Skyland Games

It’s been a while, fam. But renewing the URL today, I thought it might be time for a blog post. A lot has changed over the years, but one thing that hasnt changed is the need to play games when not everyone can travel to your location. If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that a virtual tabletop (VTT) is a handy thing to know your way around. I’ve been working on running games online since the Maptool days of yore, with portforwarding and the whole nine yards. I’d say I’m a pro at it, and I know its something a lot of people struggle with doing well. So, lets talk about it.

Types of Virtual Tabletops

There are a variet of VTT’s out there:

• Roll20: A very popular and widely used VTT with integrated voice, video, and text chat. 
• FoundryVTT: A one-time purchase VTT that is known for its flexibility and extensive add-on modules. 
• Tabletop Simulator: A physics-based program that lets users play a wide variety of games, including recreating physical board games. 
• Fantasy Grounds: A VTT known for having a robust feature set for different rule systems. 
• Owlbear Rodeo: A simpler and more lightweight VTT that focuses on core functionality like maps and tokens. 
• TaleSpire: A VTT that focuses on creating 3D miniature-based environments for games. 

I’ve been using Roll20 for a long while now, and will be discussing, in this post and a few more, how to get setup up and get things rolling for an online game. Each format is unique, so I’m going to try to direct you to common steps that you’d want to use as a fundamental for games of all stripes, but will admit that your mileage may vary with things like TaleSpire or Owlbear Rodeo which I don’t use much. Foundry looks great, but I haven’t waded far into it. Fantasy Grounds has been around a long time and I think is well articulated, but I found it a little confusing myself.

Admittedly, Roll20 has its own problems, but its familiar to me and I feel like they’ve been doing a good job lately adding funcitonality and much requested improvements. But, you do whats comfortable, affordable, and what you can get all your players to use.

Pick Your Campaign Chat Space

Scott, what the hell are you talking about? Roll20 has a message board right there native in the system? Well, it sucks, and no one wants to use that garbage. What you need to do is setup a (FREE) Discord channel and invite your friends to it. Create text channels like this:

• General Chat
• In-Character Chat
• Memes/Gifs/Reddits
• Character Generation
• NPCs
• Campaign Notes (or The Story So Far)
• avrae

You can mute channels that don’t interest you, and you can create separate private channels for things like:

• Thieves Cant
• Orcish
• Characters trapped in a room away from everyone else
• etc

That way if you want to quickly let only the relevant people know what’s up, you don’t have to think about it. Type what they said in that channel, and only people who you’ve added that know thieves cant or orcish, or are in a specific place, will be able to read it. You can also move old channels to another folder to get them out of your face when you’re done with them. Discord is searchable, so it’s great to put NPC’s in a bucket and let people find them with that search. Literally did this with a minor NPC my players met two years of actual time ago, and they were like “WTF, this guy?” Deep cuts, my friends.

Avrae is a dice rolling program that has its own nifty functionality. You can use that, D&D Beyond, Roll20 and discord to do some fairly sophistocated RP tricks, beyond the scope of what I’m getting into today. But here are some tutorials for those programs:

Make sure you’ve got Beyond20 set up with your browser.

Alright, have fun with that.

Now, we’ve got our chat space set up, you can jam out some chacacters online, create some chat space for talking about who is playing a drow wizard (AGAIN), and put some art in there showing who your character is. If your ethics allow, steal art from other folks online, pump out an AI characer sketch from Gemini or ChatGPT, use an ethical AI character creator that pays artists for sampling their work (like Mythweaver, which we need to blog about), commission it yourself, or draw shit with crayons, I don’t know, live your life man. You could do a channel that has PC’s listed in there, but you probably won’t need it. If you a have a D&D beyond campaign set up, you can place characters in the campaign and everyone should still be able to see them.

Oh, here’s how to make a D&D Beyond campaign. You’ll be wanting that if it’s D&D you’re playing.

Alright, now you’re ready to start work on the basics of the Roll20 campaign itself.

Setting up your Roll20 campaign

Go ahead and get yourself enough of a subscription to get started, whatever that means for you. You should get your money’s worth out of it. Click on Create New Game and name it something cool. Select your base character sheet (consider buying something cool from the game store if the type of game you’re running is not in the list). Then click the button to accept and get started.

Let me tell you. Spending $5 on tokens or art or charactersheets will save you HOURS. Just spend it. I spend $9 on a fish sandwich meal at McDonalds yesterday. Existence is pain. Just spend it or get another crunchwrap supreme and spend 6 hours making things by hand on Roll20. I’ll wait.

Next screen you can change the name, upload some art for the campaign, and add Game Add Ons to create specialty functionality like special token markers (for conditions, there are several out there), and other add ons. I wouldn’t mess with that though for your first time.

There’s a button here to invite players, which is self explanatory, but you will be able to copy the invite link and post it in your discord, which may save some folks a step. I’d wait until your campaign doesn’t look like an empty notebook however…. In any event….

CONGRATULATIONS

You’ve given birth a very squalid campaign! Part 2 will get into how to set up a landing page, token page, how to use your handouts, library and playlists. But this is the core of the overall setup you need to get going. I’d note that there are billions of how-to’s out there that will tell you how to do things on roll20, but not as many that tell you what to do on roll20. We’ll get into that and much more next time.