MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
If any fellow EN Worlders have backed Ember and have beta access, I would be interested in your thoughts so far. I assume that anyone backing Ember is doing so as a GM who thinks that they may run the game, so I'm not going to comment out spoilers or expect other to. Hopefully the thread title makes that clear.
For those not familiar with Ember it is a campaign created by the team at Foundry VTT that is designed specifically to take full advantage of Foundry's features.
foundryvtt.com
They are releasing a D&D 5e version and a version using their in-house Crucible system.
I backed it to support Foundry and the continued development of the Crucible system. Also, buy the time it is released and has been out a few months, hopefully long enough to iron out any glitches discovered when it is first released to the masses, I should be wrapping up my Warhammer Fantasy campaign and thought that I might make Ember my next campaign.
I have not spent too much time with it beyond reading through some of the the adventure material, making characters, and playing around with the new "Vistas" feature.
Some very preliminary first impressions.
The D&D 5e version is much more polished and further along than the Crucible version, which isn't surprising and they are making regular progress on updating the Crucible game system and content with each update. I don't plan to run it until months after the release date, so I hope the Crucible version is complete and ironed out by them.
One thing that has always bugged me about the Crucible game system is the talent tree, which would be a neat interface for advancing talents, but currently feels half-baked. I shouldn't have to consult the rules to know how the segments are broken up and node names look like programmer code, I find it very user unfriendly and it completely turns me off on using Crucible. Yet I don't see anyone complaining about it and no updates made to it. Maybe I'm just missing something or it just doesn't bother people. Even if everything else is ironed out and complete, if the talent tree interface remains the same, I'll probably run the 5e version. Maybe just a pet peeve, but it really bugs me.
I'm not really feeling the Visa feature. Its a neat bit of eye candy but feels a bit fiddly in play. It took me a bit of playing around with it to realize you are not really supposed to drop the PCs into it. I'm holding off judgement until I actually use it in play, but it feels like extra GUI fluff I'll need to juggle when running a game.
The recent update made improvements to how content is imported. I do worry that when I run the final game, I'll be hesitant to import any updates of existing content and overwriting in-game progress. I've been bitten by this with my Warhammer game. Updating content in your world from the compendium in Foundry can be confusing and fraught. I hope the Foundry team improves this in Ember to provide an example for other game systems.
The adventure is fairly linear but that is a good thing for getting people used to the new system. With the region map, you can make it much more of a sandbox.
The top toolbar that integrate time and date tracking with map lighting and moon position is slick and works very nice. All of the maps are gorgeous.
Character creation for both systems are is pretty intuitive. Not as simple as D&D Beyond, and players new to Foundry may need a bit of hand-holding, but I feel it is well executed overall.
I've not tested how well combat works. If the D&D 5e version is just using default DD5e game system default, I expect people are going to want to enable a bunch of communicty mods. One thing that I like about Crucible is it take better advantage of the VTT ability to auto-calculate conditions, flanking, etc. without needing additional mods.
If anyone has actually run some sessions in Ember, I would be interested in hearing how it went (or is going) for you.
For those not familiar with Ember it is a campaign created by the team at Foundry VTT that is designed specifically to take full advantage of Foundry's features.
Ember | Foundry Virtual Tabletop
Ember is an innovative digital roleplaying game from the creators of Foundry Virtual Tabletop.
foundryvtt.com
They are releasing a D&D 5e version and a version using their in-house Crucible system.
I backed it to support Foundry and the continued development of the Crucible system. Also, buy the time it is released and has been out a few months, hopefully long enough to iron out any glitches discovered when it is first released to the masses, I should be wrapping up my Warhammer Fantasy campaign and thought that I might make Ember my next campaign.
I have not spent too much time with it beyond reading through some of the the adventure material, making characters, and playing around with the new "Vistas" feature.
Some very preliminary first impressions.
The D&D 5e version is much more polished and further along than the Crucible version, which isn't surprising and they are making regular progress on updating the Crucible game system and content with each update. I don't plan to run it until months after the release date, so I hope the Crucible version is complete and ironed out by them.
One thing that has always bugged me about the Crucible game system is the talent tree, which would be a neat interface for advancing talents, but currently feels half-baked. I shouldn't have to consult the rules to know how the segments are broken up and node names look like programmer code, I find it very user unfriendly and it completely turns me off on using Crucible. Yet I don't see anyone complaining about it and no updates made to it. Maybe I'm just missing something or it just doesn't bother people. Even if everything else is ironed out and complete, if the talent tree interface remains the same, I'll probably run the 5e version. Maybe just a pet peeve, but it really bugs me.
I'm not really feeling the Visa feature. Its a neat bit of eye candy but feels a bit fiddly in play. It took me a bit of playing around with it to realize you are not really supposed to drop the PCs into it. I'm holding off judgement until I actually use it in play, but it feels like extra GUI fluff I'll need to juggle when running a game.
The recent update made improvements to how content is imported. I do worry that when I run the final game, I'll be hesitant to import any updates of existing content and overwriting in-game progress. I've been bitten by this with my Warhammer game. Updating content in your world from the compendium in Foundry can be confusing and fraught. I hope the Foundry team improves this in Ember to provide an example for other game systems.
The adventure is fairly linear but that is a good thing for getting people used to the new system. With the region map, you can make it much more of a sandbox.
The top toolbar that integrate time and date tracking with map lighting and moon position is slick and works very nice. All of the maps are gorgeous.
Character creation for both systems are is pretty intuitive. Not as simple as D&D Beyond, and players new to Foundry may need a bit of hand-holding, but I feel it is well executed overall.
I've not tested how well combat works. If the D&D 5e version is just using default DD5e game system default, I expect people are going to want to enable a bunch of communicty mods. One thing that I like about Crucible is it take better advantage of the VTT ability to auto-calculate conditions, flanking, etc. without needing additional mods.
If anyone has actually run some sessions in Ember, I would be interested in hearing how it went (or is going) for you.
