Roll20

By Darth Meanie, in X-Wing Off-Topic

As social distancing has ended our monthly basement roleplaying, we have started using Roll20. It seems to work pretty well (we are having a hard time with the comms, so we actually use Roll20 as the table top, but then communicate over Zoom).

Are there other virtual tabletops that folks like better?

Edited by Darth Meanie

Two of my RPG groups are doing Roll20 with Discord, the other group is using Roll20 with Zoom. One of those is a dungeon crawl with lots of maps and dynamic lighting and is really intense,;one of those is a PBTA game where we don't even bother with maps exactly (though the character sheets for that game need an overhaul, annoyingly), just sometimes put some text on the view or draw a crude representation to help get descriptions across; and the other is a story-driven D&D campaign. I'm of the opinion that Roll20 has a lot of flexibility, though some things take some extra effort.

I've played around with Astral and it is kind of nice, not needing to learn HTML to build a character sheet for a game that isn't already supported is a plus, and I like how the map system works there (dynamic lighting just being a thing is good). But I haven't had enough of a reason to use it as a DM yet. I've also heard good things about Fantasy Grounds and some people really like TTS for this, but I've not tried either method yet.

A couple of my friends backed and are playing around with TaleSpire, which is a Steam "game" that looks to be useful for any RPG that lives on square grid maps, probably will be great for a dungeon crawl. System requirements kind of make it a no-go for a lot of people, unfortunately. Only runs on Window 10, though not the worst on required specs. Also, currently, everyone playing needs to buy a copy of the game to be able to run it (could maybe get around this with some screen sharing web conference software).

Edited by CaptainJaguarShark