HYPERBOREA / Virtual Table Top

**Posted by Brock Savage** 8/03/2017 11:17 pm

The GF has convinced me that running a game online is better than herding cats into a face-to-face game. the problem is I can't find a simple virtual tabletop. All I need is a reasonably attractive and user friendly platform to push around some minis or tokens on a gridded map and a way to manage handouts that doesn't require a massive time investment to use.

* Fantasy grounds is expensive. This alone isn't a deal breaker but having played it with my old group, I'm not impressed with its 1997 UI and remember having frequent connection problems.

* A buddy of mine swears by Roll20 and it seems immensely popular. I looked into it, Roll20 seems pretty cool if 1) you have tons of free time and 2) you have basic coding knowlege.

* I own Tabletop Simulator and while it works great for board games, the VTT mods I've tried far have been terrible.

Maybe I'm wrong about these three systems. Maybe there's another VTT system out there I can try. I am open to suggestions.

**Posted by gizmomathboy** 8/04/2017 1:45 pm

I use Roll20. What do you need coding for?

I don't use its video/audio stuff. For that I use google hangouts but skype is also popular.

Roll20 shines for the map stuff and rolling. I haven't gotten into the character sheet automation side of it.

**Posted by Brock Savage** 8/04/2017 2:12 pm

gizmomathboy wrote:
I use Roll20. What do you need coding for?.

Character sheet automation and other functions require a measure of coding. Where do you find art assets?

We use Discord for voice and it's perfectly fine.

Things I Worked On · **Posted by Ynas Midgard** 8/07/2017 10:30 am

I just google stuff for art assets when needed, or use the built-in ones. They're just tokens to me, anyways; the players often spend more time searching for a perfect picture to represent themselves, but as GM I don't worry about stuff like that.

**Posted by gizmomathboy** 8/08/2017 12:37 pm

I don't worry about character sheet automation.

While it's nice they just need to roll and we can figure out if they made a save or something.

**Posted by Brock Savage** 8/08/2017 3:38 pm

Thanks for the feedback. Are there any art resources, free or paid, that have a weird fantasy look? Everything I've found so far is very modern and completely unsuitable for my purposes. I have no problem paying for art resources. Thanks again.

**Posted by Doctor_Rob** 8/14/2017 4:59 pm

I've used Roll20 as a player across several quite different games (Traveller, Conspiracy X, Savage Worlds, Vampire), and we've not had difficultly using standard form-fillable PDF type character sheets. If the DM needs an updated version of the character, simply email a copy for their reference. From the player perspective, Roll20 seems to work just fine. Ref's I know have little trouble with it, although turns do seemingly take a bit longer to play out than gaming face-to-face. The only coding I have encounered is for generating dice rolls, and for the essential basics (which is all you'd need for D&D), the dice command is very simple.