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your entire channel is making me into a somewhat component DM

Nice, knew 4 of them. Never used the music myself, nor have any of the DMs I play with. Most of us don't have the time time to set that up. Didn't know about the splitting the party up onto separate maps.

Genius!

This is a great video on the basics! I love videos like this because even when I know the techniques already, I'm not always using them to their full potential. Watching these kinds of videos helps me to consolidate my knowledge and imagine new ways of using these tools. Thanks!

Great video! Question for you. If you are a free user of Roll20 (we don't play enough to justify a monthly subscription), is there away you would recommend to upkeep a couple different games. For example, I have a Fallout 2d20, Sentinel Comics and a WFRP game in the work (deciding which on to actually play). If I keep the material for all three, I will bust my size limit with Roll20. How could I easily keep/organize the files on my hard drive and move them in when working on one of those games? I used to work with Owlbear Rodeo and it was fantastic as all the info was saved in one file you could download and then upload as needed. But with the new ver 2.0, I am not sure how long they will support the 1.0 and that is why we moved to Roll20 (plus the new link with Discord).

I played a paladin for the first time about 3-4 years ago, the DM was nice but bad at her craft. She would only, EVER, give us one combat per day! For me, as a paladin, that meant I was smiting the crap out of everything! Why not? But is that the fault of the paladin class and divine smite? Or was that the fault of a DM who needed to put multiple encounters into the same day? With one fight, I smite everything. When the paladin is tapped out for the second fight, they maybe start learning to conserve some spell slots.

Disagree with your analysis. If they wanted to limit Divine Smite to once a turn, then they should have just made it like Sneak Attack. By having Divine Smite now be a spell that costs them their bonus action, it limits their action economy. Polearm Master? Not for paladins, anymore! Two weapon fighting? Great, in One DnD, paladins can get the full range of fighting styles, including two weapon fighting...only both the off-hand attack and your Divine Smite are a bonus action! So no two weapon fighting! Virtually, anything that you might want to use your bonus action for, will now compete with divine smite. Instead of giving a paladin more options, they now have fewer. WotC clearly wants all paladins to be boring sword and board paladins, all others need not apply. Paladins are also not the most powerful class in 5e. Paladins had an incredible nova round potential, but as you noted, it meant they were done for the day. Wizards and sorcerers are way more powerful in 5e as are most full casters. Where paladins got super powerful was MC with sorcerer, warlock or bard. Paladins after level 6 are solid and good, but a 6 paladin/14 sorcerer was more powerful and a 20 paladin.

Roll20 is run by scumbags though 😂

If i wanted happy, light-skinned, daylight-thriving assassins, I'd play a wood elf. Drow are cosmically cursed as a species, and as conscientious and empathetic as I am in the real world, dnd exists partially beyond our bioessentialist ambiguity. I also want class and race traits that really, completely change up play styles, and not always in "balanced" ways. Like halflings getting -2 Str for being the size of a child is wild to me. It should be like max str 14, +4 Dex (no cap), reduce HD from classes by a die size (d4 -> d3), etc, etc. Suggestion: saying, "geez, xyz sure is bonkers, what are you gonna do" is much less fun than hearing someone's fresh take on something. So lemme put the ball back in your court. In your opinion, what should be going on with the drow, and how should that be represented mechanically?

Can people on mobile play along with this as a player?

tell me when discord has forge!

I used to use roll20 to find dnd groups, but now the whole site just feels dead, it’s so hard to find a group now. (If anyone has any suggestions on where to find groups please lmk)

It doesn't work in the app but it does in the browser. At that point just use regular Roll20. This is useless as it is.

when I launch the campaign, my players are not brought with me and yes, they do have accounts created from roll20?

I think this is interesting, especially since demiplane is now owned by Roll20 and they have the 5e nexus coming out later this year. Seems like there will be additional integration from that giving us a D&D Beyond-like character builder/tracker hooked into roll20 automatically, without needing to touch any WotC stuff at any point. That's also likely why they don't need the browser add-ons that normal roll20 can use.

how do you resize to hexagon grids?

With how Spell Sniper is restructured and the description of Witch Bolt has changed, that gives you a 120 foot range dude!

If only Roll20 wasn't bad lol

tbh, I don't fully understand the purpose of this over just playing a VTT on a regular browser window with discord running in the background. You can just toggle off the microphones in the browser, and you're set. Plus, it works with other extensions like beyond20.

What about the mods???

Yeah all the people mad at Paladin "nerfs" are crazy. Every game I've played a Paladin felt like easy mode. Like you're telling me I get to be a tank, healer, utility caster, AND one of if not THE best damage dealer in my party- PLUS I'm super duper good at fighting every DM's two favorite recurring encounters (undead and fiends)? Imo they didn't nerf them enough if they were really trying to cement Paladins as support tanks, like they mentioned in several 2024 texts. You simply don't need all that damage packed into such a character.

I've always had a problem with straight up immunities just for the sake of making an encounter harder rather than say being a "no duh, of course your fire attack doesn't hurt the fire elemental." I like the Troll/Alpha approach much better of regeneration unless hit with weakness. 10 hp will soak up some attacks but it definitely won't negate a player's efforts too often unless they're just rolling really low all game.

Wow, I probably need to tell some of my DMs about that last one because they usually take ages going through all the creature sheets to do their bread and butter attacks.

I like the idea of a dagger that can be thrown at an enemy as a reaction to attacking an ally. Like the Sentinel feat but with the daggers thrown range. Sinse the daggers normal range is only 20 feat they have disadvantage on attacks beyond that which prevents sneak attack which makes the rogue want to stay close. Free object interact to retrieve the dagger if you are within 5 feet on your turn.

I see so many solutions to a "problem"... that is just generated because people don't use encumbrance. Easy fix: Use encumbrance. If you use Roll20, it's even calculated automatically.

This is a great point. Another way to go about this with scrolls and potions that your party is hording- put a monster/ritual etc that can be fed extra magic items. Maybe feeding it spell scrolls can give cool wild-magic buffs. Or maybe you need to give it magic regularly to satiate it while you stop it from destroying the city.

So do I effectively not need to have a discord and roll20 windows open?

This should help me a lot with my characters. Thank you so much!

Looks neat but i'm not sure what the benefit is Perhaps one of the players want to try if it's useful for them, we'll see I use roll20 for vtt+music, and discord for voice chat + out of game chatting/notes

No comments? Lets fix that. Thank you for the tips!

One of the parts of fixed resources that people don't talk about enough is how important movement and range play into this. Making a melee creature unable to in melee like with difficult terrain, speed reduction, and restraining spells is basically the same thing as stunning a target when it achieves the same job: make it so the enemy does nothing on their turn.

When I try and boot it up in a vc and log into roll20 it just loads a blue screen and nothing else, any ideas what’s going on?

Hello there, I just saw news about the integration on twitter and I just have a quick question. I run a homebrew One Piece themed DnD session. Can I transfer the campaign with all the maps/npcs/character sheets etc by just logging in through it or is there some other method?

My DM does this and I think it's great.

Doesn't work with Beyond 20 so not really worth it in my books.

Eh, whatever, doesn't seem useful enough. I thought it would be something like "input commands in discord chat if you're connecting from mobile or otherwise can't load the roll20", not just "oh hey here's just a browser window inside your discord" I guess it would be somewhat useful for people who play with webcams to see them in the same window as r20, but for anything else it's almost useless. Especially considering that you can't run extensions on discord browser compared to chrome or firefox.

Well rouges commit crime, which is typically a night time activity, so sunlight sensitivity and rouges kinda go hand in hand. And how much of the game takes place not in direct sunlight? Lots of caves, buildings, even dense forests.

Omg no way! My friends and I play Roll20 in Discord. I had to look up your tutorials just so I can set it up properly for Discord. This seems to be a good add on. Gonna try this on my next session

This is already accomplished quite well by magic items IIRC. I believe in pathfinder I realized the incremental increases in magic item prices when i started making them for the party and its a very good way to exhaust cash to turn a +1 to a +2 which tou can easily counter as a dm.

the problem with the encumbrance rules is that it often clashes with the percieved loot value (and the weird economics in dnd 5e settings). lets say a hoard have 5k worth of coins and trinkets. thats great! but unless you got like 2 bags of holding or a caravan waiting outside then the partys encumbrance is most like gonna be capped out all at once or at least close to it, yet you would most likely only get a single rare magic item for that price (according to XGtE). This could be fine if you have a campagne where the party always comes back to the same town where they have a base or if you have a bank system in place but otherwise you basically have to embrace the traveling merchant sterotype by primarily barter with magic items/scrolls/potions rather than coin since those items hold more value per kg/lb compared to coins or gems

I just saw I got integration for Roll20 & Discord (yesterday) and was a little skeptical admittedly since I run mainly Call of Cthulhu and Indie RPGs. But I was playing with the integration and when I realized I could run my specific games (like CoC) with integration already available, I was sold. I definitely will give this a try in a game of mind and hope Roll20 creats the option to create multiple games in the future! Great review EncounterSmith. (Also was not expecting to be featured! Thank you so very much much <3 🎲)

This might just be me, but a lot of your cuts are a little...too sharp. It's clipping either the beginning or ending of the word off.

you talk too much just get to the point

Thanks for making this video - big fan of your Roll20 videos!

Fantastic walk through- so helpful!

I always look forward to these uploads, recently i started dming a homebrewed version of the Horde of the Dragon Queen module , and i started implementing a lot of your ideas, and my players love the creativity haha keep up the insane work man

your videos helped me after i moved, cant wait to have my first online session with Roll 20 after your help!

Happy they did this. Roll20s ingame audio was trash. We used discord in conjunction already

Honestly, this side of DnD isn't talked about enough. A lot of DMs forget that the cornerstone of the gameplay is about resource management and that to challenge your players enough you don't have to throw boss encounters every two sessions. It would be enough to not give them a long rest as soon as a combat encounter ends.

One thing you didn't mention: you can use the attribute drop down to set a value, then change it to none before saving. That will fill in the circle with the character sheet value, without linking it for every token.