My group plays in person. I have a battle map I use for encounters. I use paper and tape as fog of war. I can't afford a million miniatures so I use little printed out miniatures that are folded and made to stand up. For handouts I print things out sometimes. I can't afford something like Dwarven Forge.

All of this is a giant pain in the butt to me. It's janky. It often feels like more hassle than it's worth. I'm not a good artist. I'm not good at drawing.

I do a decent amount of theater of the mind, but I play with the kids, and there's only so much they can keep in their head regarding positioning.

I've been thinking about switching over to VTT but in person. I don't think I would go as far as a horizontal TV, but I could just have a right-side-up TV, and something like Roll20. Maybe I would move every character, or maybe some players would want to do so themselves from their devices.

Players can still keep track of their character sheets digitally or with pen and paper.

The advantages I see are that I can use downloaded battle maps that will look nice. And proper fog of war. And I have to worry about pieces of paper and giant battle mats and finding miniatures or making paper ones.

I'm wondering if anyone else has gone this way. In person D&D with a VTT. And what your experience was.

I think its a very viable idea. Shouldn't take much effort/resource to hook up a basic laptop to a small tv on the side with a cable. Something like Roll20 just displayed on the side for a map/token while you move them with a mouse.  Even a basic word doc could accomplish the same thing depends on hiw fancy you want things to look. My table did aomething similar once or twice a few years ago with a projector against the wall, it was pretty fun and got the job done. All that time/effort/energy it sounds like you probably do priniting off paper minis and maps cutting to size taping etc. can likely be done quicker doing roll20 or some other visual aid program.

And, you can definitely delegate at-table duties for moving the tokens around on screen to the table, maybe a wireless mouse can be passed around so everyone can still be involved with moving their "own" mini (it's become some sort of unspoken taboo at my table that you dont touch another players mini for some reason).

Good luck!

I have a program that I wrote which I stream to the tv for maps n stuff sodso that. Stream to the tv. It's no different really. Plus it frees up table space. Have a laptop with the map and control over the player and enemy icons and players will be fine with it.

I did this for a game that had a young player, and overall it accomplished the goal just having me move all the pieces while the players would just point at the screen where they wanted to go

It's worth trying, my gaming group was experimenting with in-person VTTs until COVID hit and we just went to not-in-person VTTs. However, expect to find a brand new set of things that you find irritating; VTTs are quirky and it's a lot of work to build your own stuff.

I think it's a great idea. One of the things that I've found helpful for building maps is to use specialised world building sites (I use Inkarnate, but there are others that Ive heard are good too). Some fo the map building on roll20 is a bit clunky (at least to me), so I tend to make the world maps and battle maps on Inkarnate, then import them in to roll20. I also use wallpapers to set the scene for times in the adventure that don't really need their own map - e.g. a photo of a generic market, or a campfire, or a dusty desert, which is good as the players aren't staring at a blank screen, or the remains of their last encounter, when the story has moved on. 

I'd recommend doing a dry run of the mechanics of using  VTT for a few encounters prior if you haven't used one a lot, as there are some quirks to each of the different VTTs and it can interrupt the flow of the game as you trouble shoot. You're probably across this already, but little things like having tokens ready for each of the characters / monsters / NPCs hidden on the map behind fog of war, so you don't have to stop the game and search for a token, testing how it looks to players beforehand, and how to assign tokens to players to move if you want them to be able to do that. Also a good idea to make sure things that you may want to move are on the moveable layers, and aren't part of the map or background (e.g. felt a bit sheepish when the players wanted to blow up the bookcase and chest, and they were part of the scenery on the background layer...). The roll20 tutorial is pretty good, I can't speak to other VTTs as that's what I primarily use. 

One thing to think about using a VTT is if you are playing in an area with not so great internet you can lose access to your game. If that was  consideration, you could maybe look at at using maps in a word document or powerpoint presentation, maximising that to the full screen. Tokens could be images that you have prepared to cut and paste as the adventure moves on. It wouldn't be as smooth as VTT, but might do in a pinch. There's probably lots of offline maps that you could use as well, I'm just not aware of them - someone on here would have to know though. And if you have consistent good internet not an issue. 

If you don't need the collaboration part of a VTT then consider something like MapTools or Foundry.

Or even just a drawing tool that supports layers, so you can have tokens on one layer, fog of war on another, and the map underneath.

Thanks all, for all the amazing suggestions.

Based on the encouragement from this thread, I started setting up Roll20. But the editor for Roll20, and the UI in general, are really quite bad. It's a frustrating experience.

I'm interested in some of these other tools, but unlike some others who prefer standalone apps, I would love if it could be web-based! Because of tools like chromecast, nothing will be easier than being able to open up a player view in a different tab and casting that tab to a TV. 

This is the first I've heard of Foundry. Will check it out! I'd appreciate any other suggestions for web-based (or otherwise easily able to be cast to a tv)  battlemap software that can give me fog of war, maybe even line of sight, etc.

So, what I am currently doing is using Fantasy Grounds to handle all the nitty-gritty. If you're willing to make that substantial first investment for ultimate, it means you have access to an incredibly powerful tool that no-one else needs to spend anything to use. All of the player side content is available in the "demo" client, which allows for character creation and joining games hosted by an "Ultimate" level account. If everyone has their own laptop, it a really great interface.

Thanks, but I want to avoid everyone having to have their own laptop. I just want the player view displayed on a TV that's close to the table.

It's not out yet, but TaleSpire should be amazing. They are saying by end of year release, only $20, and you can download and share maps. 

If miniatures are your biggest problem and you want to stay with "pen & paper" I have two suggestions for you.  The cheapest (around $10) is a set of dry erase standees. They can be had in all different shapes. I like these personally. Multi-Color Card Stands

Another option for around $50 is to buy a D&D Board Game such as this one: D&D Board Game 
It will come with a ton of minis, tokens, and map tiles you can use. 

Thanks, I'll look into those options. Also I found Astral, which is also web-based and looks a lot nicer than Roll20.