Hi everyone! Aaron here, known as Quickleaf among the geek places of the web.

I would love to hear about what set ups folks are successfully using to run Edge of the Empire / Age of Rebellion / Force and Destiny online? I've been using Roll20 for a couple years but have been disappointed with the time required to prep & with the lack of support for Star Wars unless you purchase a $9.99/month Pro account.

Also, I'm a long-time GM and I'm learning the system with some folks on ENWorld. If anyone is interested in trying out play-by-post, we have room for 1 more player: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?527581-Flight-of-the-Resistance-(Star-Wars)

Most online services aren't going to have a whole ton of automated support without paying some form of fee.

I use roll20 with a Pro account and I don't regret it one bit - of course, if funds are limited, then you may have to make do with putting in the extra work.

There is nothing that a paid Roll20 account provides that cannot be had by combining the (free) services of various third-party providers, especially if the game is play-by-post rather than live (virtual tabletop). Need dice rolling? Orokos.com. Need to post maps? Plenty of free cloud storage sites you can upload images to. Want a custom web page? Google Sites or Obsidian Portal. Want your own board/forums, to set up however you like and run games from? Freeforums.org. (I host my own FFG games, and those of other GMs here.)

I run my games on Fantasy Grounds. As long as the GM has the ultimate package, you as a player don't need a thing and just use a trial account. There is a few automation in the program, but I am extremely happy using it so far. You can check out the session if you want an idea of how it is on this platform. Not a whole lot of action this session, a bunch of roleplaying mostly.

3 hours ago, StarkJunior said:

Most online services aren't going to have a whole ton of automated support without paying some form of fee.

I use roll20 with a Pro account and I don't regret it one bit - of course, if funds are limited, then you may have to make do with putting in the extra work.

It's more an issue of getting the value / functionality I want. I've had a Roll20 Plus membership for a long time (playing D&D) and I easily ended up spending 3 times the prep time I normally would running a face-to-face game. And it was very glitchy when we played (2013-2014). That combination of taking way too much time and being glitchy killed my enthusiasm for Roll20 which was being billed as "easy to use."

How has it improved since late 2014/early 2015?

Because upgrading to a Pro account just to get Star Wars sheets that actually roll...when I have been disappointed by the platform already...makes no sense.

3 hours ago, Hurske said:

I run my games on Fantasy Grounds. As long as the GM has the ultimate package, you as a player don't need a thing and just use a trial account. There is a few automation in the program, but I am extremely happy using it so far. You can check out the session if you want an idea of how it is on this platform. Not a whole lot of action this session, a bunch of roleplaying mostly.

Cool. Looks like a good setup. Are you using @Telone's (I think that's his name) Star Wars community ruleset for Fantasy Grounds?

Yes, it's the ruleset from Trenloe.

1 hour ago, Quickleaf said:

It's more an issue of getting the value / functionality I want. I've had a Roll20 Plus membership for a long time (playing D&D) and I easily ended up spending 3 times the prep time I normally would running a face-to-face game. And it was very glitchy when we played (2013-2014). That combination of taking way too much time and being glitchy killed my enthusiasm for Roll20 which was being billed as "easy to use."

How has it improved since late 2014/early 2015?

Because upgrading to a Pro account just to get Star Wars sheets that actually roll...when I have been disappointed by the platform already...makes no sense.

Yeah, it's improved a lot. The sheet for SW is great now, and it's way less glitchy - and having access to the API helps so you can edit what you need, if you have the knowledge to do so.

Once they started getting official support from companies like Wizards, their tech was upgraded a lot.

1 hour ago, Hurske said:

Yes, it's the ruleset from Trenloe.

Yes, that's him. I aced my dyslexia check.

My group has taken a little bit different route. We used to all be local and played at a pal's house. I moved across the country and we continue to play over Google Hangouts using the dice roller. Well, that's going away, so we're opting to use this great dice roller instead:

It works really well! We just share our character sheets with the GM on Obsidian Portal and we use Skype for the videochat portion as it works considerably better than Hangouts. We've been playing this way for over a year now and it's been working really well, and our trial with this new dice roller and Skype proved to be even better. We don't often need visuals but we could certainly do that with a simple screen share.

I tried Roll20, I found it clunky. I've tried Fantasy Grounds, it's a bit more polished but is overkill for our needs. TableTop Simulator promises to be good as well, but it's still more than we need. If only swsheet.com was updated and maintained, we'd probably be set with that and a dice roller.

Roll20 + Hangouts + That new dice roller app.

Close to zero technical (non-human) errors in easily 100 hours of FFG games.

On 3/8/2017 at 1:07 PM, themensch said:

My group has taken a little bit different route. We used to all be local and played at a pal's house. I moved across the country and we continue to play over Google Hangouts using the dice roller. Well, that's going away, so we're opting to use this great dice roller instead:

It works really well! We just share our character sheets with the GM on Obsidian Portal and we use Skype for the videochat portion as it works considerably better than Hangouts. We've been playing this way for over a year now and it's been working really well, and our trial with this new dice roller and Skype proved to be even better. We don't often need visuals but we could certainly do that with a simple screen share.

I tried Roll20, I found it clunky. I've tried Fantasy Grounds, it's a bit more polished but is overkill for our needs. TableTop Simulator promises to be good as well, but it's still more than we need. If only swsheet.com was updated and maintained, we'd probably be set with that and a dice roller.

Oh my stars! Thanks themensch! This is just the sort of thing I was imagining, but assumed wasn't out there. So you all log into the same "room" on the dice app, and that way any rolls made are viewable by everyone else? And you can see who rolled what?

My experience of Roll20 is the same as your, and I've been looking at Fantasy Grounds but also feeling fatigued with the learning curve and excess of options.

15 hours ago, Quickleaf said:

Oh my stars! Thanks themensch! This is just the sort of thing I was imagining, but assumed wasn't out there. So you all log into the same "room" on the dice app, and that way any rolls made are viewable by everyone else? And you can see who rolled what?

My experience of Roll20 is the same as your, and I've been looking at Fantasy Grounds but also feeling fatigued with the learning curve and excess of options.

You're welcome!

That dice roller has been a great boon to my group. We do in fact log into a single room, and since dice rolls are preserved, we can craft and whatnot when we're not at the table and the rolls are there for the GM to look over - I believe it saves the last 100 rolls or so, I'm not quite clear on that. If we want to preserve dice rolls for posterity, we can use http://orokos.com/ (another excellent dice roller, but geared more towards forums than live play.)

If you can sit in and play a game with Fantasy Grounds with someone who knows how it works, it'll go a long way towards smoothing out that learning curve. I tried by myself but found it counterintuitive and not identical to the tutorial videos. We were playing D&D5E and it worked really well - and now I understand how the tool works, at least from a player's perspective.

My group started in person but one member moved to Canada. We play live online now (as opposed to pbp). I'm not big on putting a lot of effort into preparing things like roll20 environments and so forth, I preffer to play fast and loose and see where the adventure takes us, so have ended up with a fairly simple and very customisable system

• We use Skype to run a group video call.
• If we want a map, we use a Google Drawing. Everyone can view and edit it live, you can drag new images into it instantly from your desktop and move stuff about and draw all over it.
• We roll dice ourselves, we have no special shared dice roller because we are having fun and have no reason not to trust each other to roll fairly.
• We keep our own character sheets however we like (mine is a spreadsheet, some people use the form-fillable PDFs floating around the internet).