D&D General Your Thoughts on LoS, Dynamic Lighting on VTTs

[MNblockhead]

This is good to know. I was under the impression that Foundry was out-of-the-gate more easily tweakable than Roll20. I have the Plus account so I can modify APIs, but it's a pain. When it works it works very well, but I wish so much of that automation was easier to do with just a toggle on and off button. Foundry sounds like it probably similar but just in a different way. I think the main thing holding me back is the learning curve to adjust, but I might as well fiddle a little bit.

Foundry has a lot of great options out of the gate and may meet your needs. What it does not do well without mods is automations. If you want to run a 5e game and want all the 5e rules and official adventures, Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 are better bets. Fantasy Grounds is much better in terms of automations, inventory management, etc. I really love it for 5e. But it has a high learning curve and you have to install it locally. Roll20 sells official 5e content and nobody needs to install anything locally other than an Internet browser. But it doesn't offer the same amount of automation as Fantasy Grounds.

If you don't care about automations and character-sheet stuff, and just want an excellent battlemap tool, Foundry blows away the competition. Even before adding any community mods.

The one glaring omission is manual fog of war. That was a "must have" for me. The fact that Foundry didn't support it almost made me not go forward with it, but then I found an excellent mod the handled manual fog of war better than any other VTT I've tried. Then the developer stopped supporting it and an new version of Foundry broke it. The community stepped in a group calling themselves the League of Extraordinary Developers took it over. They take over and fork a lot of popular mods that are no longer supported by the original developer, but depending on a community mod is a gamble.

 

[Nebulous]

The one glaring omission is manual fog of war. That was a "must have" for me. The fact that Foundry didn't support it almost made me not go forward with it, but then I found an excellent mod the handled manual fog of war better than any other VTT I've tried. Then the developer stopped supporting it and an new version of Foundry broke it. The community stepped in a group calling themselves the League of Extraordinary Developers took it over. They take over and fork a lot of popular mods that are no longer supported by the original developer, but depending on a community mod is a gamble.

What? Roll20 doesn't have issues like this.

 

[MNblockhead]

What? Roll20 doesn't have issues like this.

Exactly. But you cant mod Roll20 like you can Foundry. I liken it to Skyrim. When I first played Skyrim, I played on the PC. Beside the game, I enjoyed expanding it with community mods. But finding and installing them took time and when something went wrong it could take a lot time on forums etc. figuring out what was causing the issue and how to fix it or what mod to disenable. The potential for buggyness, the time spent fiddling with it, could be a annoying, even maddening. But you could do real cool things with the game you could only do by modding it.

Then when we got a Nintendo switch years later and my son wanted to play through Skyrim again, we got it for the Switch. It was nice just having a game that just worked. I missed all the cool extra things I could do in the PC version, but the lack of choices and inability to mess with it, also made it a much smoother experience.

Roll20 is going to provide a much smoother experience. But you are limited in how much you can configure it and how long you have to wait for new features. It is amazing what some folks are doing in Foundry. People who are really into modding and using Foundry and its mods to their full potential are doing some just amazing things.

For me, I don't have the time for Amazing. But there are so many times where these is just some little quality-of-life feature I wished for and, after searching through the available mods, I find one or several mods that do this.

There is a 3-4 month cycle I seem to go through with Foundry.

1. Hmm...this is pretty cool, but it would be really nice if I could do X.
2. Hey there is a mod that does X, let's try it.
3. Holy S**T!!! It does X so much better than I was even thinking about. It also does Y and Z. Awesome!
4. Ugh. This is cool, but I need to make sure that it isn't conflicting with other mods. Reading forums and Github and tweaking settings isn't the kind of DM prep I enjoy.
5. Niiiiiiice. Everything is working smoothly, the players are digging it. All is gravy.
6. Gah! The update broke the mod and the original developer is not active.
7. Hours spent on Discord, Reddit, and other forums to find an alternative mode, find a way to make changes to config files to make the old mod work, or find that some other group has rescued the mod and need to uninstall, reinstall, reconfigure, and retest.
8. Whew! I got it working again.
9. Hmm...let's see what's new in the community modes. Oooh! New shinnies!
10. Go to #2

 

[Nebulous]

Exactly. But you cant mod Roll20 like you can Foundry. I liken it to Skyrim. When I first played Skyrim, I played on the PC. Beside the game, I enjoyed expanding it with community mods. But finding and installing them took time and when something went wrong it could take a lot time on forums etc. figuring out what was causing the issue and how to fix it or what mod to disenable. The potential for buggyness, the time spent fiddling with it, could be a annoying, even maddening. But you could do real cool things with the game you could only do by modding it.

Then when we got a Nintendo switch years later and my son wanted to play through Skyrim again, we got it for the Switch. It was nice just having a game that just worked. I missed all the cool extra things I could do in the PC version, but the lack of choices and inability to mess with it, also made it a much smoother experience.

Roll20 is going to provide a much smoother experience. But you are limited in how much you can configure it and how long you have to wait for new features. It is amazing what some folks are doing in Foundry. People who are really into modding and using Foundry and its mods to their full potential are doing some just amazing things.

For me, I don't have the time for Amazing. But there are so many times where these is just some little quality-of-life feature I wished for and, after searching through the available mods, I find one or several mods that do this.

There is a 3-4 month cycle I seem to go through with Foundry.

1. Hmm...this is pretty cool, but it would be really nice if I could do X.
2. Hey there is a mod that does X, let's try it.
3. Holy S**T!!! It does X so much better than I was even thinking about. It also does Y and Z. Awesome!
4. Ugh. This is cool, but I need to make sure that it isn't conflicting with other mods. Reading forums and Github and tweaking settings isn't the kind of DM prep I enjoy.
5. Niiiiiiice. Everything is working smoothly, the players are digging it. All is gravy.
6. Gah! The update broke the mod and the original developer is not active.
7. Hours spent on Discord, Reddit, and other forums to find an alternative mode, find a way to make changes to config files to make the old mod work, or find that some other group has rescued the mod and need to uninstall, reinstall, reconfigure, and retest.
8. Whew! I got it working again.
9. Hmm...let's see what's new in the community modes. Oooh! New shinnies!
10. Go to #2

I love all that lol

 

[Shiroiken]

You can “pick up” the mini by dragging and dropping it.

Without the ability to see very far during exploration mode, twisting, curving cavern passages made it hard to drag and drop our minis. With just using fog of war (our usual method), we could have one PC token used as the front of the party, periodically moving the others up as needed. With dynamic lighting we couldn't do that, since we couldn't see where the front was. This meant the DM had to move our tokens on demand, or we had to move together. In those tight, curving passages, this meant we moved 1-2 spaces at a time, which meant the arrow keys were easier.

 

[iserith]

Without the ability to see very far during exploration mode, twisting, curving cavern passages made it hard to drag and drop our minis. With just using fog of war (our usual method), we could have one PC token used as the front of the party, periodically moving the others up as needed. With dynamic lighting we couldn't do that, since we couldn't see where the front was. This meant the DM had to move our tokens on demand, or we had to move together. In those tight, curving passages, this meant we moved 1-2 spaces at a time, which meant the arrow keys were easier.

Scratching my head over this one. Are you guys using the alt key when moving tokens so you don't snap to grid?

 

[Don Durito]

I don't understand the use of individual tokens for exploration. Why not just a single party token?

 

[Shiroiken]

Scratching my head over this one. Are you guys using the alt key when moving tokens so you don't snap to grid?

No, we snap to grid, but since we can't see more than 1-2 squares beyond our mini, we'd go out of bounds, which would be prevented by the lines on the DM layer (it's been a while, so I don't remember what they're called). I suppose it might have just been because of this one scenario, but we found it to be far more problematic than it was worth investing in.

I don't understand the use of individual tokens for exploration. Why not just a single party token?

Depends on if outdoor travel/city adventure or dungeon adventure. In the former, the DM usually has an overmap where we share a party token. In the latter, we use our normal minis, since the exploration and combat are on the same map.

We set up our standard formation, usually 2 wide, and then whoever we choose from the front line uses their token as the "party token." When combat or something else requires us to have all our minis present, we then move all our minis to the action. With dynamic lighting, we can only see the area of our own tokens, making this movement a pain in the arse.

 

[Don Durito]

No, we snap to grid, but since we can't see more than 1-2 squares beyond our mini, we'd go out of bounds, which would be prevented by the lines on the DM layer (it's been a while, so I don't remember what they're called). I suppose it might have just been because of this one scenario, but we found it to be far more problematic than it was worth investing in.

Depends on if outdoor travel/city adventure or dungeon adventure. In the former, the DM usually has an overmap where we share a party token. In the latter, we use our normal minis, since the exploration and combat are on the same map.

We set up our standard formation, usually 2 wide, and then whoever we choose from the front line uses their token as the "party token." When combat or something else requires us to have all our minis present, we then move all our minis to the action. With dynamic lighting, we can only see the area of our own tokens, making this movement a pain in the arse.

This is what puzzles me about the assumptions behind VTT - and even what I've seen at the table top. Why do you need individual tokens when you're not in combat? Wouldn't you be better of with a single token for the whole party that the whole party can see.? This would prevent people being in different places and make it easier for everyone to know what is going on.

It seems to me that the scale of the battlemap is just wrong for exploration. It seems to me there's a good reason the traditional exploration scale was in 10ft squares.

 

[iserith]

This is what puzzles me about the assumptions behind VTT - and even what I've seen at the table top. Why do you need individual tokens when you're not in combat? Wouldn't you be better of with a single token for the whole party that the whole party can see.? This would prevent people being in different places and make it easier for everyone to know what is going on.

It seems to me that the scale of the battlemap is just wrong for exploration. It seems to me there's a good reason the traditional exploration scale was in 10ft squares.

I keep everything in the same scale except for abstract city stuff or overland/hex travel. A dungeon, for example, is all in 5-foot-squares (though I hide the grid because it looks better). It works fine. I'm really having a hard time understanding what the actual problem is being reported here. In 10 years of online play, I've never seen any of this be an issue.