Sure, there are no bells and whistles and you’ll need to do a lot of leg work as a GM, but it can be done. This will make it a more appealing product than Fantasy Grounds if you happen to have a limited budget. Using Roll20, an entire group can play without paying a penny. Only Roll20 let’s you GM a game for free though. To play using either you only need a free account (in Fantasy Grounds case though, this is only true if the GM has an ‘Ultimate’ account). Verdict: Roll20 has the edge here by a considerable margin.īoth services offer a premium level of access and both offer free access. While this is not so complex a process as to be insurmountable, it’s not for beginners either. Fantasy Grounds has the added complication of needing to tweak your firewall to allow incoming connections from your players (if you are running as the DM). Immediately this gives Roll20 the edge as there is no complicated set up, you just sign in to the site, open up your game and go. Fantasy Grounds is a piece of software which needs to be installed while Roll20 runs in the browser. The two services work in slightly different ways.

Ease of joining or recruiting for a game.

Over the past year, I’ve used both quite extensively and in this article I compare the two virtual tabletops in a number of different categories and will award a winner in each category. Which virtual tabletop should I use? I’m sure you may be asking yourself the same question. I could always find players somewhere who were online at any time of day and night.īut then I hit a snag. What’s more, with such a diverse pool of games and players to choose from, my requirement to start slightly later in the evening made little difference. Well, not exactly near to home – the players were actually from all over the world – but I played from the front room of our house. These services would allow me to play exactly as I wanted to. Most prominent amongst these seemed to be Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. In seeking out a solution to my problem, I came across a number of ‘virtual tabletops’. But it was slow, and I wanted to play ‘properly’.

As you can imagine, I didn’t have much joy with that, so I began playing by post in order to get back into gaming. If I was going to play then it would need to be nearby and it couldn’t start until the kids went to bed. The biggest realisation was that finding time to play was going to be challenging.

In that intervening period, I got married, had kids, built a career and generally became quite time poor. I recently returned to role-playing games after 23 or so years away.

Fantasy grounds ultimate demo