My regular weekly game from the 1990s has been resurrected as a monthly online game now that the 5 of us are scattered across the USA.

We used wipe-off mats and lead figures in the 90s, allowing us to easily determine who was in or out of each stunball. As we look around for resources to help us now, Roll20.net appears to be good option.

However, the Shadowrun information page on their Wiki (https://wiki.roll20.net/Shadowrun) has not been updated much by this community, making me worry that you all have collectively found something better.

What's better?

And if you use Roll20.net, can you give me examples of 4th / 5th edition character sheets combined with Roll20 Macros that pull data from those sheets? I'm happy to update their Wiki with good techniques for using it with Shadowrun 4e/5e but I'd rather not reinvent these techniques if someone's already done it.

One of my players could not make it last week due to flu - I set up a monitor in their normal seating position, with a webcam perched on top, and we jumped on discord. Had to get the rest of the players to try and be quiet and not clack dice together and so on, but for a one-off situation, it worked really well. However, that doesn't help with multiple people spread out - just thought it was worth mentioning as a thing.

My experience of Roll20 was using it for battles in our Pathfinder game we were playing before we reverted back to Shadowrun. My experience of it is that it's good - providing you have lots of time to prepare maps, icons and documents, or are using a module where these things are prepared for you. When we went "off-piste" and our GM started to improvise, we found our game slowing down immensely, as he tried to fudge maps together or create the situation on screen. Compared to using a wipe clean mat or board, it was massively slower.

If you have the time to prep a number of "generic locations" and "generic opponents" to store ready for such occurrences, then it's better - but even if you're pretty swift with the interface, it's still a lot slower than throwing down on the table, and somewhat game disruptive. I think the technology is great, but I'm not sure the UI and implementation is quite there yet in terms of delivering the experience - or at least that's what we have found.

I would be tempted to use a battle mat by your side and the miniatures, and aim a web-cam down at it from an overhead position, so that everyone can see that from a discord / skype session, and they talk you through their movement - but you can still move stuff by hand and draw with pens freehand nice and quickly.