I’ve been playing a lot of RPGs online for… well, more than a decade now. One thing that has occurred to me is that the user interface for playing online has… stalled out after a point. Generally we have virtual tabletop services that you can use which unfortunately have the tendency to automate things in a way that is more complicated and difficult than the non-automated option you would normally have.
Why is this so hard?
Last year I ran Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. PbtA games are usually a low-medium crunch game with a very easy “handle” or interface for players;
- Say what you want to do
- Roll 2d6 add or subtract a number no greater than 3
- Pick from a list on the Move the GM told you
Playing on Roll20, however, using the system that is literally built in for TSL specifically, every roll was kind of an involved affair:
- Open up your character sheet
- Hunt for the Move on the character sheet. Scroll to find it.
- Hunt for the pop up window asking if you want a modifier added (doesn’t always pop up to the front)
- Then Roll the dice, jump over to the main Roll20 window
- Go back and find your character sheet window and look for the Move to actually figure out what the roll outcome means.
This would… be more reasonable if you only did this a few times a session, but you tend to do it like a dozen times or more, and that’s for each player, and it never seemed to get easier. The UI turned an easy process into a painful process.
While this is the most egregious example, it’s also true of most other games I’ve run or played; the interface makes playing or running games harder, rather than easier, most of the time. I’ve been running a campaign of Errant and I realized not having an integrated character sheet in Roll20… made things faster. We recently moved to rolling physical dice and calling results rather than using the roller in the app, and things are faster still. So…
The Minimalism Workaround
This isn’t a manifesto or some kind of call to “ideals through play”, just… a set of workarounds I’m going to play with over the next year and see how much it improves my play experience in speed, mental load, and handling; as well as the experience of my players.
The basic principle here is readability and minimalism is better than completeness when and where the UI is not well set up.
Methods I’m going to work with:
- Skip dice rollers, use physical dice and call outcomes where possible.
- Go for minimalism/cleaner designs in character sheets over completeness/complexity; some things players can figure out to drop into a “notes” section if they want to record it, while other things are play-critical to track.
- Reduce the number of tabs/windows a player will need to reference. Ideally just character sheet if possible.
- Where maps are needed, consider other collaborative presentation tools to have maps + tokens rather than the mess that is most VTT systems.
- Play around with in-browser tools to assist navigating tabs/windows where needed. (For example, Chrome’s “Group Tabs” will let you a) have a group with only a single tab in it, and b) color and rename that tab – making it easier to find)

Key restrictions include:
- I don’t want my players to have to pay for new apps/services
- Whatever we use has to run on older computer hardware
- We are all very tired and half brain fried by the time we get to play; we do not have the capacity to learn new hotkeys or juggle through 8 massive bars of icons that look more at home on a professional art software system than a game of imaginary magic sword wielders.
I’m not sure I have an answer, and I’ll probably have to come back at the end of the year with some better ideas or discarding others, however, given the general stalling out of VTTs, I don’t think waiting and suffering is better than just doing the ideas I’ve got now.
Anyway, feel free to play with some of these if you, too, have been finding the small bumps in online UI getting increasingly more annoying and time consuming, and I hope we can figure something out until someone can do better for “needs more support than freeform, needs less tools than ‘complex layered map + 500 condition tracking stat’ games”.
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