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

[MNblockhead]

I have to say though. I am jealous AF of the extra bells and whistles you 5e GMs get with Foundry VTT. There are awesome spell animations and automation available for 5e on Foundry VTT which don't work with the Pathfinder community build rules. I would kill to be able to use those spell animations in my game, tied to each spell by default! They are off the charts awesome in a 5e game!

Yes, but... it takes a lot of work to get this to work smoothly. I've been using Foundry for just under a year and I still don't have 5e running smoothly. Or, I should say, I run it smoothly by not using most of the bells and whistles. Foundry needs to get a license to sell the official WotC content beyond the SRD and have core support for it. I first need smoother targeting controls and application of AOE damage and effects before I worry about animated spell templates.

Besides, personally, I find keeping things abstracted is more visually appealing to me. An animated fireball or black tentacles looks cool the first time you use it, but quickly becomes old. But that's a personal preference. I'm glad Foundry makes that possible and gives you a huge number of ways to customize your game experience.

[Speaking of animations, before this winter is out, fully animated tokens will be supported in Foundry VTT. From arbitrary view angles, too. So your token becomes a sprite, with different anims for walk, ready, melee attack, ranged attack and spell casting. And 6 diff poses for death, too. That's coming soon according to rumour.]

That will be cool. It can be helpful to see the status of all parties in a scene based on their tokens. But animations can be distracting and get old quickly. But I'm all for more innovation and choices for DMs and players.

This screen capture is taken from the perspective of one of the players. That player cannot see what is behind the shadows cast by those columns. The amount of time taken by the PCs (who are all Arcane casters, every one of which can and was flying in this fight) was pretty interesting. Everybody's LOS was very different depending where on the map they were of course.

This is one of the best aspects of LOS in my opinion. I still love in-person games though and this will be something I'll loose in in-person games, especially if I want to use minis on a horizontal display.

[But for general VTT enjoyability when others build it and you just buy it to run? You might tell your players they have to plug an ethernet cable into their computer. Wi-Fi and VTT play is a really bad idea and slows the game down for everybody. Be firm in your insistence. Yes, really. ]

Hmmm...why? When I'm working abroad, I don't have this option. Don't have great wifi in my work-provided residence, but am still able to run games.

At home in the USA, I have a 1-gig cable connection. I do have my computer connected by ethernet to one of my Netgear Orbi mesh-wifi satellites. But I've also connected by Wifi from home and it worked fine.

That said, I'm not hosting Foundry locally. If you are hosting in a VM in the cloud, maybe this is less of an issue? I'm using The Forge and have been happy with the service and support.

And if you DO enjoy puttering about building things in a VTT? If, for you, that becomes "gaming by other means"? Then you'll LOVE Foundry VTT and I urge you to get it, install it, watch Youtube tutorials for inspiration (baileywiki 's Youtube vids are awesome) and get playing with it.

Thanks for the tip about Baileywiki. I'll be checking out his Youtube videos.

And as I've said, on the 5e side? It's even better frankly. Give it a try. It's only $50 and supports direct import from D&D Beyond.

Note that the D&D Beyond integration is not a core feature of the tool. There are a couple of third-party modes. The two best ones (I use the one from Virtual Tabletop Assets, I'm forgetting the name of the other, newer one that is popular) require Patreon subscriptions for full features and ongoing support.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Hmmm...why? When I'm working abroad, I don't have this option. Don't have great wifi in my work-provided residence, but am still able to run games.

At home in the USA, I have a 1-gig cable connection. I do have my computer connected by ethernet to one of my Netgear Orbi mesh-wifi satellites. But I've also connected by Wifi from home and it worked fine.

That said, I'm not hosting Foundry locally. If you are hosting in a VM in the cloud, maybe this is less of an issue? I'm using The Forge and have been happy with the service and support.

I think this goes to the root of player expectations and hardware, as well as what has become a "default" experience for many using Roll20.

A lot of people play with only one screen, and discord for voice, with maybe one tiny window for video of the active speaker, if that. They are playing their game with essentially voice only. A lot of them turn their video off to conserve bandwidth. They got one small screen on a laptop to play with, and that is where their focus is.

And if you are playing on a laptop, or are a student with no access to anything other than Wi-Fi, that probably makes complete sense. If you are coming to Roll20 via "pickup games"or groups initially organized on Discord? That also makes sense. And as discord promotes and protects the anonymity of users (in a way that Skype, MS Teams or Zoom does not), then that makes sense in that context, too.

And for a lot of people, that is how they came to use Roll20 and play online - from discord.

Me? I only game via VTT. So that's my social time, too. I want to be able to see who I am playing with at all times. We play in established groups and have for more than ten years with the people I play with online (some of them for 25 of more than 40 years from face-to-face days, too).

So I run like 4 different panels with I am GMing a game. I have Skype Video/Zoom on one screen, main VTT in the middle, PDF of the adventure on the left panel -- and a big 55 for a main "active speaker" panel. Most of the guys I play with are also on multi-monitor setups. So that's a lot of data, for sound, video, VTT, online rules reference and our Secret Facebook Page going on in the background too. Video quality is very important to us.

When one of our players is on the road and playing from a laptop in a hotel room? Half the time we have to tell him to just turn his camera off. It wrecks our video and sound otherwise.

It is a matter of player expectations. I think mine are probably different than yours?

 

[MNblockhead]

It is a matter of player expectations. I think mine are probably different than yours?

Well, sort of. I was specifically discussing the "ethernet" connection requirement.

I agree with the utility of multiple displays. As a DM, I always play with two screen, one of which is a an extra long, curving landscape screen.

But I don't dictate hardware requirements to my players. We generally use Google Hangouts and Foundry. I generally am not looking at the video. Even if I had three or more screens, I would likely cover the video with reference materials. One advantage of using the video within Foundry would be that it would be displayed with the map. I think my screen is big enough that it would not feel like it was getting in the way too much, but I've not had luck getting the video-conferencing functionality of Foundry to work.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Well, sort of. I was specifically discussing the "ethernet" connection requirement.

Because when you have that much data going on with your gaming group, and people have separate monitors open for video, you notice how much that can degrade over Wi-Fi. It's just not a beefy enough data pipe.

If, at the same time, you are playing with people who are also all using one monitor, the reason that they don't complain about the video being shite is because most people aren't using it - which in turn - takes pressure off the data path so your sound isn't squished.

 

[Don Durito]

Roll20 seems to be conclusively rubbish and no doubt Foundry and some of the new comers do a lot of the things Roll20 does a lot better (I don't know why Roll20 is just standing still - possbily they've trapped themselves in a corner software-wise?).

But I haven't felt all that motivated to change, because while alternative software seems to be better at doing the things Roll20 does they don't really offer me an alternative approach.

I don't want to be locked in 5e as a system, I want to play lots of different games. I don't want better line or sight or fancy magic animations. They're just a distraction.

 

[Nebulous]

I have a question, maybe some of you know....Why don't any of these VTT look and operate like say, old school Baldur's Gate? They seem to want to go that direction, with animations and rendered sfx.

 

[Nebulous]

Also, in Roll20, a technical issue I've noticed. I like using animated effects, like a flickering torch or rain or snow. It's a short clip you imbed on the map, but I've noticed I can only use one at a time or the music starts skipping horribly. Somehow the data pipeline gets compromised, even if I have two torches flickering.

 

[Dax Doomslayer]

YMMV but I think what Fantasy Ground Unity is proposing sorta fits the BG model. It's not out yet but it does look really promising and I think it's getting close to release:

 

[Nebulous]

That fog effect is badass. I don't know why Roll20 moves so slowly as far as updating stuff.

 

[Steel_Wind]

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