Played 3 hours of 4e Reavers of Harkenwold on Roll20 tonight. A skill challenge (trying to recruit the Woodsinger Elves) and 3 battles (2 notably tough) - our level 3 PCs earned 693 XP each!
The Roll20 VTT definitely works great with 4e.
D&D 4E Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?
- Thread starter LoganRan
- Start date
Played 3 hours of 4e Reavers of Harkenwold on Roll20 tonight. A skill challenge (trying to recruit the Woodsinger Elves) and 3 battles (2 notably tough) - our level 3 PCs earned 693 XP each!
The Roll20 VTT definitely works great with 4e.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, I haven't done it in quite a while, but by the end of the 4e era it was working pretty well. I doubt it has gotten WORSE since then. That was the early days of roll20 too. Astral is another option, not sure how good its 4e is, but generally its a bit cleaner VTT than roll20 (but they are not all that different, really).
Joshua Randall
Legend
I just don't have the patience as a GM to set up all the macros and tokens and maps and stuff. I want to be able to buy pre-made Roll20/whatever modules. :waaaah:
cbwjm
Seb-wejem
I was like that with roll20 as well, now though, I found an online token creator and I've got a reason to make maps in dungeondraft so I've found I've kind of been enjoying the roll20 set up.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
My beef with roll20 is mostly that there's a lot of very awkward UX. It is just clunky! Astral is a bit more polished, but I haven't used it enough yet to decide if the UX is really better or not. It sure can be rather obtuse! I spent 45 minutes the other day trying to figure out how to set up an NPC before I figured out that you MUST upload an image of a character sheet before anything will work. You can upload any old image whatsoever, but if it ain't there, nothing works, and no nothing anywhere documents that, nor does the UI block you from doing other stuff, it just fails. So, maybe they are both clunky, lol.
Joshua Randall
Legend
Yessss... as a UX designer the absolutely horrible design of Roll20 and every other platform I've looked at fills me with... honestly not rage, but terrible sadness. Sadness that people are putting up with such terrible design because there's nothing else better to compete with Roll20, etc. and drive out these bad designs
Roll20 is what personal computer interfaces would be like if Xerox hadn't ever had its ideas stolen and popularized by Apple.
Roll20 is what personal computer interfaces would be like if Xerox hadn't ever had its ideas stolen and popularized by Apple.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Foundry is mighty nice looking gui and I figure I am hoping that prebuilt support follows.
Jacob Lewis
Ye Olde GM
I want to say Foundry is great, but the truth is that it's still being developed. And every time they update to a new build, I gotta go back and see what still works and what doesn't. And wait for all the other developers to do likewise. Unfortunately for people like myself who put a lot of effort and detail into their projects, this is a HUGE pain in the butt. I don't like relying on others to do the things I want done for me.
That said, I believe this will be a GREAT system to use if/when they ever fully develop something stable without constant changes.
Regardless of any platform, 4e will (usually) require a LOT of manual input to make it work properly. A better solution may be just to use a minimalist approach for a virtual map (i.e. rules agnostic) for keeping track of position and conditions while using other programs for bookeeping.
Jacob Lewis
Ye Olde GM
I didn't say games online don't exist or aren't possible. I was just suggesting they could be more common if there was better hardline support out there for the system rules.
Joshua Randall
Legend
You also really, really need a way to pull in the 4e characters' power output (attack / damage / conditions) into the VTT so that I don't have to hand create 47 different 'dice expressions'.
