I have a group that had been meeting in person before the lockdowns, but now since the lockdowns haven’t been fully lifted wants to play online. What are some good options?

Discord is a good option.

I know some people use Roll 20, but I haven't messed around with it myself.

Roll20 is mostly free. The referee may need to get a cheap monthly/yearly plan depending on number of players and campaigns. No one has to download or buy the software. It's website based that works best in Chrome. I've used it for online play and while it looks dated, it works fine. I use Discord for audio. Roll20 has video/audio options but they are known for disconnects. Roll20 might need a "pro" pay subscription for FFG Star Wars templates but I'm not sure?

Fantasy Grounds is Roll20's competitor. It doesn't look as aged, but everyone needs to purchase a copy. You will need to add modules for FFG Star Wars.

The new upcomer is the Foundry VTT. Foundry gets rave reviews, but it is new and I'm not sure how much support it has for FFG Star Wars. I'm hoping to jump to it someday. It's one-time $50, but only the GM will need it. Everyone else joins the game for free. You will need a "module" for Star Wars, and again I don't know the status yet of it. Since Foundry is a work in progress, it looks like it will not be quite as simple to set it up for you as the other two above.

I have to throw in EpicTable. It's also one-time GM only and cheaper then Foundry. There is an EP2 coming out "someday" so it is still supported. EP2 will be a free upgrade and I believe it will support SW/Genesys dice. EP1 doesn't support FFG/Genesys dice however, so you will need to add a dice roller. Why mention EpicTable? It's only a VTT. You don't need to add modules/addons for d20, Genesys, Star Wars, whatever you are planning. It's simply an online play area sharing a play area, images, etc. Much simpler addon if you are already planning on using one of the online dice rollers and Discord.

Roll20 is amazing for maps and images, plus it's free if you want it.

dice.owenmead.com has wonderful (also free) dice rollers that are also private rooms where everyone logged in can see the rolls. (vanlevy.com has the same.)

Get yourself Google Meet (again, free) and you can do it all in 3 tabs for the price of your electric bill.

9 minutes ago, BrickSteelhead said:

Roll20 is amazing for maps and images, plus it's free if you want it.

Free if you limit yourself (as a GM) to one campaign. You can't run two+ campaigns without a $4 per month subscription or creating a unique account for each campaign which would be a pain in the ****, and possibly against the user agreement? There's a character limit per campaign (3?, someone help me out) also for the free account iirc. I have a pay account so I can't check the limit.

ETA: Yes free for Players. All they have to do is create a roll20 account on the website then accept an invite from the GM to a campaign. All browser based.

Our group just use Google Hangouts, the call and picture quality are good enought to film actual dice rolls if you're not the trusting kind, and you can still share your screen for maps, pictures, etc.

We've been using it for months now all through lockdown.

Google Meet, Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, etc.... All free means to do things. Our guys aren't the kind where you have to watch their dice rolls, so it is nice. With other, less-trustworthy types, you might have to film rolls or use a digital dice-roller (those can be found free, as well, and have a 'history' feature so you can see what someone rolled most recently).

We were doing it partially remote B4 the lockdown, but now 100%. Used to be every other week, but now, with 3 of us NOT commuting to work, we play every week!

We used Roll20, and moved to Tabletop Simulator without looking back. It's $20 on Steam

We used discord with the regular group. It is handy because has pretty good dice rollers (i know at least 2 around these forums), video-audio share and free. Also the gamers already used it and non-gamers learnt it quickly too.

SkyJedi's dice roller is a free digi-dice roller that can integrate with Discord or work off of an independent site.

Orokos is a free digi-dice roller, but it's only the website version. It is commonly used for PbPs on this forum, and is my preferred of the two (though SkyJedi's has some perks for Discord)

I use Maptools, SkyJedi's Dice Roller, and Googlehangouts. I can share my Maptools screen on Googlehangouts for those that don't have the program. Those that do can log into my maptools server. Maptools is free and easy to use.

If you don't require maps for your game, I've found both Discord and Zoom to be perfectly functional. Granted, for the games I'm in, we operate on the trust system, so online dice rollers aren't required (though a couple folks use them in SW games due to not having the physical dice available to them for various reasons).

One thing I've noted is that Discord's call quality can at times be flaky, even if all of the players are in the same general area, with it usually being the worst on Friday and Saturday nights. Zoom on the other hand hasn't (thus far) suffered issues in call quality, but if you want a call that goes on for more than a half-hour, then somebody needs to shell out for the subscription fee. Said fee isn't too high (and can easily be shared by most gaming groups), and only one person needs to have the subscription (but can get tricky if that one person is unavailable on game night for whatever reason).

Discord chat works a little better for sharing images (especially if you either have the links to said images already on hand or are dropping the pics from a storage folder on your machine), while Zoom isn't quite as user friendly in that respect.

Foundry has a FFG Star Wars module that is workable now. There will be a major upgrade to Foundry which will allow a major upgrade for the Star Wars module. Also, the Star Wars module supports importing data from OggDude's app.

Big feature of Foundry is the modules. There are a ton of fan created modules (free) for everything from animated effects, sounds, controlling tokens, creating tokens, and just a bunch of other things.

I've been using Roll20 for Star Wars for a couple years and Foundry is such a breath of fresh air. So much better for a GM in getting things set up and running. And don't get me started on the dynamic lighting and dynamic SOUND!

4 hours ago, andyrross said:

Big feature of Foundry is the modules. There are a ton of fan created modules (free) for everything from animated effects, sounds, controlling tokens, creating tokens, and just a bunch of other things.

How easy is it setting up Foundry, finding the right modules, installing them? I want to get into Foundry with Genesys but scared to jump from Rroll20 now that I have it all figured out. What about for my players? Will they also have to go through several installs and configuring even if I'm the only one paying the $50?

My group moved to using zoom for video and audio, we pay for the pro which is 15 per month. But it is good quality and let's you record if you plan to post your games.

For seeing dice rolls we use the Jedisky dice roller. It is free and has othe nice tool like critical injury roller for players and ships. It show wound and strain summaries and track initiatives. I did a video showing how it works.

https://youtu.be/6CWE182IBr8

Before this method I did looking to table top simulator and it looks very slick. It has a dice roller, you can find models on import maps to play on. You can play with one account, but then the owner of the account would have to move all the pieces. If every has it then each can move there own. It looks really cool, but to me it looked like the learning curve was more then I wanted to spend time on.

I hope these help!

19 hours ago, Sturn said:

How easy is it setting up Foundry, finding the right modules, installing them? I want to get into Foundry with Genesys but scared to jump from Rroll20 now that I have it all figured out. What about for my players? Will they also have to go through several installs and configuring even if I'm the only one paying the $50?

I host Foundry on https://www.foundryserver.com/ They just started charging $5 a month for their hosting. For the very large files (150MB animated maps for example - which look very cool), I am storing those on an S3 server https://www.digitalocean.com/ Also $5 a month.

I empathize with the fear of leaving Roll20. I'm just frustrated with using Roll20 and Foundry gives a much better GM experience, and much more immersive for players.

Your players will not have to pay anything. They just use their browser, no fancy configurations or installs on their part.

If you join the Foundry Discord Server https://discordapp.com/invite/DDBZUDf , you get a much better idea of Foundry. There, join the starwars-ffg channel to get the status of the next release. There are discussions of using the StarWars game system for Genesys.

I noticed that Tabletop Simulator https://www.tabletopsimulator.com/ is now on sale for half price on Steam. I highly recommend this quality product, ESPECIALLY for the low low price of $10. It's an all-inclusive package that has tons of workshop mods for however complex you want to make it. Dice roller, character career and spec sheets, adversary/skill/force power decks, tons of minis and ships, 3d maps, sound packages, and that's just premade stuff. Roll20 would be my freebie alternative, but if you're gonna pay money seriously consider TTS.

Update:

I recently customized our game table a bit, and here's a screenshot of what TTS looks like in action.

On 8/20/2020 at 12:12 PM, andyrross said:

I host Foundry on https://www.foundryserver.com/ They just started charging $5 a month for their hosting. For the very large files (150MB animated maps for example - which look very cool), I am storing those on an S3 server https://www.digitalocean.com/ Also $5 a month.

So, $50 plus $5.95 month, or is the server hosting optional? So, unless I'm playing only locally using a digital tabletop on a TV for my players, I'm going to have to pay for a server? I never saw mention of having to pay for the server service. No default free service included at the company's servers with that $50?

I prefer Discord for the audio and video. There is a bot for discord that will do the dice. D1-C3 is the name of it. I have a rolls channel, in-character channel, and general channel for the game. Folks can riff between sessions if they like that way. I use theater of the mind for battle, even in-person, but if I need a map I just share my desktop via DIscord. I'm not a fan of Roll20 at all and would only use it if my game absolutely needed a battle map, even then, I like Fantasy Grounds better.

On 8/21/2020 at 8:52 PM, Sturn said:

So, $50 plus $5.95 month, or is the server hosting optional? So, unless I'm playing only locally using a digital tabletop on a TV for my players, I'm going to have to pay for a server? I never saw mention of having to pay for the server service. No default free service included at the company's servers with that $50?

Foundry itself (the software provider) does not offer hosting. They just develop/provide the software.

Server hosting is wherever you want. Two companies are offering hosting specifically for the Foundry software. Many people are smart enough (not me) and also have the resources to use their own equipment to host the software.

Some people host it on their local machine and their players access the software there. Not something I wanted to mess with.