I may not yet have my flying car, but last night sure felt like I arrived in some science-fiction reality. That’s because last night was my first proper taste of Roll20.net and, frankly, it was cool.
Four guys from three continents met up to play a game of Monster Hunter International, using the HERO 6e MHIRPG rules. We were helping the GM to playtest his forthcoming convention scenario. Little did I realise that I was taking a step into a far richer world of gaming.
What’s Roll20?
Here’s a quotation from the site:
Roll20 is the easy-to-use virtual tabletop that brings pen and paper gaming to the web the right way. Built on a powerful platform of tools, yet elegantly simple, it focuses on enhancing what makes tabletop gaming great: storytelling and camaraderie. It’s incredibly user-friendly, and runs right in your web browser, so there’s nothing to download or configure.
What’s great is that it runs in a browser window, which makes it as easy to run on my iPad as it is on my laptop. That said, even though my laptop is very old, we managed to enjoy a good game with minimal fuss.
How much faff?
It was all new for most of us, not least the GM. Mistakes were made. But not many.
Roll20 can stream in live video feeds (for putting faces to names) and audio, although we did choose to use Skype for the sound. Streaming four video feeds put my PC under pressure (it’s very old, you know) but it didn’t cause me many problems. A few slow clicks is not much to complain about, and it was my PC… not the browser.
It was so easy to “get” the basics that, to be honest, I’m really itching to get my hands on a game as GM.
What I liked…
I liked the way I could see a map, hand-out, or character sheet within the browser. Admittedly it’s easier to do a bit of emailing for the character sheets, but handouts worked great… as did maps. Being able to use “fog of war” to hide areas until players can see them is also a cool feature.
Dislikes?
My computer lagging was sucky. But not devastating. And you need to give yourself time to adjust to the experience, especially in learning to use the different functions and tabs. Effort required.
Why so amazed?
Hasn’t this stuff been around for ages now? How come you’re only just tuning in?
Well… I play on alternate Friday Nights with my home group. What need have I for an online game? Until last night, I wasn’t sure I needed it at all, to be honest.
But this is the stuff of SF. Real-time, simultaneous gaming with strangers on three continents is actually pretty cool. It was the kind of thing we imagined back when I started gaming. Now I’m doing it.
You have to remember that, for a child of the Seventies, our science-fiction dream computers had less imagined computing power than my actual iPhone does only 35 years later. This is like living in a fantasy, when you stop to think about it.
Will I play again? I hope so. I want to boot up for some Serene Dawn SF action… I just need to persuade some players to come game too.
Game on!
