import and set up all my own content, that would have been a significantly steeper learning curve.
My gaming group played a virtual game of Ticket to Ride on Saturday with Tabletop Simulator. It worked pretty well, has a dice rolling utility, and it allows you to easily set up miniatures on a game surface. We figured Tabletop Simulator would work well enough for a DnD campaign, and we plan to try that next. We just left our Google Hangouts session running in the background to provide audio. I’m not sure if Tabletop Simulator has an audio function built in but likely it does. Nearly everything on Steam does, from what I can tell. It’s $20 per license (or four for $60).
I looked into Roll20 which seems wonderfully featured but so complicated that we would all spend hours learning how to use it rather than actually playing. No thanks.
Side note: We won’t be using playing Ticket to Ride or any of the other games in the “Workshop” any more. It seems those are all just ripoffs of people’s copyrighted content. We want game creators to get paid so they make more great games. We let Ticket to Ride slide since every person in the game already owned a copy and we couldn’t meet in person due to the apocalypse.
I’m planning to use roll20 for two different groups on the same adventure: a group of 11yo kids (including my daughter), and a group of adults. Yeah, it’s really complicated, but I’ve done a lot of the setup work for the kids, and hope that with a 20-30 minute tutorial I can get them going. For the adults, I’m hoping they can figure out how to set up a character, and we can puzzle the rest out from there. It looks to have a lot of features that I don’t every really need to use. With the 5e character sheets and all the macros built into them, I think a lot of that stuff will be covered.
Here’s something took us forever to figure out: if you want the initiative order table to work, click on your character on the map, and *then *go to your character sheet and press Initiative.
We’ve been using Roll20 for our home game for a couple years now, since my daughter went off to college and had to play remotely.
I wouldn’t describe Roll20 as complicated. I would describe it as complex.
It’s like Excel. Sure you can write a full application on top of Excel which fetches data from different sources and has a custom UI on top with workflows… Or you can type in 5 numbers and add them together at the bottom.
Roll20 in its most basic form you can, for free, put player tokens and monster tokens on an empty grid, give them names, and move them around. You don’t need to use more of the features than that… but if you want more they are there.
Now of course me being a geek I have custom maps with walls and dynamic lighting so the players only see what their characters’ torches illuminate, macros for dealing with naming and displaying monsters, animated spells, and the players and DM just need to click on the attack, spell, whatever on their character sheet to take that action. Once you learn to do all this stuff it’s really neat… but you don’t need any of this.
Over the last two weeks 3 of my game store games have moved to Roll20 and I’ve helped them get set up. The first day it was a little bumpy but after 4 or 5 sessions I think there’ll definitely be stuff we all miss if we move back to in person games.
One thing that did ease the transition. Most of the players I knew were already using DnDBeyond to handle their character sheets, some of them even bringing tables or laptops into the store to access them online. There’s a really well done chrome/firefox plugin called Beyond20 that lets you use your DnDBeyond character sheet to make all your rolls in a Roll20 game without having to set up your character sheet in Roll20. I think about 2/3rds of the players are using that now.
I thought that was pretty extreme, until I realized what was missing :).
So far, I’ve set up my game with some maps, some tokens, and some character sheets. I’ve added some soundracks from the jukebox, and I plan to add some stat blocks to monster descriptions. I figure we’ll do most of the rolling from the sheets, but if it’s confusing, folks can roll real dice.
All right, I’ve run two sessions through roll20 now.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with it. There’s a fair amount of setup, and it’s not super user-friendly, but for a free product it’s very impressive.
The basic 5e rules are very well-incorporated. You can pull up a compendium and add a spell to a character sheet by dragging it onto the character. You can create a new character using the basic rules just by going through their generator (“charactermancer”). It’s nowhere near as spiffy as the D&D Beyond generator is, but it’s workable enough. I think you can add the books to your compendium, but that costs money.
Some stuff is not at all obvious, though. The GM can add a whole bunch of pages to the adventure, with underlying pictures or maps. For example, I had a town map that I put up when players were generating characters, and an image of a storm-tossed ship during the intro scenario, and then a couple of grid maps for when they were exploring a ruin. As GM there’s a tab that I can use to put player eyes on a new page, which is great. But the character tokens don’t transfer. As far as I can tell, I have to create a new token for each PC every time they go to a new map, and then I have to link that token to the correct character file. If there’s an easier way to do it, I haven’t found it.
And I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out how to do things that seem relatively simple, like allowing players to show their character sheets to one another.
The learning curve is pretty steep. But I kinda like learning new systems like this, so I don’t mind too too much.