Using Roll20 to Promote Palladium Games!!!

[spookyc]

I just started running a campaign on Roll20.net, and it really is a lot of fun. Not only that, the platform provides an insane level of organization, so there's no more flipping through stacks of papers to check character details, and if you've got PDF versions of the books, (available on DriveThruRPG.com) then you don't have to ever look away from the computer.

As much good as I have to say about Roll20, the best thing is the MILLION AND A HALF people using the platform. There are over 10,000 people playing tabletop RPGs through Roll20 on some nights. They're getting like over 1,000 new people signing up every day! You want a large pool of players to draw from for your campaign? Look no further.

But selfish GM wishes aside, there is a real possibility to give Palladium Books a renaissance because of the ready availability of potential players who have never played Rifts or other PB games, or have played in the past but moved to more ubiquitous game systems. Unfortunately, as you all know, there's a lot of negative crap being passed around on the web about PB, and a lot of people who would probably love these games are being unjustly turned off by hearsay garbage and negative people spouting subjective nonsense.

So, I am calling for all my fellow GM's on this forum to try it out. Hop onto Roll20 and take their tutorial. It's free and doesn't take much time to go through. It's free to play or run a game, but you can pay $5 or $10 per month to get more storage and lots of extra features. Give it a shot!

When you search the active games almost all of them are D&D or Pathfinder. Right now, there are THREE open Palladium games (Rifts: Chaos Earth, Rifts, and BtS). I know of two others aside from mine, that aren't being advertised because they're already full. My game is full and I've had to turn away people. 4 out of 5 of my players came from a Facebook post, but there are people wanting to play Palladium games, but either there are no games with a theme they like, or at a time/day they can do.

Let's give Roll20 a huge PB injection and give potential players some real options! Let's lead games on various nights, and in various genres. You love After the Bomb? Lead and AtB campaign! Is Beyond the Supernatural your thing? Run it! People may not have the books, so pre-make some characters for them to use, or just screenshare your PDF's (just the page they need to roll their character...you don't want to get in trouble for being a pirate!).

We can get PB back up to their once lofty position. The PB section at my games and comic shop used to be as big as the D&D section. I would love to see it get back to that.

If you want some help getting started with Roll20, you can message me, or head over to the Roll20 GM page and chat with me there. I invite all GM's on this forum to join this group and brainstorm so we can get PB games to the masses!

https://app.roll20.net/join/1224689/Ls8Yxw

[Bill]

I don't run online games. Good luck.

[Glistam]

I've seen games run online in Roll20 and played in a couple, it does seem to work out relatively well. My gaming group is local though so I haven't run a game online. I think if I ever did though I would use Roll20 to do it. Compared to what I used to use (Fantasy Grounds), I like Roll20 a lot better.

[Augur]

Roll 20 really is a useful platform for running games.

I'm not so sure how well a tool for promotion of Palladium it can be, but if someone would like to dig into the app and develop a better character sheet plug-in, I might be willing to crowdfund remuneration for such a project's successful completion. That's the kind of technical support for Palladium that's lacking in general and in specific on Roll 20.