I don't have any problem with Roll20, but I'm curious...

I think this thread could be greatly improved in general if people stated what they dislike about roll20 or what the alternatives they use do better.

Worst parts of Roll20 are it not saving updates to sheets or handouts.
I've lost updates to gold or experience multiple times, to the point where my players just use their mythweavers sheet and update their roll20 whenever I ask.

The biggest thing is the need for alternative sources of players and/or groups. Roll20 itself is simply a tool, but the community is, well, Roll20.

I really like maptool, and I use it for my campaign. I think there's a lot of better UI decisions over Roll20 (although it's still not perfect). If you have any coding experience you can do quite a lot with the macros, and it's open source so you can change other things/add plugins.

Biggest downside is having to forward a port (takes like 3 minutes) and convincing all the players to download it. Also no big pool of public resources if you use that feature of Roll20 a lot.

What is everyone's opinion of Tabletop Simulator?

I'm not the person that made this thread but I'll chime in on the first half

I dislike the optimization for laptops. It's too fucking hard to see all of that mumbo jumbo on the screen at one time and be able to effectively run a multi-media game.

I've had better success running a game off of Mibbit and Steamspeak in the past, truth be told.

The other thing I dislike about it is that you cannot edit the user interface very much. I could solve my above problem if I could just change some settings around and make some features less annoying.

What would anyone on here suggest I should use as an alternative to roll 20??

shit laptop optimization

Otherwise I think playing a game like Lord of The Rings LCG takes longer than in person but otherwise still works.

Why bother bitching about Roll20 at all here?

The Roll20 devs fucked off from here and took their desire to do any work at all to make the site usable with them. Seriously, I had to bitch on the site to the devs a couple years back to make the LFG posting usable. Before that there were these giant megagroups with 2000 people that had listings for every game ever.
Another problem is the entitled player shit. People are refusing to GM nowadays and only want to find a GM that does exactly what they want. The fact that people are holding GM interviews is a disgrace to the industry.
The playerbase on roll20 is the worst thing the site has by a large margin. Mary sue and special snowflake characters run around everywhere and are the worst thing to go through as a GM.

The dice mechanics are still years behind. You can't batch roll dice with modifiers for some fucking reason. Say I wanted to roll seven dice each with a +7 mod, I have to roll them individually.

legitimate concerns are legitimate

but do you have a valid alternative, famalamadingdong?

I only ask because I loathe the roll20 game as much as you do, but desperately need to find non shit players for my games.

Would anyone be willing to teach me how to use Roll20?

I'm a NEET and I feel like maybe I could have friends online to play games with and not be so lonely and bored.

Maybe I'll even get to PLAY Veeky Forums instead of parking my ass in a thread and having only speculatory comments to make.

That's crazy expensive for anyone but the most dedicated, D&D/Pathfinder-focused players.

>per year

Holy fuck, it's not even a one-time purchase?

What kind of Jewry is that?

iirc there was, it was like a few hundred dollars

>MapTool
>port forwarding
Did they break uPnP again?

>Seriously, I had to bitch on the site to the devs a couple years back to make the LFG posting usable.

So wait you complained about an issue and they corrected it? Seems more like a pro than a con in my books.

What do you need to know?

So far I think roll20 is the best of the bunch, even with its multitude of flaws it is easier/faster/cheaper/prettier than the alternatives.

I have no opinion on the community though since I only use it to play with IRL friends.

What's your discord user? (skype is also fine but i kinda don't wanna use it anymore)
If I find spare time I'm up for a oneshot to teach you the ropes at the very least. (Also I have a lot of spare time the next two days)

Also honest advice: playing online is fine but go out to cons, flgs etc. and find a real group, you'll find something decent after a while. I don't want to judge your NEETness as i don't know, but even if its just games: going outside helps with everything. In case you do I wish that that guy shall stay out of your way.

Not really a table top rpg platform, but Anonkun.com is pretty good for running quests and open form role play.

The guys from /fvgt/ steal models from it to use in BattleBox3D, a free version of it.

The month I played in a game that used it, it didn't seem to have much on roll20
It's easier to do piecemeal math, harder to do your own macros. It seemed harder to make maps, but I wasn't the DM in that one so I can't say for sure. I really like the Lego-style map building that roll20 provides, especially when you can just import whatever images you need.
FG does have it's own fonts for different fantasy languages, so you can type in elven or dwarven and it comes out unreadable to anyone who's sheet doesn't have that language on it. Neat for inter-party drama, but that's the only thing I really miss from it.

Fantasy Grounds is available to purchase or to go monthly.

One version is called Ultimate, $150 and anything you have licensed is shared in licensed mode to your players. (You still have to buy your books and they will cost full retail if WoTC products). ALL of this comes up for 20% off sales a few times a year.

If you go monthly, it is like $12 to 'rent' an UItimate license and share it with your players. Might be a good idea if you know that you will be done in 3 months (playing between school semesters, etc).

All I know about Roll20 is that I missed a couple of games due to DDoS attacks and decided to forego wasting entire evenings trying to play.

There are no alternatives to Roll20.

Unfortunately, Roll20's playerbase is 99% cancer.