Best Virtual Tabletop

[Celebrim]

I've ended up avoiding battle mats for the last 3 years. For those of you using virtual tabletops like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, what is your experience?

What virtual table should I be investing in for the best battle mat experience for traditional dungeon crawls?

 

[Zaukrie]

What game system?

I moved from Roll20 to Foundry for the more modern interface, and the ability to add complexity if I want. It isn't hard to learn, unless you try to automate everything. I'd say those are the two best choices right now, if you want to support lots of game systems. You can connect DnDBeyond to either quite easily with a browser plug in.....

There are a few built specifically for 5e, no idea how that will work when the rules are updated. Also, as you likely know, WotC will have a VTT sometime next year. I'm also confused how I'll use all the 5e clones together on a VTT at all (other than to manage maps only) going forward.....

 

[Celebrim]

What game system?

I moved from Roll20 to Foundry for the more modern interface, and the ability to add complexity if I want.

The most likely game systems to support would be d&d 3.x or some version of OSR. One thing I would definitely want is support for custom character sheets because I do a lot of homebrew.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How much do you want to just support maps and tokens, and how much do you want automation? I need to know before I can recommend Maptool.

 

[Celebrim]

How much do you want to just support maps and tokens, and how much do you want automation? I need to know before I can recommend Maptool.

I honestly don't know what I want because I've never used a virtual table top. Mostly I want to be able to quickly translate pen and paper maps to tiles and store those digital maps. I want a grid that supports tokens of various sizes including non-symmetric sizes. Everything after that is mostly bonus. Ideally, I've heard good things about support for fog of war, so I'd like some sort of automatic lighting scheme around the player tokens that respects line of sight.

 

[TerraDave]

I honestly don't know what I want because I've never used a virtual table top. Mostly I want to be able to quickly translate pen and paper maps to tiles and store those digital maps. I want a grid that supports tokens of various sizes including non-symmetric sizes. Everything after that is mostly bonus. Ideally, I've heard good things about support for fog of war, so I'd like some sort of automatic lighting scheme around the player tokens that respects line of sight.

Roll20 is good as it can just do that. You can take a capture from a PDF or take a picture and upload it as a map or handout. Pull pics of the internet for tokens. Grid is there, fog of war is there. Dice roller and chat is there. You can track conditions and HP on tokens.

If you want things like clickable monster stat blocks or char sheets that will be harder for pure homebrew. Though it is possible. But you don't need these to play.

 

[Celebrim]

Roll20 is good as it can just do that. You can take a capture from a PDF or take a picture and upload it as a map or handout. Pull pics of the internet for tokens. Grid is there, fog of war is there. Dice roller and chat is there. You can track conditions and HP on tokens.

I'd figured that with Roll20. One thing I like about Roll20 is storage. But it feels like all of this but fog of war is just the basics of any virtual table. And the problem I have with Roll20 is that you can't have customized character sheets until you rent it at the "Pro" level which is $99 a year - a price that really makes Foundry's one time price of $50 and self-hosting feel worth it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I honestly don't know what I want because I've never used a virtual table top. Mostly I want to be able to quickly translate pen and paper maps to tiles and store those digital maps. I want a grid that supports tokens of various sizes including non-symmetric sizes. Everything after that is mostly bonus. Ideally, I've heard good things about support for fog of war, so I'd like some sort of automatic lighting scheme around the player tokens that respects line of sight.

Okay, then let me enlarge on the benefits of Maptool and limits regarding what you care about.

First of all, the big upfront benefits of Maptool compared to some other options: It's free, and you host your own server (not difficult) so you're not dependent on someone else being up to do it.

Maps: Once you already have a map in some form for the use you plan its relatively easy to import into Maptool. Its drawing tools are present, but limited, however, so you'll usually want to draw it in something else if you don't have it from a source.

Tokens: You can set grids of either square or hexes, and importing images for tokens uses the same basic process as maps. Its easiest if you want to use symmetrical sizes (it has built in size settings for tokens of 3e era D&D style--i.e. Medium takes up one square, Large 2x2, Huge 3x3 and so on). Asymmetrical depends on what you mean by that--you can absolutely manually drag edges out to create, say, a 1x2 or 2x4 square filling object, but if you want something like 2x4 with a 3 square projection on one side I don't know any way to do it. Maptool will not convert those images into tokens per se (by which I mean put a ring or box frame around them) by itself, but there's another free utility called Tokentool that can do that for you, and then you adjust the size once in Maptool.

Fog of War: Maptool does support this, but I'm not qualified to discuss its lighting system; I use FoW, but adjust visibility manually so I don't know how good it is using lighting to have it auto adjust relative to the light aura around tokens, but I know it can do it.

 

[Celebrim]

First of all, the big upfront benefits of Maptool compared to some other options: It's free, and you host your own server (not difficult) so you're not dependent on someone else being up to do it.

It looks like someone forgot to pay the rent on the server. I could probably get it from github but it doesn't really inspire confidence. Feels like shelling out $50 for Foundry might be worth it in the long run.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It looks like someone forgot to pay the rent on the server. I could probably get it from github but it doesn't really inspire confidence. Feels like shelling out $50 for Foundry might be worth it in the long run.

Why? Its not surprising that something that is done as a labor of love by people is going to occasionally run into glitches in support. I've been using Maptool for a decade now, and other than the fact they've sometime been hit or miss about documentation, its only gotten better (this has been particularly true once it had its own baked in Java). If you're interested the most recent release (just before last weekend) was 1.13.0 and can be found here: Releases · RPTools/maptool