Is anyone else sort of miffed about the dominance of Roll20 these days?

Is anyone else sort of miffed about the dominance of Roll20 these days?

Don't get me wrong - it's pretty damn nice in a lot of ways, but the addition of the map is something my old irc-using brain is annoyed by. I liked being able to just...describe a room or area, instead of having to have a fucking map for it.

What's worse is that I can't even do quick half-assed attempts because there are no basic-ass "Draw a line" things, everything you draw using their tools becomes a shape and you end up accidentally clicking on it and all that annoying bullshit. So then, if you just try to use a map someone already made by searching for it, you eventually run out, or can't find the right sort of thing.

So now i'm making my own maps (Pic Related), but it's taking so god-forsaken long to make something that doesn't look like clown vomit that it's slowing down every other part of my planning workload for the game. Seriously, this shit is taking me hours in photoshop for each map if I do it to this level of quality, and lots of them end up being walked through in 10 minutes and never seen again. I used to use a program called fantasy grounds, and honestly I liked that more. It just had a map you could use an MS Paint-tier line brush on without it becoming a fucking geographic object you could move around.

I've also found that now that i'm using all these maps and tokens instead of descriptions...I end up describing stuff less. It's my own fault, but It just keeps happening. Why describe your npcs or room when you can see a decent approximation of it to the left of the text box? Players tend to do it too, i've noticed. I dunno. I mostly just wanted to vent my frustration. I honestly wish roll20 would just add a way to remove the map entirely, because even if I try to not use it, it's still there to the side taunting me.

And don't even get me started on using voice chat or god forbid, webcams in roll20.

Use other voice chats and roll20 for the rolls, you don't have to use the map either, just paste some fancy ass picture or something.

So don't use the map? I'm not playing the sort of games that require us to use maps.. So we just use it as a backdrop. Pic related is from our musketeer game.

It just seems like such a huge fucking waste of screen space, I dunno.

Don't use maps, or draw simple maps with which you have annotated with descriptions. I personally go for the classic black and white maps. Or use no map at all like and said, but instead of just blank pictures try to use the space for information or gameplay.

I'd go with simple maps, but the tools they have for drawing and stuff in roll20 are so counterintuitive and finnicky it's annoying.

Draw them in a program like GIMP or even MSPaint. It's free and easy.

What you are making seems to be high effort for good art.

Try using Tiled or something. Pixel sprite maps like the old SNES rpgs function well, look okay, and give things a quaint retro feel.

You could also use the map just as a means to show off background and character art. There's no obligation to use it as a map.

Yeah, i've used Tiled actully, but it becomes a bit of a pain to make certain types of maps with it based on some sorts of aesthetics and settings not having tilesets that work with it.

Good for fantasy stuff though.

I like pixlr for making maps too.i like that its online so i can switch boxes for hosting.

Fantasy Grounds is good, personally i feel like it takes some fun out of playing. too much automation. I usually run with MapTool.

I just still use IRC

Good lord, it's a time traveller from 2003

MapTool is good and has a better set of drawing tools.

You realize Discord is just IRC with a fancy skin, right?

WAY better scripting too

>'ve also found that now that i'm using all these maps and tokens instead of descriptions...I end up describing stuff less. It's my own fault, but It just keeps happening. Why describe your npcs or room when you can see a decent approximation of it to the left of the text box? Players tend to do it too, i've noticed

My group play a lot with roll20 and I noticed that too. I know struggle to give good description without a map.
I'm trying to fix that so I simply don't use map or picture

>I liked being able to just...describe a room or area, instead of having to have a fucking map for it.
If you can do so in a manner that communicates all the salient points to your players, I thank you and would give you a handy. Some people need pictures.

Completely agree. You can write scripts that control token movement.

Theoretically you could write simple AI too.

My table generally uses Roll20 for a digital tabletop and either Skype or Discord for voice.

Also, for making maps, instead of using their map-skins, I've found it useful to simply use the draw tool on a blank map with a grid. The map itself will JUST be representative (E.G. the green squigly lines represent difficult terrain from vines etc...) and I have a flavor image in the upper left hand corner. That way instead of taking forever to make maps and forgetting to describe, it takes less than five minutes to make a map (often a minute or less) and I spend more time on the descriptions, which is solidified by the flavor image (which I often search for WHILE describing the scene to optimize time.)

I started running a game over Discord after using IRC for the longest time and it's a pretty nice upgrade.

It's like having your own IRC server. You have finer grained control of who sees what rooms and can speak in them. You can wear a nickname for just your game. For example I have a Players permission group, a GM permission group for myself, and an Observers permission group for people who wanted to watch. Only the Players and GM can post in the IC rooms (though the Obs can still view them) but everyone can type in the OOC rooms.

You don't have to worry about random people crashing your channel / server since you have full, IRCOp-level powers. On my game's server people who join don't have any privileges until I grant them. It's like having a +m mode on an IRC channel but even more fine-grained.

You can refer to groups and ping them all. "@Players game time in 15 mins!" will give them a nice notification and if they have Discord on phones it pushes a notification there too. My players can always get a hold of me by going "@GM Got a question about such-and-such"

You can pin messages to a notice board style thing. So during character creation you could hang a reply with a long list of allowed splatbooks, or the character creation rules in use. All without cluttering the room's name and description.

And probably the biggest plus me and my players, you can edit messages. Say goodbye to typos and grammar mistakes. Honestly that along would have been enough to make me switch to Discord.