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Roll20.net for Pathfinder

I've been wanting to try out Roll20.net for a while in an actual game, but haven't had the best of opportunities.  Tonight, we had two players out in our Friday night game, and with the bitter cold weather at hand, I decided to host a Roll20 game of Pathfinder.  I emailed out the link after firing up a small campaign I had been playing around in.

Before the game started, I had 3 pages.  The first page was a village with some buildings I had set up earlier. It was that generic sort of pub / inn / shops setup where most adventures start out.  It was a convenient place to get things set up and let the players get used to the controls.  The second page was a bridge over water with a nice spot for an ambush.  The third map was some caves connected to a tomb.

We played the adventure of picking up a quest in town and leaving town.  Leaving town brought the party across the bridge to encounter some dire wolves.  We didn't make it to the caves.

Let me preface this review with this:  my players and I didn't spend a lot of time running through the help and videos.  The help and videos on roll20 are phenomenal and so we probably missed a lot of stuff, maybe even stuff that addresses our complaints.

So here's my take on it, though I'll post more after I have a pow-wow with my gaming group in person.

The Good

  • Chat, rolls, and emotes were easy to learn and intuitive.
  • Adding characters, NPCs, and pulling in maps was quick and easy.
  • I REALLY liked being able to drag and drop maps from my maps folder and quickly align them.
  • The ability for me to switch between NPCs in chat as a GM was awesome.
  • The controls from the tokens seemed intuitive to everyone.
  • My daughter was on a 10" netbook and didn't have trouble with screen size.  I was very impressed.
  • Macros look awesomely powerful, though we mostly didn't take the time to set them up.
The Bad
  • My players spent most of their time playing around getting audio and video chat going.  My recent upgrade to Windows 8 took out my webcam and the new microphone that came today still isn't working right.  I also couldn't find my headphones.  Next time we my try a google hangout or the other audio/video option.
  • One player got video and audio working
  • One player got audio working.
  • One player couldn't seem to get his audio to turn off.
  • One player had to install another browser to get roll20 to work at all
  • The Turn Tracker didn't seem to sync?  Not sure if that is by design.
The Ugly
  • I found it very annoying that I had to add all the player tokens to each page.  My suggestion is to be able to designate a starting position on the map and select and copy to all tokens for the PCs.  (EDIT: You can select the tokens and Copy and Paste them to the new page!  Problem Fixed.)
In summary, this is awesome stuff.  It will only get better.  I will continue to use it when I want to host online games.  I will spend the time to go through the videos and help so I can use it better.

Players from tonight:  Please leave your thoughts below in comments, if you want.
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