Roll20: a beginner's guide
Attention roleplayers, experienced and aspiring! If you’re currently craving adventure but are unable to get together with a group, expert Treehouse Dungeon Master Henry is here to help, with some advice on how to get started with online roleplaying platform Roll20…
Are you currently at an exciting moment in a tabletop roleplaying game, but unable to meet up with your group anytime in the near future? Or maybe you've suddenly found yourself with a lot of spare time and have always been intrigued by the idea of doing some pen and paper roleplaying with friends? Well, luckily for you, a while back some nerds decided to go and invent the internet, which has been further built upon (presumably lots more nerds were involved) until we're at the point where roleplaying is now something that you can do from the comfort of your own home, without the need to meet people IRL!
In my roundabout way, I'm coming to the point that I've been exploring Roll20, an online resource for hosting or joining roleplaying sessions. If your newsfeed is anything like mine then recently you’ll been inundated with suggestions and lists of ways to take your roleplaying game online. There seem to be many options, and while I do advise doing some research to find which one best suits your needs, I am here to relate what Roll20 was like for a first-time user, and give some advice on things that may not seem obvious from the outset.
Signing up for the free account was simple, and there is a video crash-course linked from the homepage, but I found that this got quite in-depth quite quickly. After creating a sample session and playing around with the tools for a brief time, I easily got comfortable with the setup. The free assets provided are very helpful to give you an idea of how to set up maps and place characters and enemies on the board.
I then went to my go-to graphical design software (MS-Paint) to create maps for my session. Of course they looked terrible, even with my extensive Paint skills. The free account provides 100MB of storage for maps and tokens, and with my very low quality graphics this would be plenty for my current needs. But, shocked at just how bad my map was, I decided to have a look through the provided maps, and discovered the invaluable search function: it's possible to find user-created content to drop into your campaign without affecting your upload limit, which is incredibly useful! While I didn't find everything I needed for all of my battles, I found resources that I could easily mash together to meet my needs.
Although the software can provide built-in character sheets, compendiums of rules and enemy stat-blocks for a wide range of popular RPG systems, I decided against using these for my first one-shot session, but would definitely consider using them for larger campaigns. Basically, there's pretty much everything you need in here for running a campaign entirely from within your browser: ways to keep track of your characters' progressions; enemies and encounters; item inventories and document management; reactive dice rolling with a neat 3D animation; even a music player for tavern ambience and intense battle music. There's so much to this little piece of in-browser software that I haven't even touched!
We found the video connection to be mostly reliable, and any problems we had were probably from our own hardware rather than the site itself. With three players and a DM the audio was manageable, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to run a larger group. This can be a major concern when running online sessions, along with player interest wavering, but with a smaller group and the interactive battle maps and visuals I didn't find this too much of an issue.
Finally, to touch on the question of whether it’s worth upgrading to a Plus account: using the free version was less of a detraction than I first imagined. Essentially the user-created maps and tokens are an absolutely invaluable asset that makes the whole experience worthwhile as a GM. I would consider paying for the Plus subscription solely to remove the 100MB upload limit, but think that for the small sum of a few pounds per month, if you're considering doing any amount of online roleplaying then it's a worthwhile price to pay, even just as a sign of support for the developers who've clearly put a lot of time and enthusiasm into making this platform as versatile and user-friendly as possible.
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