Yesterday me and my friends played Dungeons & Dragons for nearly 6 hours on Roll20. It was my first time as a DM, and it was quite a success. The overall experience was part tabletop D&D, part computer game, and we managed to get the best of both worlds combined somehow. I have a Plus subscription to Roll20, which allows me to use dynamic lighting, and that is a great feature. Every player only sees what his character would see, given his vision and light situation. One character seeing things that the others don't see is possible, which is much harder to realize when playing around a real table.

Dragon of Icespire Peak, the Essentials Kit D&D starting adventure, is relatively simple and well suited for Roll20. [Spoiler Warning!] It consists of 14 mini-adventures (+3 expansion adventures), which the players mostly pick up from a job board. The disadvantage is that the individual adventures are a bit disjointed, but the advantage is that you can easily cut it up into separate sessions. In our session we did 3 mini-adventures, the first three the players get. Fortunately they did the shortest one first, and leveled up to level 2, which made the other 2 a lot less deadly. But all three adventures didn't have much combat, they ended having 4 combats in 3 adventures. As they didn't think of trying non-combat options, that was the hardest fight, five level 1 characters against a manticore. But with several characters having ways to heal fallen comrades, that still went well enough.

One fight they had was against a ochre jelly. Normally such a fight can be quite tricky, as the ochre jelly is immune against slashing damage, and splits up into multiple smaller monsters when split. However for this group the fight was nearly trivial, because none of them had the typical slashing weapons, like swords or axes. The paladin and monk used bludgeoning weapons, while the fighter was specialized as crossbow expert, which is piercing damage.

The non-combat content was also fun, discussions with crazy gnomish inventors, searching a temple for secret doors, and discussing the wisdom of taking a big gem from the statue of an evil dwarvish god of greed (they fortunately decided not to). They did pretty well, and didn't miss out on any treasure or information.

We didn't use video at all, and we used Discord for audio. I am not an expert on Discord, so I can't say how normal this is, but we did have several problems with sound quality. I had to twiddle with sound sensitivity at the start for a while, we had several periods of sound getting chopped by lag, and twice I lost connection to the Discord server. On the positive side, I was able to use Discord using just the speaker and microphone of my iPad, and didn't have to wear a headset for 6 hours. And from what I hear the built-in voice chat of Roll20 is even worse.

I'm looking forward to the next game in two weeks.