They see me rollin‘.
To get a roleplaying game going you have to make it past as many hassles as any party of adventurers ever faced in a dungeon—only instead of traps that sever your hand if you put it in a statue’s mouth they’re more like scheduling issues and the difficulty of finding a group you vibe with.
Playing online with a virtual tabletop means at least people don’t have to come to your house, which is one hassle less, but can cause its own problems. Some virtual tabletops have to be paid for, some require everyone to sign up to the service, some demand players learn how to use complicated software, and so on. Which is why Discord pairing with Roll20 is potentially ideal—Discord is the default voice app for most gamers, and Roll20 is a popular virtual tabletop that’s lightweight enough to have a low learning curve, but featured enough that you can get advanced with stuff like realtime lighting and fog of war if you want.
The big flaw of Roll20 is its voice and video quality, which is why everyone runs Zoom or Discord in another window when they use it. Combining the two is a simple solution, and having Roll20 run as an „activity“ you can launch inside Discord as easily as one of its Jackbox-adjacent minigames means players you invite don’t need to make Roll20 accounts. The dream is of having instant plug-and-play RPG sessions, where the only prep needed is the GM planning a scenario and then everyone being online at the same time.
The Roll20 activity is currently in beta, so it’s not seamless yet. The first issue we ran up against was getting everyone into the same channel. While it’s easy for the host, who just needs to have a Roll20 Pro account to get access to the beta server and make a channel, everyone else had to be invited to the server, then invited to the channel via the Voicemaster bot, and then given user permission by the same bot—a final step I managed to miss completely.
