Tabletop Playground Free Beta: New Rival to Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Playgrounds is a new rival to Tabletop Simulator, a way to play tabletop games online. While designed for boardgames, both can be used with RPGs. You can download Playgrounds for free from Steam during its current beta phase.

"Experience digital tabletop gaming like never before with realistic physics and satisfying controls. Recreate and modify classic games or build your own and share them with the world. Utilize specialized tools to play niche and complex games with up to 8 players across PC and VR."

"Play the open beta for Tabletop Playground! Featuring deep customization and choice, enjoy more immersive tabletop games with friends than ever before. Build new rule sets for traditional games, play custom-made games by the community or create your own and share them with the world."

 

[EthanSental]

Interesting....for those more IT related, it looks great to have a 3D game table for D&D inside a tavern but does the tavern impact bandwidth? Worth checking out at least in beta.

 

[pming]

Well, I watched the video and it looks pretty much like an exact duplicate of TTS (Tabletop Simulator), with one or two additions/changes (colouring a 'mini' a solid colour; making your stand-up 'paper minis' a bit more streamlined).

If/when they add more ease-of-use things to it that TTS doesn't have, or that are just better, then I'll give it a shot. But as it stands, uh, I don't see the point to changing. Ooh! One thing that would make it unique...if they can figure out a way to add "video chat" monitors that 'sit' around the table so you can see each person playing as if you were using Skype/Facetime/etc. THAT would be a game changer!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

My own suggestion to promote some virtual tabletop is this to be used in some game-live streaming show as Critical Role.

Other idea is a boardgame with virtual character sheets, and the AI can controll the nPCs or warning when a PC has fallen in a trap, but the stats are totally controlled by the player, even in solo games, because maybe this wants to play with his own house rules, for example using a different list of the main abilitie scores.

 

[MNblockhead]

For anyone who has used either TTS or TTP, are you able to throw up maps with FOW and manually review? Or is this for just throwing up and image that you can put 3D minis on? Seem like it may be kinda need for a session or two but doesn't seem as convenient for TTRPGs as the VTTs created for that purposes. But I'm not speaking from experience, so I'm interesting in learning from anyone who uses these tools for TTRPGs.

 

[zhivik]

For anyone who has used either TTS or TTP, are you able to throw up maps with FOW and manually review? Or is this for just throwing up and image that you can put 3D minis on? Seem like it may be kinda need for a session or two but doesn't seem as convenient for TTRPGs as the VTTs created for that purposes. But I'm not speaking from experience, so I'm interesting in learning from anyone who uses these tools for TTRPGs.

Yes, you can do that. In fact, it is possible to assign lone-of-sight values to objects, like player tokens, for instance, and have FOW revealed automatically. There is also a game master mode where you can see everything that is going on and control who sees what.

However, my personal opinion is that it takes too much work to build maps and assign conditions, if a map is going to be used only once, at least when compared to platforms that have been specifically designed for TTRPGs. TTS works best for board games, where you have a fixed map/mat/playing board/whatever and you only need to move objects around it. If you tend to use a lot of encounter maps, I’d recommend using a TTRPG-specific VTT instead.

 

[practicalm]

Windows OS only. No Linux or Macintosh support.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

With the current necessity of the market driving invention, I'm hoping to see a lot of design improvement on these sorts of things. Hopefully we'll end up with some really good options for VTTs that combine the best aspects of multiple styles.

 

[Mercador]

Anyone tried it with VR?

 

[R_Chance]

Windows OS only. No Linux or Macintosh support.

So, would it function with Wine for Linux / Mac OSX? I haven't run Linux in years, but that would have been the solution back in the day.

edit Both TTS and TTP are on Steam. I'd check there for compatibility issues with Linux / Mac users.