What Does Your Dream VTT Do/Look Like?

[Reynard]

The premature demise of Sigil VTT has me thinking about what i want in a VTT. I am curious what others want.

Ignoring market realism (but maintaining technological realism), what does your dream VTT look like? What is it capable of? How do you engage with it?

A couple caveats:

The 100 or so of you clamoring to find a different way to say "play at a real table" or "nothing" or similar -- please don't. We get it: not everyone likes a VTT.

Try and keep potential desired features within a reasonable time of introduction. VR headset virtual dinner table is okay, but Minority Report style AR probably not so much (despite the many promises made...).

Anyway -- I use Fantasy Grounds Unity for the most part. I am generally happy with it, but a) I would like to be able to run it through a browser so players did not have to install anything, b) I wish it was easier to build your own rules or even house rules without coding, and c) I wish it was equally useful for tabletop war/miniatuire games as RPGs. My big wish is for a super easy dry erase style drawing tool that lets me really run VTT games the same way I run in person games. I hate having to search up a not quite perfect battlemap and do all the scaling etc in the middle of a session.

This will be mildly controversial probably, but I would not mind some AI tools built in, like turning that dry erase sketch into a prettier battlemap, or being able to generate custom random tables on the fly with a few keyword prompts.

I keep meaning to implement sounds and music but so far I can't be arsed.

What about you? What does your dream VTT look like?

 

[MNblockhead]

I more and more what bespoke VTT design to support specific systems. The dream would be Foundry with very well supported official game systems that truly support the games mechanics, but I'm starting to think that a generic VTT may just not be able to do that for many systems. The WFRP 4e game system for Foundry comes the closest but it is still kludgy, is basically created and support by one guy, and just isn't smooth and polished.

My hopes for Sigil had little to do with the 3D. I was hoping that it would have solid support for 5e's official mechanics and would smoothly handle a lot of the combat tracking, resource tracking, etc.

I'm also closely watch what MCDM is doing with their VTT, which is being built from the ground up for their Draw Steel rules.

I'm also following Crucible the Foundry in-house game system that they are designing to have full mechanical support for and which makes full use of Foundry's features. Related to that I'm backing Foundry's Ember kickstarter, a highly detailed world and campaign which will support both 5e and Crucible.

Diving into the details, when running crunchy games, I want a VTT that can trying do what a computer should be good at doing:

1. Userfriendly and reliable handling of area of effect spells, attacks, lair actions, etc. Place a template on a large group of NPCs and have the saves resolved, damage applied, and conditions applied and tracked. There are modules and game systems in Foundry that do this but it is always wonky and I've yet to experience any VTT to manages to make this reliable and user friendly.

2. Condition tracking in general. Again, it is always wonky and buggy and reliable on every VTT that tries to do this for every game system I've tried.

3. Character building that can match D&D Beyond smoothness. When I ran DnD5e on Foundry, we would build characters in DDB import them into Foundry, level up in DDB, update in Foundry. WFRP's Foundry game system is better but the GUI can be clunky and buggy. As a player in verious games in Roll20, it seems pretty basic. Haven't looks at FG character building for a while. But I have yet to be please at the character building and leveling experience in any VTT.

I could probably think of many more things that I would like in my "ideal" VTT but those three things have been frustrating me for many years. VTTs are great for battlemap and token/mini display and control but bad at handling game mechanics. They all tend to create more work for the DM without providing the QOL improvements that I would think a computer should be great at.

 

[Duke_]

I prefer games that are relatively light on rules, and theater of the mind. My VTT should also be pretty simple. What I want in a VTT:

1. Rollable character sheets that are easy to create
2. Chat (text & voice, maybe video)
3. Dice rolling and card deck support (including custom decks). Has to support weird dice pools like Cortex Prime.
4. Good mobile support
5. Share images / handouts
6. Maps with fog of war - just to help visualize layouts and overland maps.
7. Good note-taking that lets you link to other notes.

I don't really feel like a high degree of automation is on my list for most things I'd like to run.

Right now the closest thing to what I want is Quest Portal, which is very young, but developing quickly. I don't care for the AI features, but they're paywalled, so that issue solves itself handily. It lacks card deck support, but the devs are working on it. Other than that, it's pretty much hitting all my points.

 

[aramis erak]

The premature demise of Sigil VTT has me thinking about what i want in a VTT. I am curious what others want.

Ignoring market realism (but maintaining technological realism), what does your dream VTT look like? What is it capable of? How do you engage with it?

A couple caveats:

The 100 or so of you clamoring to find a different way to say "play at a real table" or "nothing" or similar -- please don't. We get it: not everyone likes a VTT.

1. Runs on my own machine or my rented webspace.
2. Pay once. Option to pay for hosting.
3. Runs on Mac & windows.
   1. Supports logins from linux, android, win, mac, iOS.
4. interface uses all three standard buttons.
5. easy dice pool size adjustment for games with dice pools.
6. Supports voice response on systems with AI accelerators
7. allows secured map caching on player systems. (In other words, don't have to redownload the map each week, but it's encrypted so that players don't go looking. Won't stop a serious cheater, but will keep mostly honest people more than mostly honest.)
8. drag and drop sheet construction.
9. supports hex-grid, square grid, trigrid, and gridless play
10. Fog of War with multiple shapes (at least oval, triangle, and rectangle) and "detect the room"

Most of those already point in Foundry's direction... I need to get my own copy. My players are invested in Tabletop Simulator, tho'.

 

[payn]

I more and more what bespoke VTT design to support specific systems. The dream would be Foundry with very well supported official game systems that truly support the games mechanics, but I'm starting to think that a generic VTT may just not be able to do that for many systems. The WFRP 4e game system for Foundry comes the closest but it is still kludgy, is basically created and support by one guy, and just isn't smooth and polished.

My hopes for Sigil had little to do with the 3D. I was hoping that it would have solid support for 5e's official mechanics and would smoothly handle a lot of the combat tracking, resource tracking, etc.

I'm also closely watch what MCDM is doing with their VTT, which is being built from the ground up for their Draw Steel rules.

I'm also following Crucible the Foundry in-house game system that they are designing to have full mechanical support for and which makes full use of Foundry's features. Related to that I'm backing Foundry's Ember kickstarter, a highly detailed world and campaign which will support both 5e and Crucible.

Diving into the details, when running crunchy games, I want a VTT that can trying do what a computer should be good at doing:

1. Userfriendly and reliable handling of area of effect spells, attacks, lair actions, etc. Place a template on a large group of NPCs and have the saves resolved, damage applied, and conditions applied and tracked. There are modules and game systems in Foundry that do this but it is always wonky and I've yet to experience any VTT to manages to make this reliable and user friendly.

2. Condition tracking in general. Again, it is always wonky and buggy and reliable on every VTT that tries to do this for every game system I've tried.

3. Character building that can match D&D Beyond smoothness. When I ran DnD5e on Foundry, we would build characters in DDB import them into Foundry, level up in DDB, update in Foundry. WFRP's Foundry game system is better but the GUI can be clunky and buggy. As a player in verious games in Roll20, it seems pretty basic. Haven't looks at FG character building for a while. But I have yet to be please at the character building and leveling experience in any VTT.

I could probably think of many more things that I would like in my "ideal" VTT but those three things have been frustrating me for many years. VTTs are great for battlemap and token/mini display and control but bad at handling game mechanics. They all tend to create more work for the DM without providing the QOL improvements that I would think a computer should be great at.

Count me in as Foundry is as close as it gets to my "dream" VTT. Specific system and adventure support so I dont have to work at it to make it work. Although, for the price im not complaining Foundry is pretty damn great as is.

 

[Reynard]

interface uses all three standard buttons.

What does this mean?

 

[aramis erak]

What does this mean?

Standard computer mice are (by IEEE standards) three buttons - left, center, and right. Many combine a scroll wheel with the center button.

 

[Reynard]

Standard computer mice are (by IEEE standards) three buttons - left, center, and right. Many combine a scroll wheel with the center button.

Gotcha. I'd just never seen it referred to that way.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Being able to make as simple or complex map IN the VTT instead of needing to import maps. Why do VTT drawing tools suck so much??

Basic drawing tools similar to Paint.

if that’s impossible then a battlemat layer that lets you Share screen. Then you can open Paint, share that window so it becomes the default background for the map layer and then just draw in Paint.

 

[sevenbastard]

Why do VTT drawing tools suck so much??

I started VTT using Maptools so I got spoiled as it was actually decent at making maps.

It did a lot of things right and was 100% free.

The hard part was hosting a game and getting everyone logged on. Roll20 made that part easy and thus rose to the top.