Best Virtual Tabletop

[Rabulias]

1) Foundry:

Pros: Cheap (~$50) but seems to support the feature set I need in a way the even cheaper products don't. Self-hosting so I don't lose the product if the company folds.
Cons: Self hosting. Doesn't seem to be a decent way to demo features so have to pay for it and hope it works for me.

The Foundry VTT anniversary sale is $10.00 off, so it is $40.00 until May 29th. If you want to try out Foundry, they have some demo sites available to try out:

Pathfinder 2 Demo: Join Foundry Demo (PF2E) • Foundry Virtual Tabletop
D&D 5e Demo: Join DnD 5th Edition Demo • Foundry Virtual Tabletop

I find self-hosting daunting as well, but there are third party hosting sites that can handle things for you, but there is a cost to that. I use The Forge (The Forge) and find it great. It is easy to install and upgrade Foundry and modules. Their hosting starts at $3.99 a month (when paying for a year in advance) or $4.49 per month paying month to month.

 

[Celebrim]

Fantasy grounds has 3 months free trial for ultimate now.

Fantasy Grounds Unity Discounted Fantasy Grounds Game Day Subscription

www.fantasygrounds.com

Thanks, that's awesome. That gives me a chance to dabble with it and find out if it is right for me.

UPDATE: And ugh...

Yeah, I can't even tell who this product is marketed for. It's big selling point seems to be rules automation. My guess is that it plans to sustain itself by having users buy developer produced content. It's definitely not the intuitive easy to use 'digital battle map' that I want, despite supporting all of the line-of-sight features that I need.

Ughh... If all the tools are this bad, I'm going to have to put this project on hold for a year or two until I can write my own. I mean seriously, this is a professional product? Did anyone that designed this ever use a CAD program? AutoCAD is more intuitive, and I'm not looking for something that takes as much work to get going as AutoCAD.

It's telling that in their terminology a 'tile' is laid on top of an image and instead of being a component of an image itself.

What I want is a grid and to be able to snap pieces together on the grid as easily as using lego bricks or 3D terrain. Then I want to be able to drag some tokens on to it and have them snap to nearest grid corner. This isn't hard stuff.

UPDATE2: Yeah, seriously. RPTools - which is free - is far better designed and more intuitive than FG. Like, maybe the automated character sheets and things like that aren't there, but as a VTT, RPTools seems better first glance, and at the least is going to have much less steep of a learning curve.

 

[Mageman]

Maybe you can check out talespire?



Also here is a good tutorial on how to make a map

Fantasy Grounds Unity Map & Image Creation with Joshua Watmough 4/15/23

Fantasy Grounds Saturday Stream. Here we go over all of the art-related news as well as demonstrate the map creation tools included in Fantasy Grounds Unity....

www.youtube.com

 

[Celebrim]

Maybe you can check out talespire?

Hmmm... another new concept. Thanks.

It definitely seems to hit the Sensation aesthetic of play, which I do have a couple of players who get into that big. "Dwarven Forge online..." seems to be the appropriate tag line.

The immediate cons are aesthetics usually come at a step price in preparation time, often fail to live up to the imagination, and everyone in the group has to pay for the platform. But at least they do seem to understand what the basic features of a VTT actually are.

I feel that I'm not the GM for this though, because I've never prioritized aesthetics as part of my prep, never been the guy that heavily invests in terrain or miniatures or so forth. I'm also the guy that prioritizes having things my way over making them look fancy. So people's handpainted beautiful battle mats always are less attractive to me than some marker lines on a battle mat that are the exact dimensions I want. One reason 3D is a downside in this scenario is I can edit in 2D just fine, but 3D is outside of my skillset and while I do have a player that plays with 3D he's not proficient enough to really help out.

I need the ability to translate my paper maps into a game and run it with the same ease that I can quickly set up encounters on a battle map, without risking giving meta information to the players.

So after just being thoroughly disgusted by FG within 5-10 minutes of the experience, I'm now choosing between Foundry and RPTools. RPTools might be the winner hands down if it supported a more robust set of line of sight scenarios that are supported by Foundry and FG, as it has the right price ($0), comes with the best free tile set I've seen so far, and is pretty intuitive to use - for example it has the 'snap to grid' functionality that I considered part of a minimum functional feature set. The killer feature would be both supports building a map easily through tiles AND has those tiles come with preset line of sight features, or at worst, set once for a named asset and then fully reusable and rotatable thereafter. So for example, a 20x10 corridor section knows that its walls are walls, and if I drop a door on one and say "Corridor with door" it thereafter knows how all "Corridors with door" work.

 

[Mageman]

Here's my home table running fantasy grounds

 

[Celebrim]

Here's my home table running fantasy grounds

Sweet setup.

 

[Lazvon]

I saw Owlbear Rodeo mentioned in a single post, but no reply back about it. Just in case it was missed, thought I would mention it again for you to check out. New version coming too, though for many the simple old version has worked well for them.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

We used Owlbear Rodeo for D&D and CoC, very good for what it does.

But with Savage Worlds/Savage Pathfinder as our current goto system, we went to Foundry hosted on the Forge and couldn't be happier, it works incredibly well.

Now, as a very non-techy perma-GM I took a planned four month period to get to know the VTT before we started using it. It's not rocket science, but I wanted to be comfy with system implementations and quirks, trying out mods etc to get a smooth playing experience.

 

[Celebrim]

We used Owlbear Rodeo for D&D and CoC, very good for what it does.

I've looked at Owlbear Rodeo and it feels lighter weight than even MapTools. I really want finer control over the fog of war and hiding parts of the map from the players than that gives me. I don't want to be continually cutting back the fog of war manually during play if I can avoid it.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

H

So after just being thoroughly disgusted by FG within 5-10 minutes of the experience...

While I completely understand why you would be put off by the UI of Fantasygrounds, I think it a pity that @smiteworks prioritise the creation of a map over revising the UI. Something I have stated on the FG forums.
I really like the application, but I switched to it when there was a lot less competition and have spent a lot of time mastering the application. It would take a very good VTT to get me to switch now.
The map making is pretty impressive but too complex in my opinion and would probably be better as a stand alone application.
I think that anything that would get be interested in switching would have to integrate with a world building tools and have something like the FG combat tracker.