I'm new to both DMing and to DnD. I'm not new to roleplaying online in a non-graphical environment, however.
I've done a lot of research into VTTs, and have tested roll20, along with a couple of others. But none of the tools such as roll20 that I have found, nor forum threads here or elsewhere, deal with the use-case that I am looking for. They all focus on map building in some form, and I don't care about that in any way.
If my game was played around a table, in person, it would predominantly be played in the theatre of the mind, with some handouts or maybe a slideshow on a display of some sort, helping me to describe certain scenes or simply set a mood. I'm not interested in battle maps and tokens/miniatures, and I want the online experience to be as similar to that as possible.
I initially considered using discord, with the beyond20 browser addon to allow people to roll from their character sheets if they want to, but one thing I really do see the value in is: "/whisper gm my character is pretty sure we're being taken for a ride, but they're too shy and is not going to speak up"
While that can be accomplished in discord with DMs, in our trial run I found it clunky and didn't like it. I want any text stuff to be all in a single place.
So currently I'm using roll20 for the chat feature, beyond20 integration, integrated video/audio (which has been solid enough so far but we have zoom as a backup) and for me to display images for flavour. But - I really don't like the software itself. It's functional but the UI design belongs in the late 90s, and the images/pages that I display are not 'front and centre'. They're a smaller portion of the screen and surrounded by tools and other such things. The only real advantage is that I only need to ask my players to open a single app/browser window.
The beyond20 integration is nice, but a few customisable dice roll buttons would achieve the same thing. Some of the players are using real dice and calling out the results anyway (their personal preference). So that is the least important feature I've listed.
Edit: I forgot the actual question! Does anyone have suggestions on running a game as I've described, because the existing threads here and in other forums all focus on map building/using.
I’m in the same boat. I’m new to DMing but have two groups going through the same book; Curse of Strahd. One group (generally) meets in person while the other is spread across the US. We use theatre of the mind with only a few handouts. So far, the online group is going well with only Zoom. Every player is on DnDbeyond so I can see their character sheets. I’ve even tried to use the the “Encounters” feature which was fine in the Death House intro, but it has been too much work to add all of the other encounters after that. I really wish when I purchased the book off DnDbeyond, it would be preloaded with the encounters for the story. Right now, I use the printed version of Curse of Strahd that I’ve marked up as I run the game. I only use the online version for quick reference. It would be nice to be able to highlight text in the online book.
I like the encounter builder in particular for estimating the difficult of the encounter for the party. That's not a simple chapter in the book, but in the builder I just add creatures and the difficulty bar tells me when to stop. Maybe experienced DMs don't see value in that but I'd be lost without it.
A couple of options (disclaimer, I am also newish to roll20).
1. As you have already done you can use roll20 just to display images of the map, and not use tokens.
2. If you are already doing that, and have zoom available, just display the image via shared screen in zoom. You can then use zoom chat to send whispers.
In both of the above, you can also have music playing through them in the background.
In this quarantine era, the way i have been running things is:
1. players have their own char sheet available on dnd beyond
2. use zoom or discord
3. I display images/maps via roll20. I'm clunky with the roll20 tactical combat, so try more theatre of the mind and use the image as a visual.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"An' things ha' come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off'f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!"
Alright. So just use roll20 pages to display immersive images relevant to the situations, such as a wooded countryside if they are traveling, a portrait of the NPC they are talking to, or a pack of hungry ghouls they are fighting.
Deviant art should deliver the goods. Upload images you find there to your game. Size the page about 20x20, plop it in the background layer and there you go.
Other than that play some jukebox music and run a theater of mind.
I use roll20 for battle maps and dungeon maps with dynamic lighting and all the bells and whistles, personally. It makes rules like "a twenty foot cone" or "60 feet of darkvision" actually mean something, and I like the tactical war gamey side of things. To each his own.
To answer your question, maybe try Fantasy Grounds?
I normally play theatre of the mind for my campaigns, with battle maps and minis for difficult fights, and I show off some things on an iPad or screen. But with quarantine, I've had to find a way around this for a new-ish group of players. We've used Zoom, which I don't love, Google Hangouts, and Skype. Discord is by far my favourite to use. While a little fiddly to set-up, and there can be some technical issues for some players, it's totally worth it.
What I've decided is this: Discord, with both Avrae and Beyond20 setup. This gives my players the options of rolling in discord, from the character sheet on DnDBeyond>Beyond20>Discord, or just telling me their rolls.
Running encounters through DndBeyond. While this is a little extra work up front for me, I do enjoy it and it makes pulling up encounters and rolling initiative a little easier. I set up my encounter, hyperlink it into my notes on Evernote, and I'm good to go. I could roll Initiative through Avrae, but that means typing in monsters, then going back to beyond to look at stats anyway, and then keeping track of things on a notepad. So yeah, it is a little work, especially when there's the chance a party could avoid the fight all together, but it makes the games flow much more seamlessly. Open your encounter, check Discord for initiative rolls, plug in rolls in DnDBeyond, Run encounter. Your players can either roll dice through Avrae or manually, and then type them into Discord. !roll 20 -- or -- !roll 4d6+3 -- isn't too hard to type for the sake of time and convenience.
Discord Channels: I've got several channels set-up, audio and video are open. Campaign Main, for dice rolls, Beyond20. Maps and Handouts, for dropping images I want the players to see. Campaign Notes, for the players to drop names and locations and quests. Dungeon Master, only seen by me for my rolls and all my behind the screen work. Random Chat, for whatever else players might want to share that's not campaign related. Bot Test, for the players to test out bot commands.
Regarding the Maps and Handouts and encounters. I pull the maps from the digital source book into an image editor, Then pull tokens from Avrae [ !token monster ] place them on the map, Then use Windows snipping tool to copy what I want the players to see of the map, Paste into Maps and Handouts section on Discord. This is easy enough to do on the fly for small encounters, but I'd set-up larger ones before hand. It also allows me to set-up a kind of 'fog of war' for dungeons, showing players more of the map as they traverse the area.
There's a great video from SlyFlourish [HERE] that goes through using Discord to run games.
Hope some of this helps, mate!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“...there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward.” Bipolar II, Anxious, ADD | Chef|QueerHe/Him | Descent into Avernus [DM] Running on Encounter+
Oh, and I just added the 'Groovy' plugin to the Discord server as well, still playing with it to see how easy it is to play ambient sounds. Edit: Got that up and running, found using [Pakku] Audio from Youtube simple enough.
“...there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward.” Bipolar II, Anxious, ADD | Chef|QueerHe/Him | Descent into Avernus [DM] Running on Encounter+
We've also been forced online by covid. Here's what I've ended up with:
PC's has characters on Dndbeyond. Roll dice either with real dice (by far easier) or on rolldicewithfriends (the best site with a diceroom, very simple). However the site has been quite overloaded lately (can't understand why...).
We use zoom. I have two screens, and share one of the screens with the players as a "table". Then I only have to drag images, maps etc onto that desktop. The other screen I use for "everything else". The nice thing with having a shared screen all the time is that you don't have to mind going into the share button at all. Just drag and drop.
I also use improved initiative for initiativ (just drags a players view onto the "table").
That's about it.
And about whispers: I had to just tell my players that I have to have my concentration so many other places that I don't have the time to read. "messages". If I should allow them to do that, I think I'll actually rather have them send me messages on my phone or something.
Yeah, at first I thought discord was the way to go, and I set up beyond20 + avrae to give them options. I didn't think about splitting it into multiple channels during gameplay though. It's a novel idea but not one I'd really consider. I really want all comms in the one place - switching between channels would annoy me too much. I could use my phone to monitor a second discord channel, but so far roll20 works better for chat.
I've since figured out that if I create a larger canvas and set the background to black, then images placed onto that looks nicer. I'd prefer more control over what they are seeing (if their monitor is a different res, then they see it quite differently to me, but that's fairly minor I think.
I still think roll20 would benefit from theming/skinning, and I don't like the interface but as I'm not using it for anything other than chat + images + video/audio, I don't have to use the gui much. I can deal with it for now.
If it gets annoying over time I'll try a suggestion a friend made over discord, which is hangouts + google slides or jamboard, and people would just need to call out the dice rolls.
I'm new to both DMing and to DnD. I'm not new to roleplaying online in a non-graphical environment, however.
I've done a lot of research into VTTs, and have tested roll20, along with a couple of others. But none of the tools such as roll20 that I have found, nor forum threads here or elsewhere, deal with the use-case that I am looking for. They all focus on map building in some form, and I don't care about that in any way.
If my game was played around a table, in person, it would predominantly be played in the theatre of the mind, with some handouts or maybe a slideshow on a display of some sort, helping me to describe certain scenes or simply set a mood. I'm not interested in battle maps and tokens/miniatures, and I want the online experience to be as similar to that as possible.
I initially considered using discord, with the beyond20 browser addon to allow people to roll from their character sheets if they want to, but one thing I really do see the value in is: "/whisper gm my character is pretty sure we're being taken for a ride, but they're too shy and is not going to speak up"
While that can be accomplished in discord with DMs, in our trial run I found it clunky and didn't like it. I want any text stuff to be all in a single place.
So currently I'm using roll20 for the chat feature, beyond20 integration, integrated video/audio (which has been solid enough so far but we have zoom as a backup) and for me to display images for flavour. But - I really don't like the software itself. It's functional but the UI design belongs in the late 90s, and the images/pages that I display are not 'front and centre'. They're a smaller portion of the screen and surrounded by tools and other such things. The only real advantage is that I only need to ask my players to open a single app/browser window.
The beyond20 integration is nice, but a few customisable dice roll buttons would achieve the same thing. Some of the players are using real dice and calling out the results anyway (their personal preference). So that is the least important feature I've listed.
Edit: I forgot the actual question! Does anyone have suggestions on running a game as I've described, because the existing threads here and in other forums all focus on map building/using.
I’m in the same boat. I’m new to DMing but have two groups going through the same book; Curse of Strahd. One group (generally) meets in person while the other is spread across the US. We use theatre of the mind with only a few handouts. So far, the online group is going well with only Zoom. Every player is on DnDbeyond so I can see their character sheets. I’ve even tried to use the the “Encounters” feature which was fine in the Death House intro, but it has been too much work to add all of the other encounters after that. I really wish when I purchased the book off DnDbeyond, it would be preloaded with the encounters for the story. Right now, I use the printed version of Curse of Strahd that I’ve marked up as I run the game. I only use the online version for quick reference. It would be nice to be able to highlight text in the online book.
I like the encounter builder in particular for estimating the difficult of the encounter for the party. That's not a simple chapter in the book, but in the builder I just add creatures and the difficulty bar tells me when to stop. Maybe experienced DMs don't see value in that but I'd be lost without it.
A couple of options (disclaimer, I am also newish to roll20).
1. As you have already done you can use roll20 just to display images of the map, and not use tokens.
2. If you are already doing that, and have zoom available, just display the image via shared screen in zoom. You can then use zoom chat to send whispers.
In both of the above, you can also have music playing through them in the background.
In this quarantine era, the way i have been running things is:
1. players have their own char sheet available on dnd beyond
2. use zoom or discord
3. I display images/maps via roll20. I'm clunky with the roll20 tactical combat, so try more theatre of the mind and use the image as a visual.
"An' things ha' come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off'f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!"
Alright. So just use roll20 pages to display immersive images relevant to the situations, such as a wooded countryside if they are traveling, a portrait of the NPC they are talking to, or a pack of hungry ghouls they are fighting.
Deviant art should deliver the goods. Upload images you find there to your game. Size the page about 20x20, plop it in the background layer and there you go.
Other than that play some jukebox music and run a theater of mind.
I use roll20 for battle maps and dungeon maps with dynamic lighting and all the bells and whistles, personally. It makes rules like "a twenty foot cone" or "60 feet of darkvision" actually mean something, and I like the tactical war gamey side of things. To each his own.
To answer your question, maybe try Fantasy Grounds?
Hey!
I normally play theatre of the mind for my campaigns, with battle maps and minis for difficult fights, and I show off some things on an iPad or screen.
But with quarantine, I've had to find a way around this for a new-ish group of players. We've used Zoom, which I don't love, Google Hangouts, and Skype.
Discord is by far my favourite to use. While a little fiddly to set-up, and there can be some technical issues for some players, it's totally worth it.
What I've decided is this:
Discord, with both Avrae and Beyond20 setup.
This gives my players the options of rolling in discord, from the character sheet on DnDBeyond>Beyond20>Discord, or just telling me their rolls.
Running encounters through DndBeyond.
While this is a little extra work up front for me, I do enjoy it and it makes pulling up encounters and rolling initiative a little easier.
I set up my encounter, hyperlink it into my notes on Evernote, and I'm good to go.
I could roll Initiative through Avrae, but that means typing in monsters, then going back to beyond to look at stats anyway, and then keeping track of things on a notepad.
So yeah, it is a little work, especially when there's the chance a party could avoid the fight all together, but it makes the games flow much more seamlessly.
Open your encounter, check Discord for initiative rolls, plug in rolls in DnDBeyond, Run encounter. Your players can either roll dice through Avrae or manually, and then type them into Discord. !roll 20 -- or -- !roll 4d6+3 -- isn't too hard to type for the sake of time and convenience.
Discord Channels:
I've got several channels set-up, audio and video are open.
Campaign Main, for dice rolls, Beyond20.
Maps and Handouts, for dropping images I want the players to see.
Campaign Notes, for the players to drop names and locations and quests.
Dungeon Master, only seen by me for my rolls and all my behind the screen work.
Random Chat, for whatever else players might want to share that's not campaign related.
Bot Test, for the players to test out bot commands.
Regarding the Maps and Handouts and encounters.
I pull the maps from the digital source book into an image editor,
Then pull tokens from Avrae [ !token monster ] place them on the map,
Then use Windows snipping tool to copy what I want the players to see of the map,
Paste into Maps and Handouts section on Discord.
This is easy enough to do on the fly for small encounters, but I'd set-up larger ones before hand.
It also allows me to set-up a kind of 'fog of war' for dungeons, showing players more of the map as they traverse the area.
There's a great video from SlyFlourish [HERE] that goes through using Discord to run games.
Hope some of this helps, mate!
“...there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward.”
Bipolar II, Anxious, ADD | Chef | Queer He/Him | Descent into Avernus [DM] Running on Encounter+
Oh, and I just added the 'Groovy' plugin to the Discord server as well, still playing with it to see how easy it is to play ambient sounds.
Edit: Got that up and running, found using [Pakku] Audio from Youtube simple enough.
“...there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward.”
Bipolar II, Anxious, ADD | Chef | Queer He/Him | Descent into Avernus [DM] Running on Encounter+
We've also been forced online by covid. Here's what I've ended up with:
PC's has characters on Dndbeyond. Roll dice either with real dice (by far easier) or on rolldicewithfriends (the best site with a diceroom, very simple). However the site has been quite overloaded lately (can't understand why...).
We use zoom. I have two screens, and share one of the screens with the players as a "table". Then I only have to drag images, maps etc onto that desktop. The other screen I use for "everything else". The nice thing with having a shared screen all the time is that you don't have to mind going into the share button at all. Just drag and drop.
I also use improved initiative for initiativ (just drags a players view onto the "table").
That's about it.
And about whispers: I had to just tell my players that I have to have my concentration so many other places that I don't have the time to read. "messages". If I should allow them to do that, I think I'll actually rather have them send me messages on my phone or something.
Ludo ergo sum!
Yeah, at first I thought discord was the way to go, and I set up beyond20 + avrae to give them options. I didn't think about splitting it into multiple channels during gameplay though. It's a novel idea but not one I'd really consider. I really want all comms in the one place - switching between channels would annoy me too much. I could use my phone to monitor a second discord channel, but so far roll20 works better for chat.
I've since figured out that if I create a larger canvas and set the background to black, then images placed onto that looks nicer. I'd prefer more control over what they are seeing (if their monitor is a different res, then they see it quite differently to me, but that's fairly minor I think.
I still think roll20 would benefit from theming/skinning, and I don't like the interface but as I'm not using it for anything other than chat + images + video/audio, I don't have to use the gui much. I can deal with it for now.
If it gets annoying over time I'll try a suggestion a friend made over discord, which is hangouts + google slides or jamboard, and people would just need to call out the dice rolls.