Our first Roll20/Google Hangouts test session

Okay, so last night we finally got our schedules together and did a test session logging in to Roll20 and Google Hangouts to see if we could get it all to work.  My friends Kirk and Steve came over to my place, with Kirk kindly bringing a couple laptops to share.  The rest of the crew, Mike, Bill, Kaiser, and Doug, all logged in from their respective domiciles.

Logging in to Roll20 was easy and some of us spent time filling in details on our character sheets in the online campaign space.  We played around with the die rolling functions, spell casting macros, chat area, and moving our character icons around.  At first I was annoyed by the size of the video windows on screen for the other players, but I found the controls to shrink them down out of the way of the starting tavern map.  I plan to work on tailored macros later but for 1st level characters you don't need much.  Moving the icons is very easy and the on-screen drawing functions worked well.

Not everyone found it easy to get into Roll20 but eventually all of us did.  Google Hangouts proved a bit more difficult.  The audio came and went occasionally.  Part of the problem may have been that most of the time we were trying to use both simultaneously.  Also, at my house the wireless bandwidth may not have been up to carrying three laptops running two video and audio feeds at the same time.  In future I'll be on my desktop which is cable connected to the router.  I did find that when I moved my headphones back from the borrowed laptop to the desktop where they had been all sound was weird.  I'm still working on figuring that one out.

So, we're just waiting for Bill to finish getting the campaign ready, Doug to finish his character, me to make a portrait for Doug's character, and (maybe) to see if Alex wants to join as well.  I expect we'll have our first session in a couple weeks.