Impressions: First Roll20 Session as a DM

The Corona Crisis has forced my normal Face-to-Face (F2F) D&D game to either go into hiatus (never a good thing for a long running campaign) or to go online.  We've opted to try online play using Roll20 as our software engine as at least one of our players has fairly deep experience with it as a player and a deep programming background making macros and such an accessible option.

I'm writing this article the morning after my first session.  My intent is to summarize the bumps and some potential actions to smooth out the game moving forward.

Description of the Game Situation

Before diving into the issues, I'll take a moment to describe the encounter as a refresher for those who participated and to set the stage for any one who wandered into this posting. 

The session was a single combat, actually an extension from our last F2F session.  We are playing a campaign out of the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure book with the party currently on the Long Road escorting a caravan. The caravan is five merchant wagons each with four NPCs a caravan leader and five players -- 26 total friendly participants.  That's a big group and it drives big encounters, definitely treading into unwieldy territory.

At the end of last session, the Caravan had been attacked briefly by 16 bandits.  They fired a few volleys and ran into the night.  Three of the party gave chase with a forth running after them after a few rounds.  The night's encounter was a continuation of the last session and began with the party scattered, running in the dark after the bandits who staged a hasty ambush as they realized the party was faster and able to track them.

Description of our Setup

We were playing from a number of houses over Roll20 with Discord used for voice and side bar conversations. One pair was in the same room.  I was the only one using a webcam.

Impressions -- Game Perspective

I walked away from the session with a number of observations of what went right and wrong from a game experience perspective. Here is my summary:

The Good

1. Dynamic lighting allowed "realistic" use of player vision,  impossible F2F,
2. Attack/Damage rolls were generally much faster than F2F,
3. Tracking damage was much easier than F2F, 
4. Handling a large encounter (17 mobs) was generally soother than expected,
5. Most of all, we were able to play D&D!

The Bad

1. I missed some private messages during the game,
2. Player feedback was missing (I couldn't see faces to read reactions),
3. Cross talk and background noise was occasionally an issue,
4. Handling of breaks/AFKs was not addressed,
5. Several mobs were missed in the initiative tracker,
6. Finding the active mob was a challenge,
7. Changing between layers/modes was annoying,
8. Roll20 dynamic lighting doesn't work very well for conditional LOS, things like hills blocking vision between different levels, 

I'd like tho retain the good things and do what I can to alleviate the bad items.  My first step toward the reduction of issues is to dive a bit deeper into each and come up with some actions to address them.

Private Messages

Private messages can be sent through a number of means, whispered in Roll20, direct messaged in Discord, even texted over the phone.  When playing as a DM, I'm often overloaded with tasks, scanning for incoming messages just doesn't happen.  Sometimes those messages are important to the game and time sensitive.  Because of this, I want a bit more structure for PMs.  I think the following rules might help:

• Do NOT use Roll20 whispers -- I just don't need more messages popping in game,
• Do use Discord direct messages for normal private messages,
• Do use phone text messages for urgent brief messages,
• Always seek a positive acknowledgement that the message was received, perhaps by saying (via voice chat) something like this: Hey Joe, I sent you a message on Discord. Repeating as necessary until you hear an acknowledgement. 

I think following that procedure would alleviate my concern and certainly relieve me of regret for not seeing someone's private message in a timely manner.

Player Feedback

Sensing player reactions are important both to my enjoyment of the game and as a tool to adjust pacing and other factors.  It turns out that faces and body language are key to this and were totally absent from the game session last night.  I'd like to encourage two things from our group to help with this:

1. Obtain and use a webcam.  Roll20 seems to handle this really well and it makes at least some non-verbal communication possible.  I know they are hard to find these days, but I'd really like to give them a go.
2. Try to verbalize reactions or at least type them in character as we play.  I want to know when people are engaged and when I need to speed things up or change them in some other way.  In other words, more emotes please.

 Cross Talk and Background Noise

Cross talk is a natural result of a group communicating.  The more often people say things (which I want) the more often we step on each other verbally (which I don't want).  We also had some issues with background noise, more formally known as Sascha and Kapi disrupting things.

Three possibilities come to mind to reduce this:

The first is to use Push-To-Talk (PTT) in Discord.   Here is a how-to for setting up PTT:  Appuals.com.  While it is annoying to have to push a certain key to activate your mic, it dramatically cuts down on random noise.  This was a hard requirement in my WOW guild discord - for good reason.

A second possibility is a manual mute on headset.  My preferred gaming headset has a boom mic that mutes if pushed up.  This makes extended conversation possible and provides a visual cue that the mic is hot (or not).  I like this approach for DMing where I will be talking a lot and don't want to mess with a key press for PTT.

A third possibility is mouse click mute on discord.  This is done by clicking the little microphone icon (bottom left of Discord screen).  It gives visual and audio feedback on state changes, so if a mouse click is easier than PTT then this is a good choice.

Having most of the mics cold most of the time will reduce noise and make priority conversation clearer. But it makes the atmosphere of playing together worse, so a middle ground is probably best.  Having a strategy to make your mic cold quickly, especially when dealing with a barking dog, is a GoodThing™.

Breaks and AFKs

We tend to have sessions that run for close to 4 hours.  In F2F games, its pretty easy for people to get up to stretch, get snacks, visit the loo, or pet a puppy without significantly disrupting the game. Playing online it's much harder to time these events so that the game isn't interrupted.  Having people quietly get up to attend to such needs results in what feels like people randomly disappearing which makes the feedback situation even worse.

I want to avoid having someone speak to another participant, wait for a response and then discover that person wasn't actually there at the time.   This quickly devolves into frustration, repeated messages and general sadness.

I also want to avoid starvation and burst bladders.

I think we can best address this by doing two things:

1. Scheduled Breaks - Having a schedule break lets people know an opportunity to refill that glass is coming in X minutes, discouraging the temptation for a quick dash to the kitchen until break time.  How often and how long should breaks be?  I think the minimum is once every two hours for ten minutes.  Maybe five minutes at the top of each hour? The group should discuss and collectively enforce the agreement.
2. Announcing Necessary AFKs - If someone has to AFK during the session and it can't wait for a break, perhaps the cat is on fire and really needs to be extinguished, interupt, announce it briefly and attend to it.  Perhaps just say "AFK Cat on Fire" in Discord or typed in Roll20 chat (not Discord).

Missing MOBs on Initiative

I had challenges last night with some critters not being listed in the initiative tracker, being missed, or being deleted from the tracker.  With 16 identical mobs and all of them moving on their own initiative score this is a problem that seems inevitable.  I would have never attempted this F2F.

The F2F approach is to lump them and have the DM move them all at the same spot in a combat round. Roll20's handling of initiatives makes this simplification seemingly unnecessary.  It feels more realistic to have them all move at individual spots - but this makes keeping track harder.  It forced me to depend on the tracker which made me vulnerable to problems if a mob was accidentally deleted or other unexpected things happened.

An obvious fix for this issue is to retain the F2F simplification, have mobs of each type or even all the mobs move at the same spot in the imitative order.

Finding Active MOB

Last night's encounter was on a huge map, 150x150 squares (the largest Roll20 supports), which highlighted an issue with Roll20's initiative tracking.

When I floated over (or maybe selected, I don't remember) a mob in the tracker, a yellow highlight appeared around the matching token.  That's great, unless the mob is off screen so the highlight isn't visible.  There is no way to jump from the tracker to the active mob.  That is a function sorely lacking in Roll20 and makes big battles harder to deal with.

Once again, retaining the F2F simplification of lumped initiatives things get easier. If all 16 bandits moved at the same time, I could move the map to see some of them.  Resolve their actions and then scroll to the next set. This does run the risk of double moving some mobs and missing others, in exactly the way it can happen F2F.  Tried and true methods used in F2F games translate to Roll20, mark moved mobs (with a symbol) if it seems likely to be confusing, having players help avoid double moves.  All in all, not that big an issue.

Changing Between Layers/Modes

I found myself frequently having top do mouse clicks to change between layers (GM, Token, or Oops) and to switch between measurement mode (for distances) and selection mode.  The buttons to manage these functions is in the top left of my screen which is a long way across a big screen (first world problems) and generally just annoying. 

The obvious solution is to use keyboard short cuts.  It turns out teh devs at Roll20 allready fallented this issue.  Those short cuts are listed on their pages keyboard shortcuts and advanced keyboard shortcuts.

I put together a summary of the advanced keybindings on a PDF: Summary of Roll20 Bindings.  I expect I will be setting these bindings as active and using this summary.

I need to look at these more closely, pick one and have a highlighted cheat sheet at hand while I play, at least for a while to learn them.  I'm thinking I will want the advanced settings, as I tend to prefer keyboard commands to clicks as once they are learned they are faster.

Dynamic Lighting Limitations

The issues I had with dynamic lighting last night all revolved around limitations of the rather amazingly powerful system. Roll20 allows optical walls to be placed on the map that block light and line of sight.  This is fantastic for things like walls and pretty painfully limited for things like hills.

Someone on a hilltop (or a ditch) can see others in the same area and have a restricted view of the rest of the map.  Perhaps they can see other hilltops or into a valley at a distance but not close to the slope of the hill.  Its all rather messy and beyond the power of Roll20.

I don't know of any fix for this, other than than being aware of the limitation and making sure players are also aware and can control meta-knowledge appropriately.