I don't know if paying GM's to run convention games is common overseas or not. Over here we don't pay our GM's to run games at conventions. They also offered to pay GM's to run these overflow games. In other words they may have been rather dishonest about the amount of players they had signed up already. The obvious trick/trap was that a new gm would try it out, maybe like it, tell all their players and get more people using roll20. They were advertising for GM's (to make themselves look popular). Instead they announced an online gaming convention and, at the exact same time as they announced it, claimed they already had way more players signed up than they had GM's available to run games so they weren't advertising for players. However, they didn't try suggesting people use their new platform. They hit a lot of message boards and message lists to drum up interest. Hell I've been doing it for well over two years.īack when they were getting started the roll20 guys performed a large advertising offensive. I've personally been able to use Roll20 as a GM just fine. I've heard one of the founders is kind of standoff-ish, that's about it.

Maybe it's gotten better since then, but it left me unimpressed before. As in it looked like it was only going to be functional if I memorized the manual, learned to code, wrote a whole bunch of macros to do even basic functions, and then my players all did the same.

I tried using MapTool and the other RPTools years ago, probably close to 10 years ago now, and I found them to be the same kind of mess that a lot of niche open source projects seem to be. That being said Fantasy Grounds has a lot more stuff integrated and kept up to date so I might swing for it eventually. I've often been tempted by Fantasy Grounds and lots of people tell me that it's like a slightly better version of Map Tool. Fortunately 'campaign frameworks' often has that covered. It's a simple framework with a lot of possibilities but sometimes you need to get a bit technical. I've been able to use it to run Pathfinder, 3.5, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition, Shadowrun. Map Tool has an active community who produce different frameworks for different systems. Don't confuse Map Tool with Map Tools (which is a geographical mapping program). In all honesty I'd much rather use Map Tool (which is basically the poor man's Fantasy Grounds from what I've heard). However, as a GM it's just really clunky and a nightmare to use. I have some nasty horror stories and bad experiences involving the people who run it that left a rather nasty taste in my mouth.

Fantasy grounds 2 scripting