If you get a notification saying this document is at it’s viewer limit, you can still read it and you can still see updates by hitting ctrl-F5 to refresh the page. If you can’t make a comment because of this, you can comment on the original reddit post here or find my contact info below under“Contribution”. I am in the process of moving this document to Notion, which will allow for better organization and commenting at any amount of viewers.
Introduction
Welcome to the new version of“Comparison of Alternatives to Roll20”! As of April 12, 2020 I have renamed the document and completely revamped it in response to the new surge in VTT usage due to COVID-19. In response to great demand I am now including Roll20 in this list. Also, I’ve moved this from Google Docs to Dropbox Paper, which is better suited to very large documents and allows people to comment without being able to accidentally add suggestions.
Please share the document with as many people as you can. I did all this work because I know people need the resources right now and I want to help as many people as I can to continue to play games together during this dark time.
Follow Updates
This is a work in progress, so I will be maintaining a changelog at the end. If you want to be notified of changes, you can sign up for the email list here, or if you are signed into dropbox, click the three dots menu in the top right, and select“Follow”(though be prepared for the latter method to send you a bunch of emails when I make changes or comments.)
If you’re new to this and need help with all the jargon, go here.
Contribution
If you have feedback about any of the information presented here or want to add something, please contact me. If anyone is interested in helping administrate this document, contact me.
Actually, before you contact me asking for me to add a feature, do a ctrl-F on this document and search for it by name. It might already be on here.
Mouse over the lines on the left edge of the screen to browse the table of contents.
You can collapse entire sections by mousing over the section title and clicking the small triangle that appears to the left of it.
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Quick Start
If you want to jump straight to the whole guide, just click the little arrow next to this section’s title to collapse it.
This is a very lengthy guide, hopefully so that you can compare and contrast your options and make the decision that’s right for your group. However, you may not want to spend the time thinking about that. So, assuming you trust me 😉, here my software recommendations for different situations. I’m giving a couple recommendations for each group, ordering them from top to bottom in each category according to which ones seem to fit the situation best. I’ve recommended multiple VTTs alongside standalone features in each category, it’s up to you to decide which categories are most important and if you want to choose an all-in-one tool or not.
Your casual D&D 5e group needs to get online with as little fuss as possible.
A/V Conferencing & Chat
Discord — free, less good for bad internet, great group text chat servers
Zoom — $14/mo, better for bad internet, mediocre group text chat
Full VTT(All in one program)
Tableplop — super simple, supports both drawing maps and importing them, Simple Fog of War, easy dice rolling, basic characters. But it’s new on the market and therefore reliability is unknown.
Astral — intuitive UI, easy-to-understand character sheets, fancy map features, supports only importing or building maps from assets, RTS-style Fog of War only, well-supported long-term by developer
Roll20 — Roll20 is not the most intuitive or user-friendly option on the block anymore, but it has a good feature set, and it’s more prepared to deal with the huge influx of users due to the pandemic than the other two.
A La Carte(Use individual tools)
Syncing Battlemaps:
Shmeppy — super simple, supports drawing maps only, tokens, Simple Fog of War, well-supported long-term by developer
Character Sheets:
Dead trees — just keep your old character sheets.
PDF sharing or Google Sheets — like having a paper character sheet but putting it on the internet, sometimes with nice autocalculation features
D&D Beyond — D&D Beyond has gorgeous character sheets and character building, but it’s not super house-rules friendly.
Introduction
Follow Updates
Key
Glossary
Contribution
Quick Start
Your casual D&D 5e group needs to get online with as little fuss as possible.