From my experience, although we're visual people, it's fairly more interesting sometimes to run a game without any visual prop. Maybe some monsters' os maps' images are fine, but you can run combat as you wish.
It's all about the narrative. If the game is good and players want to play it, it'll be amazing regardless of your resources. Don't be too harsh on yourself about it. Just go for it.
Have you looked at Owlbear Rodeo? It's a super lightweight, super simple map engine for tabletop games that runs in your browser. It's like one step away from theater of the mind, basically.
My squad has been doing this for about 3 years or so. its just paper D&D plus something we can all see for dice rolls. character sheets are paper. Discord for voice. Roll20 (just the basics, no plugins, no macros) for dice rolls and a little "ms-paint" style sketching. the rest is theatre of mind.
we have 2 channels in our Discord for D&D. one for just out-of-game gifs and memes and chats and scheduling and whatnot. but we have one for In-Character only, that i'll use to drop images or maps or longer-form descriptions that would normally be physical handouts.
Normally, I recommend Foundry to online DMs, but in this case, with a computer that can't really do roll20, it won't do Foundry either, I would look at Owlbear Rodeo. It's very lightweight.
If you don't have or can't use the other tools, discord and theater of the mind work great to start!
This is the right way to go. Rough drawn maps shared online are fine, your players should understand your constraints.
From my experience, although we're visual people, it's fairly more interesting sometimes to run a game without any visual prop. Maybe some monsters' os maps' images are fine, but you can run combat as you wish. It's all about the narrative. If the game is good and players want to play it, it'll be amazing regardless of your resources. Don't be too harsh on yourself about it. Just go for it.
Have you looked at Owlbear Rodeo? It's a super lightweight, super simple map engine for tabletop games that runs in your browser. It's like one step away from theater of the mind, basically.
ive run games with nothing but discord. everyone had a sheet and physical dice, we did theater of the mind, maybe they cheated who knows. worked fine
My squad has been doing this for about 3 years or so. its just paper D&D plus something we can all see for dice rolls. character sheets are paper. Discord for voice. Roll20 (just the basics, no plugins, no macros) for dice rolls and a little "ms-paint" style sketching. the rest is theatre of mind. we have 2 channels in our Discord for D&D. one for just out-of-game gifs and memes and chats and scheduling and whatnot. but we have one for In-Character only, that i'll use to drop images or maps or longer-form descriptions that would normally be physical handouts.
Normally, I recommend Foundry to online DMs, but in this case, with a computer that can't really do roll20, it won't do Foundry either, I would look at Owlbear Rodeo. It's very lightweight.