D&D General Do you want a 3D vtt?

[Clint_L]

I am not sure this problem has anything to do with VTTs. I think @Man in the Funny Hat point was that the VTT allows for us to play together when we are separated by distance. I know my play group extends from coast to coast, and occasionally across oceans. But the issues of "battlemap versus TotM" are the same as they would be at the table.

That said, I actually think VTTs have lots of advantages and automation is certain one of them. If you can cut down page flipping because the computer remembers the rule every time, you can speed up play. Vision and light on the battlemap are another place where it can be advantageous if that is what you were doing at the table: laying down exactly what you can see and where spell effects are is very useful. these advantages are so strong that lots of people use VTTs for in person games, in fact.

One place where I think most VTTs fall down, though, is they aren't very good for certain kinds of improvisational play where you just scrawl some terrain on your dry erase board and make up monster stats in your head because the party zigged when they should have zagged. A high fidelity 3D VTT tied to a highly automated rules database would be even worse for this style of play.

I totally agree about playing at a distance, as one of my campaigns has to be online (but I get to include my childhood best friend, with whom I started this journey 40+ years ago! I still build physical battle maps for those games, though, and point a camera at it.

I'm not so sure about that last point, though. I think improvising an encounter on the fly is exactly where a VTT might excel. Here is why:

create a fungus-filled cavern for a D&D encounter. Add a setting-appropriate monster for a Level 5 party, and a bit of interesting treasure with a common level magic item

The Fungal Cavern is a dark, humid underground lair filled with various species of fungi and mushrooms. The walls are slick with moss, and the air is thick with spores of spores of decaying organic matter. The cavern is home to a colony of violet fungi, which emit a toxic gas that saps the strength of any who inhale it.

In the center of the cavern, there is a large, glowing mushroom, which serves as a lair for a myconid sovereign. The myconid sovereign is a level 5 monster that can control the other fungi in the cavern, using them to attack intruders. The myconid sovereign has the ability to emit a cloud of spores that cause hallucinations and confusion, making it a formidable opponent for a level 5 party.

Among the debris scattered throughout the cavern, the adventurers may find a small wooden chest containing a potion of water breathing and a scroll of lightning bolt. The chest also contains a +1 shortsword, a common level magic item that provides a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with the weapon.

Now imagine the AI had access to some virtual terrain...

 

[MNblockhead]

I agree on the bold bit to a degree, but the system needs to be made to support the GM doing that rather than just dumping it on the GM to make that work. 5e players have too much range & can move too high of a percentage of their visual range. Toss on the fact that PCs are overly durable & overly powerful beyond the needs for level appropriate encounters & that kind of split turns into running two or more fully separate games in parallel while the PCs are aware of literally everything & not in any meaningful risk due to being split. Phrases like "oh I've got 90/120 feet darkvision" & "I get to ignore partial cover" "cunning action dash" & so on means that it becomes very difficult for the GM to mitigate that load of running parallel games with phrases like "It's dark, you can't really tell" & "there are trees/ruined buildings/rocks/whatever".

So far we don't yet have the darkvision rules for 6e & can only hope for improvements in the new generation of forks like blackflag but I'm at the point of just saying "nobody has darkvision ever & no light cabntrips" or "darkvision counts as carrying a candle & no light cantrips" because I'm tired of players crossing their arms & demanding I zoom out to give them a gods eye view

This raises one of my main concerns with an official WotC VTT. Yeah, it will be great to have a system that supports and models all of the systems RAW. But what if you want to customize it, tweak the vision rules, etc. In Foundry, I can do that. I worry that an official VTT that is focused on being the best emulator of the official ruleset is not going to support homebrew well.

 

[tetrasodium]

This raises one of my main concerns with an official WotC VTT. Yeah, it will be great to have a system that supports and models all of the systems RAW. But what if you want to customize it, tweak the vision rules, etc. In Foundry, I can do that. I worry that an official VTT that is focused on being the best emulator of the official ruleset is not going to support homebrew well.

Yea I adjust vision all the time for the reasons I noted but it doesn't stop players from crossing their arms and saying "but I have 120ft darkvision"/"but I ignore cover"/"but I've got $insane-number-ft range"/etc any time they feel like I'm the one putting them at risk of whatever is in the dark. 6e needs to do more to constrain those abilities to values reasonable even when 3-5 players are using them together around the same screen on the table.

 

[gamerprinter]

Just to add my 2 cents, no, I don't need a 3D VTT. Not only that, I don't need virtual tabletop at all. I only play at a live table. As a third party publisher and a professional cartographer, I've been creating VTT maps and content for over 10 years, so I know how to create content for virtual tabletop - I do it all the time. But I don't use it myself. I physically print maps I need for games. I don't see a time that I'll ever use virtual tabletop, but I can always provide for it, just the same...

 

[MNblockhead]

One place where I think most VTTs fall down, though, is they aren't very good for certain kinds of improvisational play where you just scrawl some terrain on your dry erase board and make up monster stats in your head because the party zigged when they should have zagged. A high fidelity 3D VTT tied to a highly automated rules database would be even worse for this style of play.

^ This. As much as I love Foundry, I had to compromise greatly on this. Foundry is great with my current campaign in which I'm running a megadungeon for which I have over 110 high resolution maps. But I would not have wanted to use it for my first 5e campaign, which was home brew. Also, Foundry requires prep. It doesn't even support manual fog of war without using a poorly supported, highly temperamental, community mod. You can do hand-drawn maps, but even that requires community mods to be an acceptable experience for me.

But the tools that do a great job with hand-drawn maps and manual fog of war for low-prep games, tend to be poor for supporting advanced VTT features and/or are difficult or impossible for me to host games from with my internet challenges, even if I'm willing to put in the effort to do the network configurations.

Foundry is almost there. It is so close. All it needs is to improve its drawing experience and have a solid, dependable manual fog of war feature. But that is not what the Foundry community wants. Manual FOW is routinely voted down in the developer's polls.

 

[Reynard]

^ This. As much as I love Foundry, I had to compromise greatly on this. Foundry is great with my current campaign in which I'm running a megadungeon for which I have over 110 high resolution maps. But I would not have wanted to use it for my first 5e campaign, which was home brew. Also, Foundry requires prep. It doesn't even support manual fog of war without using a poorly supported, highly temperamental, community mod. You can do hand-drawn maps, but even that requires community mods to be an acceptable experience for me.

But the tools that do a great job with hand-drawn maps and manual fog of war for low-prep games, tend to be poor for supporting advanced VTT features and/or are difficult or impossible for me to host games from with my internet challenges, even if I'm willing to put in the effort to do the network configurations.

Foundry is almost there. It is so close. All it needs is to improve its drawing experience and have a solid, dependable manual fog of war feature. But that is not what the Foundry community wants. Manual FOW is routinely voted down in the developer's polls.

What do you mean by manual fog of war?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I'm likely a statistical outlier for the general D&Der population, but I don't even use VTTs in the first place and certainly would not enjoy a 3D one. Maps are good, but progress on one is a pencil-and-paper deal for me. Part of the charm of this game is the extent to which it invites one's own imagination to fill in the details of a setting or scene, and VTTs often take that away.

I could not agree less. The idea that VTTs take away imagination is absurd to me.

 

[Azzy]

I could not agree less. The idea that VTTs take away imagination is absurd to me.

Yeah, as someone that uses a VTT, I agree that it's absurd.

 

[Malmuria]

Yea I adjust vision all the time for the reasons I noted but it doesn't stop players from crossing their arms and saying "but I have 120ft darkvision"/"but I ignore cover"/"but I've got $insane-number-ft range"/etc any time they feel like I'm the one putting them at risk of whatever is in the dark. 6e needs to do more to constrain those abilities to values reasonable even when 3-5 players are using them together around the same screen on the table.

That sounds incredibly taxing. Fortunately, I haven't really run into that problem with my group. As long as there is a basic idea about what is where, we can make the scene work. We use ToTM or owlbear rodeo. From the innumerable debates on "mother may I," however, I can see that there are many players that want very clearly hard coded rules for their actions. This is putting aside the fact that having a top down view--that the characters do not have--is quite empowering.

You might be interested in looking at this article on rules for theater of the mind combat:

Sly Flourish's Guide to to Narrative "Theater of the Mind" Combat in the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons

Note, this guide has been updated since the original written in October 2015. This guide aims to help Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition DMs run narrative "theater of the mind" style combat. This style of...

slyflourish.com

 

[Guest 7034872]

I could not agree less. The idea that VTTs take away imagination is absurd to me.

Like I said, I'm probably an outlier. I'm not making claims about other people's experiences with VTTs here; just a report of my own.