I ran my first adventure using Roll20 last night. Despite some initial skepticism from a few of the players it went really well. This is doubly surprising as it’s only the second Pathfinder adventure I have GM’d, and indeed only the second adventure I’ve GM’d for many years!
I have much to learn before I become a good GM, but the evening was a success – we were able to be joined by an extra player who is usually too far away to make our regular game nights and at least one of the players felt we achieved as much in-game, or more, as we would in a normal evenings adventuring.
I attribute much of the success of the evening to the following three things:
- As a group we were very well prepared. I have spent much of my professional life using tools like Lync and Skype to participate in meetings, even more so in the past year or so as a remote worker. Based on that experience I requested that everyone get their accounts set up in advance and set up a time to test the system with me in advance of game night.
Our groups former-GM (f-GM) and I spent a couple of hours one evening doing an initial trial of Roll 20 and experienced issues with the built-in WebRTC voice & video chat. We next tried using Roll 20 with Google Hangouts and the chat experience was much smoother – we used Google Hangouts on game night and whilst the UI is a little more cluttered and the Roll 20 UI is compressed clear communication is so important that this decision was easy to make.
The day before game night most of the group joined a Google Hangout I was hosting at some point throughout the evening and tested their mic and camera setup, played with the basics of the system and even set up some macros.
All of the above meant that on game night everyone knew their systems were correctly configured and weren’t looking at new and unfamiliar software for the first time on game night.
- I was reasonably well prepared. I purchased a PDF of the GM Screen from Paizo (all of my Pathfinder material is in digital form, more on that later perhaps) and printed the GM side of the screen along with a grapple flow chart I found online and the full description of each monster the party would face from the PRD (though I missed a couple of descriptions for things like the Troglodytes’ aura and the Giant Spiders’ web, which are explained elsewhere in the rulebooks).
I’d also drawn all the maps for the dungeon the party would be crawling days before game night and had a reasonable handle on the adventures structure.
Of course there was more I could have done, like knowing the spells on the scrolls that were available as treasure to the party, being more familiar with the module I was basing the adventure on, etc…
- The group was very forgiving. We are long-time friends, we all want this to work and everyone was very forgiving of mine and each-others gaffs. We had a player turn up an hour and a half late (thinking he was “only” 30mins late), I was ill-prepared for a few eventualities, a few spouses were talking to players not quite realising what was going on – but nobody got too upset and everything flowed smoothly.
Unfortunately as this was only my second time Games Mastering a Pathfinder adventure I’m still a little green when it comes to the rules, but I’m sure this will get better with time and I didn’t feel like it slowed us down too much. I’m fortunate that f-GM stepped into my old role as rules librarian and was looking up things for us as they came up during play.
It’s nice for a GM, regardless of whether you’re playing around a real or virtual table, to have someone to share the burden and help keep on top of the rules and I’m very grateful for my friend f-GM for doing so.
My only real gripe with Roll 20 is that I couldn’t get the handouts system to work, I tried to show the players an image when we were testing the system but it seems they were never shown it. Reading up on the Handouts feature in Roll 20’s documentation since I think this was probably user error but I’m certain the UI could be clearer.
Handouts would have been especially useful early in the adventure when I didn’t go a good job of explaining the look of the tower the party were sent to clear – having an image I could show the party whilst I try and explain it would really help and I’ll be trying to use the handouts mechanism in future. Hopefully with more success.
In all I’m really pleased with Roll 20, I can’t wait to use it again and fully expect to be upgrading to one of the non-free subscriber levels in future. For now, I have more preparing to do for next weeks adventure!