Level 1 DM here. Trying to Level Up.
by
, June 20th, 2020 at 07:28 (13163 Views)
So.
Back in January, my 42-year old brother (I'm about to turn 41 myself) asked me if I could make a campaign for him and his kids (he's a single Dad, mom's out of the picture half a country away, drugged out of it, got 14-year old twins, boy and a girl). Wanted to do it online just because I lived 20 miles away. (He lives on the east of town, My parents live with my sis and my other nephew on the west side of town, also 20 miles from me, and I was planning on including said nephew that just graduated.)
I'd been idly subbed to Roll20 for about a year with Pro, just probing at it every now and then. I'd not participated in any games, but had actually been considering trying to join one as a player. However, the one I joined as a player quickly proved to be a failure, and after the second session I started making plans to DM my own campaign, explaining to my players, "Hey, I'm new. I'll just referee **** and put in some interesting encounters here and there, you guys be the judge of all rules that occur amongst yourselves (the party), and if I do something wrong, then tell me, and I'll revise it."
I made certain to have a Session Zero where I intended character creation to go on, but since over half the party didn't want to wait for Session Zero before they threw character concepts at me, I grudgingly accepted them. XD I was originally going to try to railroad them all into having a shared background, so that I won't have to have 4-6 individual reasons to tie people into the story. The rest of Session Zero went swimmingly. Everyone showed up, we went through a "mini-dungeon" I had whipped up just to show them how things worked in Roll20, and we all agreed on date and time to start our Session 1. There was even one guy that was disappointed we didn't start Session 1 directly after Session 0.
Session 1 kind of sucked. The PC the actually DID try to have a shared background with as many of the others as possible, the guy that tied the group together and was given the quest from the McDude to check out the McPlace, was absent, although he'd told me a few days in advance. (Unavoidable personal issues, happens to everyone.) So I NPCed him as groaning, half-passed out in the cart, leaning over every now and then to vomit, and when they got to the town closest to the dungeon, the rest of the party put him up in a room where he was sick until he rejoined us in Session 2.
But that's not the reason Session 1 really sucked. Roll20 started glitching out, despite being stable during out Session 0 the previous week. People couldn't connect or move things or even Roll20 would crash their computers in the worst cases. It was unusable unless I turned off the Dynamic Lighting (really the one of only two things I liked about it) and the API (the other thing I liked about it), both paid features.
"Well, that happens sometimes, just mail support about it." Find their address, pop 'em off an e-mail since they (at the time) had no other formal ticketing system.
Still have yet to hear back from them. Asked about it once on the forums, was told to bring my issue up there so other forum members might help. I did, but none of their advice solved my issue, so still waited for an "official" response, never got one.
Figured they didn't care about their customers, so I sent them a (actually very-nicely worded) mail telling them why I cancelled my sub, moved to Fantasy Grounds, and that I hope they get better enough with both their product and staff to make me consider them again in the future.
So here I am, about 4 sessions into Fantasy Grounds using Unity, and it's been a bumpy but awesome road. I can't wait until it goes full release!