I recently retired and started up on Roll20 to get back into RPGs after 40 ish years.
It works better than you think…and worse. The worse is that many of the people that contact you are SO DAMNED FLIGHTY! Don’t show up. Don’t respond for weeks then get upset when you are a bit cool to their 'enthusiasm etc. The flightyness is very very bad. However, if you stick with it you get invites to established Discord communities that are more stable - like OSR which stands for ‘Old School Revival’. SO, don’t get discouraged right away and keep pecking at it.
The huge advantage of today over the dark ages of the 70s-80s is that if you make something for people to play you can really sink your teeth into it because it won’t just be used once with your friends but can be used again and again…and modified to work for something else again and again. It is really motivating when you are creating something.
Other bad news is that, as of 2021…it is ALL D&D 5e ALL the time. While there is interest in non D&D 5e is is like maybe 10% of the volume. However, those 10% seem to be less flighty because they know it is all D&D 5e all the time…
Yes, this. Since I am old I also tend to be less tech savy than most so sometimes I am the problem.
As for logistics…
PRESCREEN YOUR PEOPLE! My first attempt was a disaster because I took the first people interested. TALK to your potentials before allowing them into your adventure. In addition, if someone doesn’t seem to gel with the others, be much more proactive in removing them than you would in person.
Don’t use as many as you would in person. 4-6 in person worked great. Online…I have found 3 works best…maybe 4 if some of the 4 know each other already.
You have to tone down the ‘sophistication’ of your adventures. I could get on my Old-Geezer soap box and rail about youngsters being dumber etc…but I think it is just that they get distracted…they play the game but have their phones on and play phone games…or they watch something else while playing. or something. In effect, yes, your PCs will be significantly more stupid than what you are used to (if you are old)…but it could just be that the golden age of 70s-80s…we really were ruthless/hard on the PCs.
People are much more into the story than the combat than I was used to. back in the day, it was a dice fest and WE LOVED IT. Story was great…but combat was what we lived for. Yes, there was some ‘role play’ but, in general, people played as if it were them in the setting (and we loved it!). Today there is much more serious roleplay…and if, like me, you WILL kill PCs and consider the threat of real death important…losing a character you spend much time building a story around well…it hits them much harder than just shrugging it off and rolling up a new one. {cue ‘damn sensitive youngster snowflakes’ }
For example, I am very much a world-building and story telling DM. In the last campaign I had a woman (late 20s) say that I was an interesting DM and one of the better ones she’s had…but said she grew frustrated at all the combat ‘getting in the way’ of discovering the story
Also, time. Don’t do long sessions. Maybe when the group/DM get to know each other better. Seriously…I have found 2 hour sessions works best…especially when you are getting to know each other.
Also…short campaigns. Try a campaign designed to last about 3 months playing once per week for 2-3 hours. If you like them and they like you…repeat.
The idea of a pickup game of D&D, with people who meet each other by virtue of coming to the game, is alien to me, whether in person or online. I’ve always played in groups where I already knew at least someone, precisely because I knew someone. But maybe that’s just my introverted nature.
Going by your previous post, it sounds like you might also have dropped out of the hobby about the time your friends started having kids. Kids are the number one killer of regularly scheduled D&D games.
You don’t need a webcam, but you do need a microphone. I have a headset that I bought years ago so I could listen to music/videos or play video games without disturbing other people. Unfortunately they’re not that cheap.
I use Roll20, which is free(mium). It’s fine. Third parties develop character sheets and the like. I found the 5e character sheets to be very good. The less popular games, such as 4e and Mutants & Masterminds, have worse sheets
There’s a steep learning curve for the GM. The tactical game works pretty well, if the GM uploads appropriate maps and tokens.
When I played/ran Adventure League, this was fairly common (and I didn’t know anyone when I first responded to a MeetUp listing and started 5e). As time went on, I’d know people at the event but even then often had a table of strangers. I rather enjoyed it but then I somehow dodged all the horror story AL people you read about. Was great for networking and eventually finding people to join/run full “real” campaigns with.
It helped that AL games were one shots and 2-3 hours long so if the people weren’t your style, you didn’t have a lasting obligation to continue playing with them.
Thanks so much for all the replies and advice everyone!
I don’t plan on GMing online, only playing, so that should make things easier. I already DM mini-adventures over the phone with my friend. So that scratches that itch (more or less).
But I would like to learn how to play online and hopefully find a great DM and a group that I fit with. I realize it may take some time and travails.
Because I am not familiar with 5th edition D&D, I bought a player’s handbook and I am (slowly) reading it (in the bathroom lol).
I also bought a microphone to run through my USB interface -that I use for recording.
I will download Discord and figure that out. I am guessing that they have some channels to join to help newbs learn and troubleshoot it.
Once all of the above happens, I will go to various sites and start looking for a group. If you have a suggestion for such a site, I am all ears.
As far as learning a virtual table top interface, I think I will wait until I find out what the DM is using. There are so many options out there. There is no use trying to learn all of them. Owlbear Rodeo sounds the easiest and coolest to me, though.
Honestly, I would much prefer a theater of the mind game over mini-maps, tokens and battlemaps but I realize that many 5th edition groups use them.
The problem is, the developers said that they designed 5th edition to be theater-of-the-mind, but the way they actually designed it makes battlemaps nearly essential. Way too many abilities either depend on or alter precise positioning.
You can run a TOTM game via straight Discord. Just get a dice rolling bot and post maps of the rooms as pictures so people know the general layout. When looking for a group, try looking for one that just runs on Discord.
There’s an LFG (Looking for Group) subreddit for people looking for games. I’ve never used it personally and, since it’s the internet, I’m sure it’s some degree of a dumpster fire but it’s also probably the largest resource for trying to find an online game. I believe Roll20 has its own LFG forum/function as well.
I played an asynchronous game over Discord (in text) using Roll20. I did not find the tech burden very high, but I was already using Discord for other stuff. It went great until the DM got busy and stopped updating the game.
I would totally play in real time over Discord, either sound-only or with video.
Oh, man. I normally use battlemaps, but I couldn’t figure out how to stage “Characters chase a giant boar down a steep moraine while giants up top throw rocks at them and cause an avalanche and the characters try to reach the bottom to save the valley’s village” on any battlemap I could find. So I just grabbed a cool picture of an avalanche and told the players to imagine themselves on that slope and we would do theater of the mind.
It was excruciating.
Three of the players got it and asked smart questions (“Can I surf downslope to get closer to the boar? Is there a tree sticking out I can grab onto? How far away are the giants now?”) and acted accordingly. One player sort of got it and took suggestions.
But one player, holy Jesus. “Wait. I don’t understand. I don’t see my character on the map.”
“He’s not on the map. Just imagine you’re on the slope, and the boar is about fifty feet downslope from you.”
“But where am I on the map?”
“So, this isn’t a map. It’s just a picture to give you a sense of what the mountain looks like. Imagine you’re in the midst of this cloud of dust.”
“But where is the map?”
“Again, there’s no map. We’re trying this combat without a map. Imagine yourself there. What do you do?”
“…I don’t understand.”
I don’t remember how we ever made it through that combat, but what I’d hoped would be a thrilling chase/rescue/combat sequence in a dynamic battlefield was just painful.
Stuff like that happened to me almost every time I thought I was being clever on Roll20. I never learned to just keep the maps to dungeons and roadside ambushes.
To be honest, I tend to tune out a bit during sequences where the DM describes a trap/puzzle and the players are supposed to guess what the solution is. So I’d probably wait for other people to shout out suggestions and then if one sounds like it’s successful I’d say “I do the same thing”.
I’ve had similar experiences on battlemaps on Roll20. And in person.
In the current game I’m in on Roll20, we were in a dungeon, and Player A’s character climbed up a shaft, and the GM revealed a different section of the map and moved his token there. He got into a fight that went on for a couple of rounds while the rest of us were still trying to ascend the shaft, and it badly confused Player B, who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see Player A’s token - she actually could see it, on the other section of map, but she just didn’t seem to be able to wrap her head around the idea that Player A’s character was on a different level of the dungeon. It took a few minutes of discussion to get her to understand what happened, and I’m honestly not sure that she actually does, even now. She also constantly loses track of who is where, and which token is which, despite them having labels.
During an in-person game session, this same player had an episode of confusion that’s become kind of a running joke in our group. We were using minis on a battlemat. In one encounter, they were fighting animated hands. I told them, “I don’t have minis for all the hands, and they’re swarming all over all of you anyway. You each have four animated hands in your mini’s space, attacking you.” The other players had no problem, other than occasionally losing count of how many hands they had killed and how many were left in their space, but Player B just went through the entire encounter confused, and unable to understand what was going on, despite everyone at the table repeatedly trying to explain it to her.
Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great person, and generally a really fun person to game with. She loves roleplaying and does a great job boosting the fun of everyone around her. But she does seem to have a real issue with envisioning spatial relationships and tactical positioning, and that can get kind of frustrating from time to time.
I can be the same way as a player. I’m fine with tactical positioning in combat, but I don’t do well parsing spatial descriptions of things. In any situation where we’ve obliged the DM to give us a broad overview of a space (through scouting or magic or whatever), I just go ahead and zone out completely. If I don’t have a visual representation, I’m sunk.
I’m also really bad at navigating in the car based on verbal directions. GPS was a real life changer for me.
On the one hand, I get it. On the other hand, when you’re playing a fighter who can cast firebolt, it’s not too hard to say, “Whatever–can I reach the boar and attack it? If not, I’ll cast a firebolt at it.”
That’s all I needed. There was no puzzle, and the landslide was just to add some spectacle to the fight (plus some automatic movement and some acrobatics checks to avoid going prone and/or taking damage). But the conditioning to have a battlemap was so strong that he couldn’t figure out what to do without one. It was like I’d said, “Let’s play chess! Here’s a pineapple and three books about typography. What’s your move?”
While we’ve been able to work around it (and no one has been terribly confused), it IS annoying to be Spider Climbing on the ceiling and taking up the same Roll20 grid space as whatever character is underneath me. At least in person you can get one of those little mini stands you use for flying creatures if you plan on being raised on the Z-axis on a regular basis.
As far as characters being in different parts of the map, you can (though I think you need a sub) set up Roll20s maps to only show players what their characters actually see so the character on Level 2 wouldn’t be on a Level 1 player’s screen.
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