Last night I had to postpone our Classic Traveller game because the Roll20 virtual tabletop was doing weird things. After getting pissed, updating Chrome, looking stuff up, etc, I finally told the group we’d have to delay. I tried on my MacBook and on my Chromebook - the problem was not the computer.

Later that night I discovered it was working fine in Firefox and even Safari. DERP!

So I spent the rest of the evening exploring other VTT options. I looked at Fantasy Grounds. I tried Foundry. I bought a one month subscription to Owlbear Rodeo.

I came to the conclusion that for our needs Roll20 is still the best choice.

All I need is a simple system. I don’t need a lot of crazy cool shit like animations. I need pages on which to drop maps, tokens to move around like miniatures, “handouts” for my players to open and use, and character record sheets on which to type out Classic Traveller characters. I don’t need a lot of other stuff.

Of the systems I looked at, Owlbear Rodeo, seemed like it had potential. However, it lacks character record sheets. Its stated goal is simply to provide a virtual tabletop. I thought it did that pretty well. I didn’t find it very intuitive. Look, I’m just a librarian, but I work on various systems all day long, and have for the last 30 years. If I can’t dive into a system and have the basics sorted in an hour, without reading a lot of instructions, I deem it less than intuitive. That’s how I found Owlbear. It didn’t suck, but it was going to be a heavier lift than I wanted. Fantasy Grounds was totally wrong, and Foundry was going to be a big pain.

If I were to use Owlbear Rodeo I need to probably put a lot of stuff into campaign wiki. I would host it on my own server space. We’d still need to use Discord for audio. And I’d have to re-do all the transparent GIF “paper” miniatures I use for tokens. That’s a lot of work that I’m just not going to do voluntarily.

Honestly, I was pretty tired last night. When I got home I was in a good mood though, and I had enough energy to ref the game well. I did not have the energy to butt heads with tech problems.