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Setup for a Roll20-based Online Pathfinder Horror Campaign

So we've been getting things set up for the new campaign.  I helped set up character sheets in Roll20 for everyone.  We even did some testing tonight.  Audio was a bit iffy, so I decided to set up a teamspeak3 server as a backup, just in case.

Some observations:

  • Roll20 doesn't always give a good indication of what the players will see to the GM.  To get around this, I often end up running one pane as a user and one pane as the GM.
  • Managing a large number of pages in Roll20 seems painful.  I am always scrolling around.  It also seems like the page scroller should disappear automatically sometimes but doesn't.
  • It seems like I am setting page settings over and over again for things like distance in Pathfinder/3.5 units.
  • Modern maps seems ill-supported on Roll20.
  • Getting players to generate characters in advance is difficult.
  • PCGen is a resource hog.  I don't know how they can possibly keep moving it up in version without addressing the resource usage.  1 character sheet load took almost a half a gig of RAM.
  • Teamspeak3 server is easy to set up until you don't get a router port opened automatically.  I had a conflicting app rule in the port forwards that I had to delete and then replace. 
  • The android app for teamspeak3 worked great on my Galaxy S4.  That was a surprise after reading the reviews.
  • Roll20 needs a better way of holding GM notes.  I ended up sticking guidepost objects on my GM layer to hold them.  It wasn't really ideal.
  • The Darklands for Golarion seem a lot scarier that the underdark.  It works well for horror.  I highly recommend "Into the Darklands" as a resource.
  • Desperation seems to be a key aspect to entrench in the setting of a horror campaign.
  • Dynamic lighting is nice.
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Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 15, 2013 at 12:26 PM

    On PCGen that's just what it reserves incase you load a LOT of sources, if you are loading just a few you can play with the settings in the pcgen_low_mem.bat to run the program.

    ReplyDelete

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