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VTTs

JohnnFour

JohnnFour

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Adamantium WoA
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There's a whole bunch of virtual tabletops out there now. Use this thread to inventory them all.
 
Foundry.

It's supposed to be fantastic. But not user friendly to set up. Is there a set up guide anywhere?
https://foundryvtt.com/
 
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Roll20
https://roll20.net/

I fight with this too much. It's like an expensive car but old, so trying the awesome features might or might not get you in trouble.
 
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JohnnFour said:
It's supposed to be fantastic. But not user friendly to set up. Is there a set up guide anywhere?
https://foundryvtt.com/
Click to expand...
I have played exactly one game on FoundryVTT, but I was impressed. The GM was really over the moon about it. For him the setup had been straightforward (he's using the IPv6 protocol, so no extra steps were necessary). But if your ISP does not want you to set up a server of your own, you need to take some extra steps:
If your players are connecting over the internet, they will use your public IP address. Use a site like http://whatismyip.host/ to easily discover your public IP address. In order for this to work, you will need to forward web traffic for your local network to send the Foundry VTT port to your computer's local IP address. This step is required in order for your network to know where to send the connection.

Port forwarding can be intimidating for some users, but it is the recommended approach as it is more secure than other options and will result in better networking performance. We have a specific Guide to Port Forwarding that you should reference for help setting this up correctly.
Click to expand...
https://foundryvtt.com/article/installation/

If you want to keep things simple, you can buy cloud hosting customized for FoundryVTT for something like $4 a month (or a bit cheaper, if you set up the hosting yourself). Or you can use AWS, there is a guide for that, too.

The package has some extra niceties, like being able to use Roll20 content. Setting up maps with dynamic lighting, fog of war, etc. is much faster than on Roll20.
 
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Has anyone tried d20pro by Mesa Mundi? I've tinkered with it, but as I'm new to VTTs, it's not as intuitive as I like. Does it run smoother than others? Is it worth researching?
 
MapTool

https://www.rptools.net/

I actually use this at the table as a digital battlemap instead of using physical miniatures, so I am not using all the features, but I really like the vision/light blocking system, and the ability to easily force the player view to jump/zoom to where you want (I have a GM client at my laptop, and a player client running on the computer connected to the projector)
 
@CatDenier I have not used it, but the app looks pretty slick.
 
Yet another VTT contender, Role, is now Kickstarting:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/role/role-a-new-kind-of-platform-for-the-rpg-community

This is a bit of a strange beast, having only theater of the mind capabilities (video chat, character sheets, dice rolling and cards - but apparently no text chat), and adding "looking for player" and content market features to the mix - including 6 RPGs only distributed via their service. Hard to say how this will fare.

Update: There is a text chat, phew!
 
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Tarrasque is a simple but still impressive VTT upcomer for 5e games. I have no beta access, but at least the video looks intriguing:
Tarrasque.io is a cloud-based virtual tabletop for in-person D&D game sessions, with a focus on simplicity, usability, and speed.
Click to expand...
https://tarrasque.io/
 
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Owlbear Rodeo is another simple solution currently in beta, but open for everyone to test:
Owlbear Rodeo is an attempt to make a web app to run tabletop encounters without the complicated setup process needed for other VTTs.
Click to expand...
https://www.owlbear.rodeo/
 
Foundry definitely looks excellent but I too had issues setting it up initially. I think it is a Windows security issue because it worked fine on the laptop. For some reason the updates don't seem to work for me either but the technobabble on the discord forum about issues tends to be over my head.
 
Monsen said:
MapTool

https://www.rptools.net/

I actually use this at the table as a digital battlemap instead of using physical miniatures, so I am not using all the features, but I really like the vision/light blocking system, and the ability to easily force the player view to jump/zoom to where you want (I have a GM client at my laptop, and a player client running on the computer connected to the projector)
Click to expand...

We tried this at the beginning of the year with our group and these were our experiences:

The bad parts
  • The initial setup was horrible to say the least. Our group has two Computer Scientists (one master, one phd) as well as two regular engineers and it still took us ages to set that thing up.
  • The UI is... let's say sub-par. It's not intuitive at all and really hard to understand at the beginning. Everything feels like a custom engineering tool from the 90ies
  • You can stream music to the other players through the tool, but you'll have to have the mp3s on your computer for that
The good parts
  • It's free
  • There is a crazy amount of features in there
  • It's built to be very extensible. You'll need to do some scripting, but there also seems to be quite a considerable community supporting implementations of different role-playing systems.

All in all we decided not to use it and move to roll20 for our purposes, as our group basically only needed a tool to display some very basic battlemaps and for that, roll20 is just fine (+you can stream tabletopaudio) and the UX is way nicer.

However, if you want to have a more concrete and explicit experience (lighting, fog of war, precise movement, automatic calculation of stats etc.) and you have the time and motivation to dive into the documentation of maptool, then I recommend you take a look.
 
I've absolutely fallen in love with Foundry VTT because of it's openness, the excellent UI, and the incredible community that has been built up around it.

The openness of the system allows anyone with programming skills to create a system (which represents an RPG ruleset) or a module (which represents additional features like automation, animation, pretty much anything really). Even if you don't have the skills to develop something, it's quite simple for anyone to work within the frameworks that are provided to customise and add your own homebrew "stuff".

It makes it so much easier for me to do so much more in my online games - for example, I've been adding music, ambient sounds and sound effects to recent sessions with ease, something that used to be quite painful and generally required using a separate app or Discord bot. Now I put a little bit of thought into what I want to use during a session, source and add the files to Foundry and now as I switch between scenes I can have a playlist start up automatically or start firing off sound effects with a single click whenever required. Recently I used this during a viking funeral to sound a horn and play a traditional Norse funeral song and my players absolutely loved it - now I'm looking for sound effects that I can use when I get around to running the Alien RPG.

The only thing that a lot of people don't like is the fact that there is no official content or marketplace, so in most cases if you want something you need to add it yourself, although systems for RPGS that have an SRD do tend to have that content available. There are community modules for importing content across from Roll20 and DnDBeyond which does offset this issue, and personally I haven't had any problems with manually adding the content that I need for my games - it's easy and really just a matter of how much time you have available.
 
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