It all goes substantially less stellar than the guy who usually runs the show.

Our regular GM has been taking some time off to get Numenera working in Fantasy Grounds so inspired by the Fellowship of the Bling I decided to fill in.  In the process of trying to get something going via some VTT decided test out roll20.

I haven't tried to GM anything since the mid 80's.  I wasn't terribly good then and atrophy hasn't helped.  I lean more toward the technical solutions vs artistic and it's apparent that's a large part of my problems GMing.  You'll see in the coming posts I took liberal advantage of donjon and wizardawn's random generators.

The group is made up of the primary GM's childhood buddies.  The games often devolve into the same humor they had at 14.  I think murder-hobo's describes the whole group of us quite well.  Normally we all play online via Fantasy Grounds and Ventrilo every other week for 3-4 hours.

Mostly what I hope others get out of this is a good example of how much worse your GM could be so be fearless in giving GMing a go.  As my mother said you can always serve as a bad example to the next guy.

My next post will be how I decided on roll20 vs Fantasy Grounds but right now I need to break away to watch a little college football.
-Bunch

Sounds like you need more prep than most.

The best advice I can give to you would be: after using technical generators, do the results make sense?

This can lead you to: adjust generators to create relevant content to your contexts. (psst! there's your creativity, btw).

So, how do you deal with improv?

Both football teams I care about won so nice break.

Just one more piece of background.  I am at all times attempting to do the laziest job I can because I am assuming my group will all go back to our normal GM once he's built a Numenera ruleset and intro adventure for Fantasy Grounds.  

How did I decide on roll20 vs Fantasy Grounds?  I started by just defaulting to Fantasy Grounds because it's what I know.  I've been a player using it for years and played around a little bit using rulesets etc but never really setup a campaign.  I started by grabbing the OSRIC ruleset and tried to get up and going with that.  It all started fine I grabbed a random dungeon map from Wizardawn and started to look into populating the dungeon.  This is where it took a turn for the worse.  As far as I could tell not many monsters currently exist in the OSRIC monster library for Fantasy Grounds.  The person working on the OSRIC ruleset just hasn't had time to completely populate the monster library.  Totally understandable as it's either a lot of manual data entry or a fair amount of coding and debugging to try grab monster data from some source and output it properly for FG.  I started this but decided it was going to take more time to massage the data then I wanted to spend just so I could have a variety of humanoids to fight.  So I suspected my options were either spend the time needed to get monsters into a monster library for OSRIC, switch to another system that had some monsters or try a different platform.  

I went with try another platform.  Roll20 gets a lot of good press in the VTT scene so I thought I would try it out.  My initial reaction was this is great.  The access to art, drag and drop nature of the interface and ease overall was really impressive.  The further I got into it though the less I was impressed.  Not because it doesn't do what it says it does but more because it doesn't do what I wanted it to do.  I wanted an easier to use Fantasy Grounds.  I love the automation I get from FG as a player.  When FG has a library for something it's a beauty to get things working.  When it doesn't its a bitch of XML and Lua or just brute data entry.  With roll20 I felt like it was faster and easier to get started because it tries to do so much less.  Concrete examples are clicking on a weapon in FG after selecting a target will compare the attack roll with bonuses vs the opponents defenses plus bonuses and tell you whether you hit or not.  roll20 doesn't how I have it running.  I don't even know if it's possible without upgrading and using the API.  

Since I knew at this point I didn't have time to put what I wanted into FG I decided to go with roll20 for the first session at least.  

That's it for this post.