My group of gaming friends are considering an AP over Roll20 in the future and were wondering if anybody has done this before. If you have, do you have any advice for us?
Background:
We have been playing PFS scenarios over Roll20 for a couple of months now with rotating GMs and it has been going well. We have been having a good time and everything, more or less, has been going pretty smoothly.
We have talked it over and understand that the players would have to stay on the rails to a greater extent than if we played face to face (real time map generation would just suck). We also realize DM/PC communication would have to be on point so the DM could prepare as well as possible. Are there other things we need to be aware of before making a decision?
Finally, are there any APs you think would be particularly suited to VTT? Sandbox games would be a little more challenging (looking at you Kingmaker), but other than that, we don't know how else to narrow them down.
I ran Reign of Winter on roll20 a while ago and it went pretty well. Having the pdfs of the adventures is nice as you can just copy those map images right into the vtt (there may be some grid alignment issues, sometimes the squares aren't square on those images). Maps not present I just quickly put together in CC3; they weren't very high quality but they got the job done. I think at one point I was totally unprepared and just sketched lines on a blank background to serve as the map.
For communication I used mumble since last time I tried the hangouts in roll20 you were dropped out every time you needed to refresh the page, plus iirc there we no push to talk. It may have improved since then. If not, discord is a pretty solid option nowadays.
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The 2 hardest parts of roll20 play is thus:
The Voice Program you using. Skype has it's issues as well as google hangouts. Best thing I have used was Ventrilo.
Finding reliable people whom will show up. It took me about a year to get with a group that did not just fall apart after a few sessions. Luckily you have the group it sounds like. SO that can eliminate this challenge.
AP wise the Best AP I've played is Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition. It is a Classic and is very enjoyable. I do believe you should start with it.
Another good AP I've been apart of was Emerald Spire as it is a dungeon crawl.
Skizzerz: what are CC3, Mumble, and Discord? Right now we just use the chat thing on Roll20. It isn't bad, but it isn't great either so we are open to other options.
Fruian: What is Ventrilo? Rise of the Runelords is one we are considering since one of our group has played the whole thing, glad to hear it should work well for this!
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Mumble and Discord are voice chat programs, much like Google Hangouts (which is what roll20 has embedded in the site), Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and the list goes on. The two I named are both free, the former requires someone to set up a server and the latter does not. Discord also has the bonus of not requiring any sort of software installation, it's all web-based.
CC3 is Campaign Cartographer 3, a mapping program. It's not free and it's amazingly frustrating to use, so I generally don't recommend it unless you think you'll get really into mapping, are familiar with using CAD software, and have a lot of time on your hands to get over the steep learning curve. Other things I've done for mapping in the past are using tilesets (such as the Map Packs on paizo as well as tile sets on drivethrurpg) and then stitching them together in a program such as photoshop. Although any image editing software will work, photoshop has a nice "snap to grid" feature and the ability to rotate/flip individual tiles to make it a lot easier to work with them. I'm sure there are other programs out there tailored towards making campaign/dungeon maps, but I haven't used them. The Flip Mats line offers some premade maps too, some of which are applicable to APs. Finally, there is a fair assortment of maps and tilesets on the roll20 Marketplace if you want to just arrange things together on roll20 itself, although I've found that it tends to really bog down the site if you have a large map with tons of individual tiles, which is why I use other programs and then export a single map image instead.
I have run several APs using roll 20, although most of the players were in the same room, I find a big TV in the living room works better than a table top.
For remote players, the biggest thing is they need to have a fairly descent headset and microphone (if everyone is remote, this is even more important.)
I didn't find making real time maps terribly difficult. Obviously, they didn't have huge amount of detail, but quickly drawing the major shape of the battlefield and grabbing some tokens didn't really take any longer than it would with a battle mat, markers and minis.
Obviously all the complex set pieces needed to be set up ahead of time, but the bonus that you can set them up ahead of time and have them ready to go in a second is pretty huge.