Now, reading the title of this thread, you probably ask: @The Great White Lizard , why would anyone engage is such blasphemous activities contrary to all of the old ones teachings? Well for a couple of reasons. You're stuck at home because of quarantine and can't play WHFB You don't want to drive 8 hours or fly across an ocean to play with someone you know You want to try out a new army, but don't want to have to buy and paint 600 dollars ish of new models You want to playtest new rules for something but are FAR to lazy to actually make a model for it. (I pretty sure this last one only applies to me) Now, you ask, @The Great White Lizard , I'd love to try out a new army, but new 8th army books are like, super expensive. Fear not. Some enlightened person got together a collection of 8th army book pdfs, for anyone who wishes to enjoy. (I hope I'm not breaking any rules by posting this, mods If I am, could you let me know before deleting the post because I put a bunch of work into this.) Anyway, here's the link to all of the pdfs. I recommend reading them even if you aren't planning on ever playing them, because extra information on your potential foe always comes in handy at some point. Anyways, back to the main subject of the post. The platform I'll show you how to use to play virtual warhammer is called roll20, and you may have heard of it before. Its most common use is to play the RPG Dungeons and Dragons, but it can also be modified to be warhammer compatible. Now the first thing you'll need to do is create an account. Go to roll20.net, register, and verify your email. Once their, you'll see a screen with two buttons on it, create new game and join a game. Click on the 'create a game' option. Call it whatever you want (enter a name in the very first box), no tags, no character sheets. Now, scroll down, and click I'm ready, create game. Then you'll be taken to a screen that looks like this. You need to invite whomever you're playing to your game. Click on the invite player button, and then either send a link to them or send an invite to their email. Be sure to give them GM permission by clicking on their avatar. Now you need to move on to the next step. Note that you can skip inviting anyone altogether and wait until you have someone who wants to play with you. Click 'Launch Game'. As you launch game, you'll notice that a blank grid will show up, a chat box and a little box with your name on it. You'll be asked to grant access to mic and camera. Yes you'll automatically join with your camera and mic on. If you don't want to, I suggest checking out this reddit thread. Now, you're probably overwhelmed by the amount of tools here, but let's just focus on a few. On the side, you'll se a bunch of icons. The only ones we need to worry about right now are the mouse icon, the cube icon, the paintbrush, the ruler, and the dice. The dice icon let's you roll dice, pretty simple. In warhammer, only d6's and d3's are used, so you don't need to worry about all the rest. The mouse allows you to select and move things, as well as group things together to make the movement phase easier. The Ruler allows you to measure distances, you'll notice it snaps to the grid and is in feet. We'll fix that. The cube allows you to switch between layers. Basically you'll use that to avoid accidentally moving the terrain or gamemat when trying to move your models. Now if all of this sonds nightmarishly confusing to you, don't worry. I'll walk you through everything. The first thing we need to do is get rid of the grid. It's super annoying, compares movement, and jsut makes your life a pain. Go to the top of the page and click on the little page icon, it looks like this: You'll then see a page that looks like this: Hover over the start page, and click the gear icon. Then you'll see this page: Scroll down until you get to grid, and then flip the switch from on to off. Right above that you'll see scale. Change it from 5 to 2, and then change feet to inches using the drop down menu. This is to make sure the ruler measures inches instead of feet. After this, x out of the page setting, and then click the x on the pages. Now we're going to set up the game mat. Click on the cube and then go to 'Map and Background. Zoom out, to around 30 percent (using the bar on the top right), and switch to paintbrush. Draw a square that covers the entire map. don't worry if you can't fill it on your first try, just switch to the mouse and drag it until it covers the entire screen. In this example I used light green, but you could make it any color you find visually appealing and works well with your battle terrain. Now that we've put up a gamemat, it's time to move on to terrain and models. In roll20, most objects are tokens. Ind order to get tokens, you have to upload them as images from your computer. To start, go to google or any site (GW's official site comes to mind) and get a good screenshot of a model. Keep in mind that screenshots should be roughly the same size as the base, and the models should take up almost all of the screenshot. Next, go to remove.bg/upload and upload your screenshot, removeing that white background from the image so it doesn't appear on the gamemat. Now, upload your screenshot to roll20 by going to the image tab, going to 'my library', and clicking upload. Drag it on to the 'table' and size it to your liking. Now base sizing is an absolute nightmare, so use this pdf for determining base sizes and conversion (Yes, I realize this thread has basically become a compedium of useful links). Feel free to make your models as large or small as you want, but make sure they're scaled appropriately. When your done it should look something like this: Tips on this online format: Measuring can be tricky, I like moving one model in the unit first and then measuring the distance to be sure I have it right. Model frontage can also be a bit tricky, if all else fails just go to the base sizes doc to determine it. Be sure to select entire units by draging a box over them under the mouse tool, it's the only way to wheel and saves a ton of time 3D dice is a helpful setting you can enable under the gear tab in the right, that lets you see dice rolls on the virtual table I hope this tutorial was helpful, hopefully soon I'll be able to upload some battle reports of online 8th games soon. Note that this could easily be adapted to fit 40k or AOS, as they're similar in to 8th in essentials (if not in quality). Happy wargaming, tGWL
I'l check this out when I get a minute @The Great White Lizard Sounds interesting! I'll say right now, that a large part of the fun I have with the game is laying out the large armies, using my terrain and having a laug with my friends. Still, that all said, It would be interesting to be able to have a game sometime with @NIGHTBRINGER or @Killer Angel without going to Canada or Italy respectively!
That's the general idea @Lizards of Renown. Of course it's never going to be nearly as fun as actual warhammer, but it does have a few advantages that can make it worthwhile in certain circumstances.
I know it's obviously been a while since this thread has been up but I don't come by here too often so: Don't make your images have an invisible background. Yes, it makes them look nicer, but in terms of practicality, it's easier to just use a white background or a site like Tokenstamp and use the lovely squares you can make as bases. Wheeling: Roll20 rotates anything you've selected around its center, so make a 'rotator tool', a large transparent square which you can place with the center on the corner you wish to wheel around and select both the unit and the square. As long as the square is large enough to have one corner cover the far corner from your wheel point, selecting the unit + the tool will let you wheel properly. You can make roll20 tell you how many of your hits/wounds/whatever succeed by simply adding a > sign (ie if I want to roll 30 attacks hitting on 5s I type /roll 30d6>5 and it'll roll all the dice and tell me how many rolled 5+). Use protractors for blast templates. There's no real way of getting an artillery die in roll20, so use a protractor and roll a d360 (roll20 is not limited to real dice sizes). For anything that can direct hit and refuse to scatter, roll a d3 and designate one of the numbers to be said direct hit. You can colour the background of a roll20 page without drawing a square. In the options where the scale and grid are, you can find a "Background" section where you can freely change the colour to anything you like.