D&D 5E Foundry Gets Official D&D Support

Joining Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and WotC’s own VTT plans, the Foundry virtual tabletop is getting official D&D support. You can se their announcement video below.


This will give yet another way to play D&D and that's some very good news.

 

[MNblockhead]

It's more that my players and myself are scattered across a couple of continents. Which can make map loading and whatnot really challenging. I pretty much limit myself to under 1Mb for any single image. By the time you add in dynamic lighting, a bunch of tokens, and whatnot, that's about all we can handle before things start grinding to a halt.

One of the reasons I ended up going with Foundry about 4 years ago is it was the best VTT option I found for running games when I had mediocre internet and my players were all in a different country. I was running Rappan Athuk, which has over 100 maps and many of them quite large.

Foundry wasn't my first choice, mainly because of lack of manual fog of war.

Fantasy Grounds was my first choice but it was absolutely impossible to host games with it. A mixture of poor internet and the FG hosting service blocked traffic from the country I was working in. I tried both classic and unity (which just came out of beta at the time).

Roll20 has always made hosting games dead simple and has always provided a mostly smooth experience, even without great internet and new computers. But even the most expensive plan didn't give me enough storage.

I tried MapTool with Google Meet screensharing for a player facing instance, but I didn't like having to move the PC tokens and the players not being able to interact with it.

Also test d20pro and a few others that I can't remember but none of them met my needs.

I ended up going with Foundry hosted by The Forge. It has been awesome. I ended up putting in walls for dynamic lighting and the better play experience made up for the lack of a low-prep manual fog of war option. I've run sessions with huge maps, with dynamic lighting, sound, animated effects, etc. with no performance issues.

 

[Azzy]

One of the reasons I ended up going with Foundry about 4 years ago is it was the best VTT option I found for running games when I had mediocre internet and my players were all in a different country. I was running Rappan Athuk, which has over 100 maps and many of them quite large.

Foundry wasn't my first choice, mainly because of lack of manual fog of war.

Have you tried the Simple Fog module?

 

[Zaukrie]

If I could just figure out the complexity of 3d map making in foundry better.......

 

[MNblockhead]

Have you tried the Simple Fog module?

Yeah, early on it worked okay. Not as good as when I used RealmWorks or MapTool for in-person games with a horizontal monitor acting as a battlemap with minis on it.

Then the community developer stopped supporting it and it broke. The League of Extrodinary Developers took it on and it would work and then not. It seems to have finally stabilized, but by that time I had already moved to prepping all of my maps for dynamic lighting.

In my current campaign, I'm using pre-prepped maps so I haven't had to rely on it. But I've tested and played around with it fairly recently and I still don't find it a smooth experience. It isn't integrated and I'm still not exactly sure how it interacts with the core scene settings and core lighting controls. If I use it more maybe I'd get more comfortable with it.

For comparison, the D&D Beyond Maps manual fog of war works very well.

The problem is that the Foundry community has very little interest in manual fog of war. Foundry really shines with all of the advanced lighting and line of sight features. Manual Fog of War has gotten onto development priority polls over the past few years, but receives very few votes. I had subscribed to the Foundry patreon to get voting rights, but eventually cancelled. My priorities just don't match those of the majority of Foundry's users (or at least those invested enough to pay for the rights to vote for new features).

Normally, I don't mind dealing with the issues that community modules bring (development stopping, breaking when a new version of Foundry is released, etc.) because most provide DM quality of life or eye candy features. But fog of war is a core, fundamental feature if you want to run a low-prep, sandbox game. Other VTTs do it better and I have yet to find anything that does it better than Map Tools (though the networking hassles of configuring it to host games online prevent me from recommending it for most people looking to host online games).

If I were to run a low-prep, open sandbox campaign, I wouldn't use Foundry. If I were to run D&D again, I would likely just use D&D Beyond. As much as I like Foundry (and it has been almost a separate hobby in itself for me over the past 4+ years), I think a lot of fans oversell it those looking for a VTT. I would never recommend it for someone that wants simple, low-prep battlemap functionality.

 

[Cergorach]

If I were to run a low-prep, open sandbox campaign, I wouldn't use Foundry. If I were to run D&D again, I would likely just use D&D Beyond. As much as I like Foundry (and it has been almost a separate hobby in itself for me over the past 4+ years), I think a lot of fans oversell it those looking for a VTT. I would never recommend it for someone that wants simple, low-prep battlemap functionality.

Foundry VTT has a certain technical hurdle (that something like The Forge fixes partly) that can be pretty high to setup and maintain. If you're not technically inclined and no one in your group is ready and able or willing to pickup that responsibility, don't use Foundry VTT! It would be like giving something like MS Access to make a simple table...

BUT... FVTT can be used very well with low-prep IF you've set up the right tools previously. If by low-prep you mean also setting up FVTT, then NO, this are not the VTT you're looking for! But if you've set it up already (with the right tools) you can do ad-hoc very well! Something like Dungeondraw, Moulinette (Tiles) with the free assets from Forgotten Adventures you can get very far. And that is just basically installing a couple of modules and downloading and copying ~11GB worth of assets. That's basically how we've currently been playing.

You can get even more fancy with the Baileywiki modules (requires a Patreon subscription), who have a huge collection of premade tiles (based on the FA assets) that pretty much function like RL cardboard tiles. You can create dungeons, cities and even wilderness ad-hoc.

If you don't ever need all that, the FVTT isn't for you. Something like Roll20 (and other simple VTTs) will be a better solution.

The Roll20 Pro subscription has 8GB of storage and they now support webp images (no animation though), what kind of maps were you using?