Recent content by Heilemann

You found something that works for you, and that's great. I had to roll for SAN on reading it, but that's me! 😄

Let's hope Fantasy Grounds stays afloat forever, otherwise I hope you love your current OS and its version! 😄 (I say that as someone who was on Windows back in the day and moved to Mac OS where Fantasy Ground wasn't).

Sure, that's certainly true. But not only are you locked into that VTT now, which great that that works for you, but that's a hard pass from me. Moreover, you're locked into reading your rulebooks... in... your VTT? Again, hard pass. That company might go bankrupt, they might do some shady stuff...

Well as I said earlier I’m not attracted to the automation side of VTTs; i think the drift towards computer games, even at a relatively small scale, detracts from the grain of TTRPGs. YMMV, so thats not a detractor for me.

Well, that got me!

Yeah that’s certainly true, and eg. for browsers there’s scant support for certain kinds of annotations (at least in open source packages, including Mozilla’s) which is frustrating. But non-interactive rendering is pretty solid and for the purposes of sharing resources at the table, looking up...

I’m generally not a fan of renting software either, but for software that I really use if it’s priced fairly, I think it’s worth it to keep supporting that development effort, especially in something as niche as role-playing.

To add a counterweight to the above arguments, here's what I want from a VTT, and what none of the ones I've tried are giving me (and why I wrote my own that does what I'm talking about here, but that's another matter): It should be simple above all, simple to sign up, start a game, invite...

Certainly up for debate, but I genuinely think the little motions that go into understanding the roll, the weapon, skill, environment, etc modifiers, the carried over bonuses from table to table, that particular weapon vs that particular armor, hitting that 66 on the crit table. The...

Everyone will have their own take on this, but as someone who has spent a lot of time actually implementing software to run and automate RPGs in various ways, my ultimate conclusion is that engaging with the systems and understanding them adds immensely to the game; outsourcing it to eg. a VTT...

Echoes of Burning Wheel social mechanics in there.

"Roll to grow potatoes, please." "Critical fail." "Well fu..."

Possibly for some things, unlikely for many others, and impossible for certain things because they're made by certain people using certain materials and it just isn't replicable.

Worth also knowing that just because there's eg. a 15% tariff on something, that doesn't mean you'll pay just 15% more. My wife recently paid 70% more on clothes from Sweden, in part because UPS has a brokerage fee, but in part because <we tried to figure out why and simply failed; the system is...

It's a firehose; I wish more Discord communities were forum based.