VTT play definitely requires more comms discipline than FTF. We put all the humorous asides and peanut gallery comments in text so that the people speaking can speak uninterrupted. We've been playing online for years so we have it down to where nobody talks over each other.In decreasing importance:
Note that 1, 2, and 3 are not VTT specific, and are the biggest causes of slowdowns.The VTT adds additional slowdowns.
- We find the lack of visual input due to audio only to require more words than when we can see each other
- We wind up repeating due to someone having noise at home interfering with comprehension. (None of us live alone.)
- Due to no faces visible, people talking over each other is FAR more common (more than 10x more than when we played FTF).
- the interface of the VTT's I've used are not faster than using real dice
- the ALIEN module for Foundry
- made adjusting dice rolls a pain - and in combat, mods are common. It's not push a button, it's right-click, wait for the modal dialogue, enter the mod.
- made using an alternate attribute with a given skill (an optional rule) a pain. For example, player wanting to use Heavy Machinery to analyze a problem should be using INT, not STR, but the hard link is to STR.
- it did speed up resolving the stress system.. unless there were rerolls.
- Maptools, foundary and GTove pushed my (now dead) windows laptop to the point of lag
- ironically, the lower spec Chromebook was less laggy on Foundry, but foundry comlained about screen size (or lack thereof).
- loading maps on GTove, Foundry, and maptools was much slower than pulling them out and putting them on a table
- one of the players usually didn't see the map until the second round of combat...his connection was slowed due to living further into the boondocks than I am.
- I can whip out the hex-tiles and use erasable markers far easier than I can use a VTT as a virtual whiteboard.
- the use of the VTT's ping feature (Foundry and GTove) is not useful if the portion pinged isn't where they are looking. "Where?" long press to ping location, "I'm not seeing it. Hold on" (30 sec and a restart of the ping later) "Oh, there1" vs face to face, I'd just touch the map.
- they get disorented if I snap everyone's view to a specific location
- Fog of war is great... but gTove doesn't have any shape but rectangles last I used it. Which meant using the radius light of the various games was a real time sink
It's true that the more automation and stuff you bake in, the more resources and bandwidth are consumed. If you don't have good computers and internet, you're going to have a bad time. Of course, lighter weight games and theater of the mind play alleviate the need for much of that.