PBP and PBEM have the best descriptive nature and in pre 3.5 editions it can be argued that a game is better without map or icons just using the imagination and I played like that for over a decade in AD&D and understand how a game can be better with less to look at and hence using the imagination more. Like a book is better without pictures.

But for 3.5 and 4th edition a mapper helps due to things like attack of opportunity.

Got my beta invite for Roll20 today, so I should have some reports on how good it is soon.

Likewise, I actually got to test some of the features today and they work exactly as seen on the demo videos.

I still have to test the video/audio chat, however I was surprised by how wide is the jukebox library.

To Zell, Kansas or other betatesters:

Can the game remain live and accessable even if the DM is not there? That would help tremendously for maps on PbP games.

I just got an email from Riley, one of the people at Roll20, and he confirmed:

This means a map that can be accessed by players and (with DM permissions) adjusted. This is perfect for Play-By-Post games!

Can one of you beta testers elaborate on how specific the permissions can be? For example, do players have blanket access to move tokens on the map, or can the GM limit their accessibility to just their own characters' token? Also, on a related note, if a player takes an action that results in a Condition (stunned, dazed, prone, etc.) being applied to their target, will the player be able to make the changes to the enemy token?

By default all tokens are just for the GM so he can limit the players to just one token or armys of them if you want. But that does mean that they can't make the marker changes on tokens they can't control

Can you add/use your own maps, maps pieces, and tokens? Or do you have to just use their stuff?

There is no "their stuff", everything you use is from somewhere else.

You have a search engine that looks for tokens, maps, etc on the internet and the same goes for the songs on the jukebox.

It is possible, to store your own images but the capacity is limited (100 MB) since it's a free service.

Also with some going around, you can upload your own songs into the jukebox.

I misunderstood when I saw they had a search engine to search images. I thought that it meant to only search their site. This is looking more and more like something I may get.

Thanks Zell!