#Roll20 is a deck of many blessings and curses.

Let's start with the blessings. Our family appreciates being able to bring together materials from a range of publishers. Our campaign uses materials from @KoboldPress@mastodon.social, #HitPointPress, and #WotC. For #DnD the Roll20 Charactermancer is a great tool for character creation and leveling — I just hope it shows up for more game systems soon. We also had some times we were physically separated this summer and Roll20 worked pretty well for distributed play. Having a searchable Compendium of all the 5e spells, character features, and rules from our selection of published materials is great.

I also like the ability to seamlessly edit the campaign materials we’ve purchased. I integrated all my edits for “Cat and Mouse” into the Roll20 version directly, then used a bunch of open laptop browser windows as my GM’s screen, adventure text, and GM map, even when we played in person. My edits for “Three Little Pigs” are significantly more extensive — not only changing the central family from human to nkosi, but flipping the genders of the two younger kids, making the family’s mother (Nassia) a character, developing them all as actual NPCs, and editing the stories and motivations of some of the antagonists. Roll20 handled this so seamlessly that I forgot, until checking the original while writing this, that I had invented Nassia myself.

But there is no separating these blessings from Roll20's curses. One curse comes from how much we depend on the Charactermancer in our character creation and management. To put it simply: not everything is implemented. For example, in the Southlands Player’s Guide from #KoboldPress, there’s a bardic college called “College of the Sky.” Our 9-year-old chose it, in part because it adds “levitate, gust of wind, and fly” to the bard spell list. Except, unfortunately, in Roll20’s Charactermancer it doesn’t add them. So now I have to figure out some work-around before he gets any third-level spells, because I am 100% certain that this dragonborn character wants to be able to fly like his ancestors.

Another curse is that it has a weird hierarchy of content. I actually originally bought the stand-alone adventure version of Cat and Mouse. I started customizing it, we started playing it, and when it went well I bought the larger City of Cats book that includes “Cat and Mouse” as an adventure within it. Unfortunately, both of my purchases are considered, in Roll20’s words, a

Module: A complete adventure. Must be selected when creating a game.

That means I couldn’t add the City of Cats book content to the same D&D “game” I’d started with the stand-alone Cat and Mouse adventure. You would think this might be okay, but one of the benefits that Roll20 reserves for people who (in addition to buying game materials on the platform) pay a monthly subscription fee is the ability to move more than three characters between games.

I’ve delayed dealing with the problem by having us transition to Tomb of Tiberesh. Roll20 classifies it as an “Addon,” so it can be added to any game, new or in-process. But after that I’m going to have to either pay for a subscription or re-create all our characters to transition from my initial game to the full City of Cats series. And then we may need to do the same if our current campaign continues beyond it.

There are also other Roll20 quirks I’m more happy to deal with, in part because most of our gameplay happens on a physical tabletop. For example, when you drag a character onto a map in Roll20, you see a token of that character appear. But the token isn’t attached to the character — you have to go back and attach it. And if you’re using dynamic lighting (which also requires a subscription) you need to manually assign the token the ability to see, the distance it can see, and so on — even if these things are already on the character sheet.

So I’ve got mixed feelings about recommending Roll20 to other families. It has flaws, but I don’t know if there’s a better choice, for those trying to balance affordability and function. I've checked out a number of other options. D&D Beyond only offers WotC content, and I don’t want to “homebrew” everything we want to use from other publishers. Almost everyone else (Fantasy Grounds, Foundry, Alchemy, Shard, etc) requires a subscription and/or a license, in addition to the cost of buying materials, for the things we’re doing with free Roll20 accounts.

The exception seems to be One More Multiverse, which you can play with a free account and already has Humblewood in place. They also seem like good folks, so I’d recommend checking that out if you’re just getting started.

I’ve started playing with #OMM as part of my personal research. I’m enjoying the pixel art character designer that’s integrated, and the overall aesthetic looks quite appealing for families. Also, the #5e SRD character creator is well-implemented. If I weren’t already invested in Roll20 purchases I’d be looking at OMM seriously for our game, though I wish Kobold supported them.

We like being in a world of anthropomorphic animal folk. “We” being my #family — playing #DnD.

I spent some time looking for options for us. Our 9-year-old likes combat. Our 14-year-old likes avoiding it. They both like mysteries, and unfamiliar cultures, and role-playing.

Everyone likes character creation and character development, but no one is up to collating and combing through all the options. So we use #Roll20 for character management. A free account (for all involved) works pretty well for that, though we may be about to run into a problem. (More on that in a later post.)

After some research, I bought City of Cats and the Southlands Player’s Guide from @KoboldPress@mastodon.social, Humblewood Campaign Book from #HitPointPress, and the Player’s Handbook from #WotC. In our world, the #Southlands are the continent to the south, while #Humblewood exists on the east coast of the continent to the north.

Our party consists of:

• Our 9-year-old’s dragonborn bard
• Our 14-year-old’s mapach barbarian
• My partner’s elf fighter
• A subek paladin that I play as an NPC

Our first adventure was an adaptation of Richard Pett's “Cat and Mouse” from City of Cats. I chose it specifically because it's meant to be played different ways, with thought given to non-violent ways of handling situations, and lots of opportunities for role-play. It also manages to be compact (for our group, which spends a lot of time role-playing, it was six sessions) while having an “open” feel. By that I mean that characters can move through the adventure's streets and islands as they like, encountering some NPCs/situations and others not, and the result feels quite coherent.

The Southlands campaign setting needs some massaging to be appropriate for my kids — for example, removing slavery. It also needs some more subtle changes to fit with non-racist ways of playing animal folk. This particularly means that gnolls, basteti, nkosi, ratfolk, subek, kobolds, and others do not have racial personalities or predispositions to violence or other activities. Also, far too many positions of importance in the Southlands societies and adventures are held by humans, though luckily “Cat and Mouse” is generally an exception to this. Though it still has the problem that too many important NPCs are males.

So here are a few small adjustments I made to the characters:

• Raheed: Seen as a thief who doesn’t pay his debts by others, but seen as a hero by ratfolk because he uses his resources to help their downtrodden community. (It’s hard to be a rat in the City of Cats.)
• Hakaan: A trader and merchant, not a “slaver.”
• Heth: Female, but otherwise substantially the same.
• Nassoor, Achraf, and Oumayma: I was going to make at least one of them non-human, but the party only ended up encountering one of them.

I also introduced Omar, a key NPC from a future planned adventure (“Three Little Pigs”), into their adventures in the Perfume District. I changed him from human to nkosi — and from a hapless merchant to a cartographer well-connected in the world of antiquities. He became their introduction into a second adventure, based on Jerry LeNeave's Tomb of Tiberesh (also from Kobold). For this I’ve changed Hazi into a gnoll and Lugo into a heru.

I’m hoping this choice of materials — and these alterations — might prove useful in someone else’s campaign, if they're playing with folks with tastes like ours.