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What is your preferred VTT and why?

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Here's a cross-post where I answer some questions about "what is the best VTT"?

I'd love to hear what VTT you use and why. Maybe we can make a final list of pros and cons for each VTT to help new GMs make an informed choice.

* * *

Now that we have great choices for VTT, we have the benefit of deciding what we want and then likely find a VTT that meets most of our requirements.

Each VTT has pros, cons, and features the others do not have or do not do as well.

Foundry offers more automation and larger inventory of cool community-built system libraries and plugins. But at a cost of bugs and issues when app upgrades break plugins. It's like the world of WordPress back in V1 and 2.

Roll20 has a bigger community so more GMs and players to game with. Its architecture has a lot of technical debt, but it's automations are great. Its interface is clunky in areas. But it has a large inventory of adventures and content via the marketplace, and it's easier to use for certain functions.

Astral has the alliance with DTRPG for a growing library of content.

RPG Tools is an old contender, a great community, and is free.

Arkenforge has some cool mapping features.

Our VTT, Campaign Tabletop, and Owlbear, are lightweight VTTs with very short learning curves. They do not have automations, plugin architectures, or large libraries of content. But you can get up and running in minutes.

If stuck, and you don't want to be a "DM DJ" with the tech and effects, I propose you start as lightweight as possible. That could be Campaign Tabletop or Owlbear. But even easier, use Google Slides and share edit links with your players.
  • Make one Slide for battlemaps and when you want players to control their tokens. Give your players full edit rights.
  • Make other Slide decks for when you want to have all control for moving and editing. Make a deck for each adventure, campaign, world, or section that's natural for you.
  • Master your browser's bookmark management toolset so everything is at your fingertips.
  • This is my favorite tool for making tokens right now.
  • Use Discord, Zoom, Facebook Messenger, or Google Meet for video and voice chat. If you have a low-tech or low bandwidth group, just use a conference call in Whatsapp (@JochenL does Signal offer free conference voice/video?)
Right now, I think we could try bucketing GMs into core needs to help decisoon-making:
  1. You want to be a pro DM DJ, or want a lot of automation
  2. You want something with deeper features in a certain area such as mapping, content marketplace, or add-on libraries
  3. You want something fast and simple
If anyone know of an existing feature set comparison table out their, I could clone that into a Google Sheet and crowdsource opinions from subscribers who are familiar with a VTT, especially the less common ones like Arkenforge.
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Wow, that's a great document! I don't know if it's current, but I might just link to that.
 
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Reactions: ELF

Ahkmed

Member
Platinum WoA
This is an older topic, but thought I would speak up. I like having books on the table, but am coming to like having PDFs on my PC. I find it personally more convenient. That does seem to lend itself to VTT use, I blame Herolab. LOL. When we started using that we all started to use PCs at the table. My VTT experience is based on everyone sitting at the same table, just using personal PCs to access content. We have yet to use it online.

I have used Owlbear, and still do for some planning. It is a nice site and does have a bunch of options for a free option. I was able to upload my maps/images and use them with little to no effort.

Then we went back to tabletop for a bit and I came across Foundry. I used it for Twilight 2000 when I got that system because they had resources for it that made it nice to use. Quite a bit of plug and play stuff with adding mods, or user created content at least, made it very viable. The use of the character sheet and NPC sheets for rolling was amazing. We were all learning the system and it helped a bunch.
Then I converted on the fly Undermountain for PF1e using foundry. That was a little work intensive, but I had stumbled across high res maps and that is what prompted the conversion. That is where the technology escaped me, I had difficulty using the resources for Pathfinder. I was able to get the map to work for me and put in teleports and such, but the character sheets did not seem to find a home with me or the players. I guess we were spoiled with Herolab. But Foundry allowed us the freedom of everyone being in control of their own toon movement. I had a screen showing the party, my own screen with all my GM goodies, and they had their own screen for just them. The ability to log in and set things up was great for that. And now that I have a server set up for gaming and data storage, the next step is to get it running on there so it will be available even when not gaming. the nicest thing about it is anyone can join in for free, but one person does need to purchase the program. However the purchaser does not need to be the GM, you can transfer control of the "world" to anyone.
As an option you could have just one screen for the entire group if you are not prone to have laptops all over your table, I preferred everyone with their own to take some workload off of me as GM.
 

GM Rob

Member
Gold WoA
I switched from Roll20 to Foundry a little while ago because of Roll20's poor support for Starfinder (and the cost). Foundry takes more work to use, but it has been OK so far. Most of my play these days is back to face-to-face sessions. I have experimented with using a 32" LCD TV laid down on the table as the map, and adding regular minis. Foundry is a bit fiddly to get set up for this use case, but it's nice to have dynamic fog of war! I'm using this setup in about half the games I GM face-to-face.
 

Ahkmed

Member
Platinum WoA
I have a 42" tv in the corner of the room for my PS4 that I hook up the general foundry map on. But we all have PCs that we connect to Foundry with to enable players to move their toons. I will say it was very satisfying the first time someone moved onto a teleport square and their toon disappeared across the map. Setting up the squares/hexes to match the map is tricky, if you can imagine the original Undermountain maps in 1080p and the size of that file and map in foundry. I had to make the concession to the players that after so much of the map was explored that I was going to have to "adjust" the grid to keep them in the right places.

I haven't used Owlbear for a bit with the fog of war, but it might suit what you are doing better than Foundry, unless you are using other aspects of Foundry. Might not hurt to check it out.
 

GM Rob

Member
Gold WoA
I haven't used Owlbear for a bit with the fog of war, but it might suit what you are doing better than Foundry, unless you are using other aspects of Foundry. Might not hurt to check it out.
I discovered Owlbear just after I had bought into Foundry and set up a cloud server for it. I never really looked at it seriously, but perhaps should do so now. Especially for the face-to-face tabletop use case. Foundry is a bit too much for that case.
 

Ahkmed

Member
Platinum WoA
I had seen something about that but haven't checked it out yet. I will have to do that.

Edit: So I have checked out the video, and it looks very nice. I will have to dive in deeper when I have some free time and see what all the options are. I know I am attached to allowing my players to log in and control themselves, but we did it for quite awhile without that option. But I do like simple and efficient, it helps to find a balance when doing prep work for the session.
 
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