Roll(20)ing In

Okay, so, in my last post, I figured out what my campaign would be about, what the ultimate goal would be. I tried to start writing the first adventure of my campaign, but boy, that's hard! Especially when you do not have the details on your players' characters. I don't have the slightest clue what their characters are going to be like, since my boyfriend and two of my friends are incredible roleplayers and try to do something new every time, so I'd wait for their characters and character backgrounds before I can write everything down.

So, instead of having a standstill until the writer's block would remove itself, I decided to go with what I already had and implement that into the platform I was going to use. Roll20.

Some of you probably heard about it or even used it already. I'm not entirely new to Roll20, however, I only used it as a player. It's fairly easy to use when you're "just" a player. I never really thought about the mechanics of the program. When I started, it all looked fairly simple.

Now, for those who haven't heard of roll20.net yet, it's a website allowing you to play all kinds of dice-based tabletop roleplaying games online. It has an in-game voice chat and even the possibility to broadcast webcams. Furthermore, the dungeon master (in this case, me) can already set up the adventure and even the whole campaign on it. It's very user-friendly once you figure out how it works. Some say it's very easy to use, others, including myself, find it a bit more difficult to figure out the mechanics and all the features, but with quite a bit of patience and some help from a good friend who already DM'ed some adventures of his campaign using the website, I managed to figure out how it works and even though it sometimes frustrates me, I get it to work for me.

Time to Get Started

I started with deciding on the name. What would the campaign be called? I got settled on "Feykissed" it works for me, maybe not for everybody. But hey, it's my campaign.

I then got to choose if I wanted to implement character sheets. I did, and I chose the 5e Dungeons and Dragons character sheet, since that's the system we'll be using.

I then joined my own game. As the maker, and thus admin, I am able to change everything on my field. And what a field I saw. When you first enter a game you just made, you are greeted by a blank part of the screen with just a grid on it. On both sides of your screen there are toolbars, on the left are a few tools you can use on the grid. On the right are all your settings tabs. This is also where you search for your objects, your backgrounds and the tokens.

Due to me using the free version and being an extreme cheapskate, I only use the free-to-use stuff people provide. Shout-out to everyone making and contributing to open-source stuff!

So, now ready to start, knowing where to find my objects, I decided to first place a background, a grass floor. I pull one from the gallery and it covers the grid... What the...

I right-click and notice there are multiple layers you can put stuff on. Tokens cover the grid, as they are actually supposed to be in between the lines of it. So I pulled the grass to the background, together with everything that shouldn't move anymore. There, first scene objects are placed and I'm tired of figuring out how everything works. I got inspiration and decided when and for what the first rolls would be on this amazing site: roll20.net.

I love it.

Now I just have to learn how to actually implement my players in it, but that's for next time.

Bye!