Online Virtual Tabletops

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 12:38 pm

I've never found one I like, though I just stumbled across a link to http://roll20.net/ . Anyone tried it? Bad things to say? Good things to say about some other online virtual tabletop?

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 1:44 pm

roll20 just finished and declared that they'd delivered their kickstarter rewards last week, so it's not much of a surprise that you just stumbled on it recently. It's on my list of things to check out.

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Wed Sep 19, 2012 2:05 pm

Roll20 is fine if you want the DM to be in charge of everything except rolling dice, this means that others cannot move their own game tokens.

Openrpg is better

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 2:27 pm

I've only messed around with it, but I don't recall token movement being limited to the GM. I believe players can move token they add.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 2:44 pm

I've used MapTools and TTopRPG; they both have their charms (and they're free), although MapTools has a reputation for being overwhelming for some people.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 8:47 am

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:Roll20 is fine if you want the DM to be in charge of everything except rolling dice, this means that others cannot move their own game tokens.

No, you're in control of your own token. We all know you were against Roll20 the moment you heard about it, but you can't just lie about it to try and influence people's opinions.

Roll20 isn't perfect, though; I want it to work as advertised, but when I used it during the beta it seemed prone to glitches. I suppose that's to be expected in a beta build, and maybe it's better now.

Nihilistic_Impact · Post by **Nihilistic_Impact** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 5:31 pm

They recently introduced 3d Dice for your basic rolls, don't have percentile 3d dice yet though. Our group had some issues; but the staff have been quick to respond to issues.

And they're currently working on dynamic lighting. You can set tokens and items to radiate light to clear their fog of war. Pretty interesting from what I've seen so far; but that's only on the dev server.

Still for a free system it's pretty good for getting friends together.

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp · Thu Sep 20, 2012 9:03 pm

Stubbazubba wrote:
Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:Roll20 is fine if you want the DM to be in charge of everything except rolling dice, this means that others cannot move their own game tokens.
No, you're in control of your own token. We all know you were against Roll20 the moment you heard about it, but you can't just lie about it to try and influence people's opinions.

Roll20 isn't perfect, though; I want it to work as advertised, but when I used it during the beta it seemed prone to glitches. I suppose that's to be expected in a beta build, and maybe it's better now.

I couldn't move tokens when I tested it myself, and lacking the ability to set controls for allowing others to complete actions. Requiring the game starter to be the sole person capable of making changes even with monster tokens and environment tokens and whatnot bogs the game down. Other tabletops let you flag others as lurkers players or GMs, easily solving this issue

@impact

The 3d rolls are laggy and a waste of time. When you roll a die, everyone sees it in the game box. We don't literally need or want the rolls to physically appear and big down the server, our hardware and Internet connection

Openrpg Is a better place for friends to get together. You can actually make a room for your friends to connect to without you having to manually email them all links. They just browse and see you.. This Ben lets others see and join you if you wish. You'll make even more friends.

Judge the system by what it is, not by what you want it to be.

Strung Nether · Post by **Strung Nether** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 10:54 pm

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote: I couldn't move tokens when I tested it myself, and lacking the ability to set controls for allowing others to complete actions. Requiring the game starter to be the sole person capable of making changes even with monster tokens and environment tokens and whatnot bogs the game down. Other tabletops let you flag others as lurkers players or GMs, easily solving this issue

@impact

The 3d rolls are laggy and a waste of time. When you roll a die, everyone sees it in the game box. We don't literally need or want the rolls to physically appear and big down the server, our hardware and Internet connection

Openrpg Is a better place for friends to get together. You can actually make a room for your friends to connect to without you having to manually email them all links. They just browse and see you.. This Ben lets others see and join you if you wish. You'll make even more friends.

Judge the system by what it is, not by what you want it to be.

I have no idea about any of these online rpg systems, but I'm still opening my mouth because I have the impression from your post that you have an axe to grind. The first criticism was valid, but the "3d rolls suck due to hardware, internet, and we don't want them" doesn't make sense. If the 3d system is there and the server/internet is not actually slow/buggy, than it isn't a problem, and even if you are forced to watch a short animation every time you roll, it is a minor gripe. I also don't think that it is appropriate to say "we don't literally need or want" instead of "I don't literally need or want".

Nihilistic_Impact · Post by **Nihilistic_Impact** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 11:17 pm

You can also disable it.

I have fun with it, it can be buggy; but issues are fixed as they come up.

Strung Nether · Post by **Strung Nether** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 11:22 pm

Nihilistic_Impact wrote:You can also disable it.

Then it is a COMPLETE non-issue.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 7:19 am

Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote: I couldn't move tokens when I tested it myself, and lacking the ability to set controls for allowing others to complete actions.

I'm not sure what you mean here. What kind of actions are you thinking of? I don't know what you do in Roll20 besides move tokens, roll dice, and edit your bars.

Requiring the game starter to be the sole person capable of making changes even with monster tokens and environment tokens and whatnot bogs the game down. Other tabletops let you flag others as lurkers players or GMs, easily solving this issue

Anyone can be made a GM if you want everyone to control everything and change settings, and every item can be made to be controllable by anyone or everyone, GM or not. I don't know of a 'lurker' option, but everything else you're saying is a complete non-issue.

The 3d rolls are laggy and a waste of time. When you roll a die, everyone sees it in the game box. We don't literally need or want the rolls to physically appear and big down the server, our hardware and Internet connection

Then turn it off. This is a non-issue.

Openrpg Is a better place for friends to get together. You can actually make a room for your friends to connect to without you having to manually email them all links.

But it requires everyone to have openrpg downloaded onto their machine. This is browser-based, so its more flexible and can theoretically be accessed from handheld devices, though I haven't tried this myself. That's not objectively better or worse, but it's an option that openrpg doesn't have.

Judge the system by what it is, not by what you want it to be.

The system is casual-friendly, functional, and with plenty of pop. It's code needs to be cleaned up, IMO, because at times it lags way more than it should. I don't know how much of that is user-side hardware/sotware issues and how much is on their end. When it runs smoothly it's actually very good; it's user-friendly, intuitive, and quick to pick up, unlike OpenRPG. If it would always run smoothly, I would be a much bigger fan.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 12:23 pm

My experience with OpenRPG was pretty much horrible in every way; are people really talking about it like its awesome now? How much it must have changed.

This looks pretty cool. The fact that I don't need to download a program is awesome.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 12:36 pm

hogarth wrote:I've used MapTools and TTopRPG; they both have their charms (and they're free), although MapTools has a reputation for being overwhelming for some people.

Where does it have this reputation? I've never heard of that.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 1:19 pm

Grek wrote:
hogarth wrote:I've used MapTools and TTopRPG; they both have their charms (and they're free), although MapTools has a reputation for being overwhelming for some people.
Where does it have this reputation? I've never heard of that.

I don't know what to tell you; in every on-line discussion of Maptools that I've ever seen, someone has called it user-unfriendly or a pain to learn.

Examples from this board:
"So, having dealt with the relative clunkiness of MapTools [..]"

"The initial time investment in learning how it works can be a bit of a pain."

"When I tried Maptool it was arguably as bad as OpenRPG. Who the fuck designs the user interface for these things?"