Tools

Virtual Tabletops (VT or VTT) are designed to allow users to play games on their computer that are traditionally played on or around a table. There are several different flavours of VTT, free and commercial, each with their own pros and cons.

Roll20

A free, fast-growing VTT with a big plus: runs entirely on your browser. They have a big user-base so it's quite easy to find a game. They also have different subscription levels (for the GM) that remove the ads and include great features such as dynamic lighting and mobile support. There are plenty of community created character sheets for most games out there, and the API support with the Pro subscription allows for the use of life-changing scripts.

d20Pro

An oldie but a goodie. It's been around since the beginning and is currently getting a facelift after a very successful kickstarter campaign, turning into d20Pro Unlimited. At the moment it supports d20 games, but after they're done in a couple of months, they'll add support for virtually everything. It's free for users as long as the GM has a license that allows them to join. The license is paid for only once unlike a subscription, and many features are always included such as dynamic lighting. It does require you to download the software, but it should allow for higher performance.

Fantasy Grounds

A commercial VTT with a great look and feel. It's high-fantasy interface is regarded as the best by it's users, and supports quite a few games out of the box, including the latest installment of D&D. It does have a free demo, and also offers either subscription or lifetime licenses. It's community is also very active, so you won't have much trouble finding a game to play.

Astral VTT

One of the newest additions to the VTT industry, having joined in 2017, with a modern interface to complement it. It has a robust map editor with fantastic features like dynamic lighting, hundreds of free assets and the ability to export entire maps to use offline, and that's using the free account. You have the ability to subscribe as well for additional features such as weather effects, thousands of extra assets and even more space to upload your own. Give it a try!

Foundry VTT

Foundry VTT is as up-and-coming Virtual Tabletop currently in beta. It is scheduled to be released in January 2020 but you can join in right now as a patreon supporter. It has most, if not all, features currently available in other platforms and is built using modern web technologies for incredible performance. The user interface is fantastic and intuitive and you can host games directly from your own computer to avoid reliance on external services. All in all, it's a great tool and you should give it a try if you have the chance!

While those are some of the most well-known ones out there, they're by no means the only ones. If you'd like to check out a big list, head over to Wikidot and read this article.

There are two ways to go around role playing: TotM (Theatre of the Mind) where there are no maps, grids or miniatures, or using Battle Maps with grids, accurate distances, obstacles, and tokens. This section will help if you'd like to delve in the latter.

Dungeon Painter

A free web-based tool to easily and quickly create tiled maps. It has a good set of basic objects for your everyday dungeon or town, but if you need to a lot of custom items it may fall a bit short. You can save your maps or export them as images to quickly add them to your VTT game. Export tile size can be changed to fit the different VTTs or print, great addition!

Campaign Cartographer

Highly regarded as one of the best commercial softwares for map creation, but slowly falling behind the new players in town. You can add objects and tiles as you please, and the results are quite good. Don't let that take the interest away though; if you manage to learn how to use it properly you can create amazing maps.

Dundjinni

Another oldie but a goodie. What's especially great about this one is actually the community; they share hundreds and hundreds of objects for everyone to use in their maps, and the price is slightly lower than that of Campaign Cartographer, it also is a little easier to use but normally with a legacy feel. Definitely worth checking out, at the very least for the community.

Grid Cartographer

This one caught my attention some time ago but didn't have the chance to try it yet. A promising map creation software that seems especially oriented at battlemaps and dungeons as opposed to world maps. It has a free demo with some limitations, and the Pro version is very accessible. I still need to test it, but it might not be great if you also need a lot of customization, unless you want to add the objects manually with another software after the map has been made.

Tiled

Tiled is a very easy to use multi-platform software that let's your create maps with, you guessed right, tiles! You can change the size as you need it, import any images you have for tiles, work with orthogonal, isometric and staggered maps and export your finished product ready for VTTs, or to keep adding more resources with your favorite editing program. -Shared by MessyConfessor

MapForge

MapForge is a battlemap creation software specifically designed to be easy to use and quick to create amazing results you can export to use in any virtual tabletop you like. There's practically no learning curve and is in active development, so you can expect it to get even better in the near future. You can use your own assets or purchase curated add-ons to bring your maps to the next level.

While there's nothing that screams RPG more than graph paper and books piled in your table next to those character sheets, switching to more detailed and feature-rich maps can improve your game and is not something hard to do. If you rather use Photoshop, GIMP or another flavour of an editing application, check out our resources section that will help you get started with amazing results very quickly. (And some ready-made maps too, if you're out of time!)

There are millions of stories worth telling about a role playing game, but the best ones always start with a 1 or a 20. At least the funny ones!

Roll20 Wiki

I have to admit, that wiki is better than most dice rollers out there. It uses the same system as the actual virtual tabletop (or at least an old version of it). It is very intuitive and easy to use, and extremely powerful as well with many different types of rolls that can be made. The title links to a wiki page with just the dice roller for easy use, but the full wiki page with the relevant information can be found here.

Rolz

Another free web-based dice roller. It also features a great deal of rolling possibilities, like exploding dice, dropping and fudging. Also they're testing dice rooms, so make sure to take a look if you need that. Another feature that can be really helpful is the dice log, since it shows the previous rolls made as long as you remain on the page.

AnyDice

While not precisely a dice roller, I thought it might be useful to add it here. AnyDice is a Dice Probability Calculator, so it let's you check the chances of a particular roll getting a particular result. It does extend it's functionality with a roller using the previous result as input simply to check the facts, but it's not very easy to use solely for that purpose.

Brock H. Jones Dice Roller

Another alternative for your rolling needs. It has some interesting features, like a few different sets of predefined stats rolling to start creating a character, and a custom search for the d20 SRD. It works great for regular die rolls, but it falls a bit short if you need to customize it too much. -Shared by DJSuptic

You can find many dice rollers for Android and iOS on their respective markets so you can always have them in your pocket in case you need them. Of course if you'll be using a Virtual Tabletop, you'll find that all of them have some sort of dice functionality.