D&D 5E 5e and the Cheesecake Factory: Explaining Good Enough

Morrus · Feb 22, 2021

PsyzhranV2 said:
makes your complaints about supposed "elitism" extremely hard to take seriously, given that the English practically invented elitism.

Refrain from insulting entire cultures, please.

Morrus · Feb 22, 2021

We're going to drop the fascinating argument about whether Paul Farquhar has heard of the term 'ad hominem', please folks. It's (a) pretty heated and (b) nothing to do with D&D.

Snarf Zagyg · Feb 22, 2021

I tell you, this thread really is like taking everyone to the Cheesecake Factory!

It all starts with the group getting along, enjoying their dishes.

But the, about two hours in, the volume is noticeably louder, and you notice Derek isn't wearing pants, and it's all downhill from there.

The lesson? They need to build more; after all, they can only kick Derek out of one at a time.

Starfox · Feb 23, 2021

TheSword said:
When people say D&D is the most popular because it’s all they know (or have been brainwashed) then I get uncomfortable. I dislike snide arguments that rely on the assumption that the population is dumber than they are, and can’t make decisions ‘correctly’ and doesn’t know what they want.

First, I agree with you. Second I will provide a counter example, myself.

I am currently getting into VTT from zero, And I am on Roll20. I have read that there are other better, cheaper, VTT, but of the two I tried (the other was Fantasy Grounds) Roll20 was easier to get into. And that is what I am doing right now, getting into VTT. So I am an example of what you're disliking - but I also show a way out. Becasue once I have become familiar with the concepts of VTT, I may move on. Or I may not. I still use an iPhone tough there is serious competition today; I never bothered to check them out because iPhone is good enough. Maybe Roll20 will be good enough. * Shrugs * Or maybe I just can't stop writing useless posts.

TheSword · Feb 23, 2021

Starfox said:
First, I agree with you. Second I will provide a counter example, myself.

I am currently getting into VTT from zero, And I am on Roll20. I have read that there are other better, cheaper, VTT, but of the two I tried (the other was Fantasy Grounds) Roll20 was easier to get into. And that is what I am doing right now, getting into VTT. So I am an example of what you're disliking - but I also show a way out. Becasue once I have become familiar with the concepts of VTT, I may move on. Or I may not. I still use an iPhone tough there is serious competition today; I never bothered to check them out because iPhone is good enough. Maybe Roll20 will be good enough. * Shrugs * Or maybe I just can't stop writing useless posts.

Aha. That’s fair.

I started in the same place as you almost exactly the same as you. New to VTT

Everyone told me how amazing Foundry was so I paid by $50 and then started to play. Liked a lot of the features (like player openable doors and transition lighting). Then found when I did a trial run with players that I couldn’t just give them a password to access the system online - I don’t believe this was clear in the product description when I bought it. Or if it did, it made it look trivially easy to fix.

I spent 3 hours looking at YouTube videos trying to make it work. The instructions were described by someone comfortable modding and working with computers clearly (that’s not me). Eventually I downloaded a freeware product to open my PC up as a server, but other players had to download the same too. It all looked a bit dodgy, I didn’t like the idea of asking my friends to download freeware if never heard of based on a YouTube recommendation. We gave it a go anyway... I couldn’t get it to work.

So I paid for a subscription to Forge - a foundry add on. Bearing in mind I’ve now paid a large up front fee and a subscription and not player a session on it now. We got to do our trial session. It took about an hour to sort out the Forge you tube videos and another 30 mins to upload everything I had done on Foundry for the first game. My players logged in. Two managed it but the third just got a blank tabletop screen and couldn’t see any maps, tokens or anything in the compendium.

Now I’m not being funny, but at several points during this experience I would happily have given up. I persevered though mainly on the recommendation of people who seemed to really know what they were talking about... dare I say experts.

I think people tend to overlook obstacles they have already overcome as if they were trivial. Now I like transition lighting, and I like player controlled doors. The question I have to ask myself is, had I known what a ball ache it was going to be, would I have bothered. I suspect not.

So I went back to Roll20 for D&D and use the Dynamic Lighting panel to control when doors are opened. That in some regards let’s me match the flow of visual information to my descriptions. It takes a few seconds more but it’s far more user friendly for me and my players. Ultimately that counts more for me that knobs and whistles.

I reckon there’s a sweet spot between the simplicity of Owlbear Rodeo and The Foundry. Roll20 seems to fit that sweet spot for me. No doubt someone could suggest an alternative sweet spot, but the phrase once bitten twice shy springs to mind. I’ll stick to what I know. The risk that people have over estimated benefits and underestimated hurdles is too great.

fearsomepirate · Feb 23, 2021

Roll20's interface sucks for open-world-ish campaigns, but it works reliably and is free. Pretty sure it's the top VTT right now at 5 million users. I use Fantasy Grounds, but it can be kind of janky. A while back, it decided that nobody was going to get maps, just a gray screen. Then, a few weeks ago, it let my players see maps again!

Starfox · Feb 23, 2021

fearsomepirate said:
Roll20's ... works reliably and is free...

We use a few pieces of code - the standard roll we use is one exploding d6 minus another exploding d6. That far, it is free. But rolls where both dice show the same result can have special significance, and we use some code to notify us when that happens. That requires us to pay a monthly fee. Its small things that make a difference! Anyway, to us it is worth it and the cost is much less than what we save by not ordering pizza like we used to when we were all here. A worse problem is that I pay rent for my gaming room, which is about 1/3 of my apartment that now barely sees any use. In fact until very recently the gaming table still had things on it from out last face-to-face session, before Corona.

fearsomepirate · Feb 23, 2021

Fantasy Grounds somehow does not have basic things like Fighters' Second Wind and Rogue's Sneak Attack coded into it. You have to manually add all that kind of crap. You also need to use a 3rd-party mod for a Ring of Protection to actually give +1 bonuses. There's no good reason for this.