Thread: Roll20.net (Easy service for online PnP Gaming)

If you live somewhere where BRP and other D100 titles aren't commonly seen games, this might be useful to you:

Roll20: Web-based online virtual tabletop for all roleplaying games (RPGs)

Basically its a free (though you have to pay for on-phone access and to avoid seeing ads on some pages like campaign descriptions and the LFG page) service to host and play PnP games on. It's system independent, supports a ton of features that would make BRP possible, has good mapping tools, video and voice support for webcams as an option, google plus integration if you desire it (not mandatory), a huge library of background images, sounds, music, and pogs, etc. Best yet, it doesn't require any downloading if you have any HTML5 compliant browser.

I'm hosting my first BRP campaign on it myself, a post apocalyptic one featuring mutants and psions.

Hope this is useful to some of you.

I got to use this as part of AetherCon back in November and liked it quite a bit. They've made some sound upgrades since then (most of my games had issues with sound and switched to the G+ add on to fix it). I especially liked the macros in the die roller - you could program in your target number and it would flag your roll as successful or not. Made it easy for the GM to pick out the rolls he needed to pay attention to.
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Jason
Game Convention Central

Wow this looks really cool. I have always wondered how these things worked, but was always afraid of spending money on something that I was not sure would work.
Thanks for posting.
The physical die roller does not seem to support d100 (two 10 sided). Is this correct or am I missing something?

You're missing something Puck. I've previously used TableTop Forge for my on-line G+Hangout gaming but they've lost their development team and so merged with Roll20. I hope that they will bring their much better (IMO) die roller to the Roll20 application.

The issue I had in the past with Roll20 is that they required you to use their US-based server which was crap for anyone outside the US lags, dropped connections etc). However they have now added the ability to run out of G+hangouts and that works much better although I haven't tested it under load yet.

The benefit over TTF is the ability to retain maps etc., over multiple sessions although TTF did provide ways of saving some material locally and reloading in a new session.

Maptools is also free and very good, though if you want to use some of the advanced macro features it has a very steep (for non-technogeeks) learning curve.