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.

 

[SteveC]

During the live presentation on Twitch the owner/founder mentioned that WotC has a very straight forward pricing scheme for these products on other platforms, so we can expect the same $30/book/expansion. And that holds true for the first expansion: "Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk". When I look up the PHB/DMG/MM on Roll20, each of those costs $30, so $90 for the bunch.

That sounds about right. For whatever reason, my employer doesn't let me stream Twitch, so I didn't see this, Thanks for the info. The $30 price point is about what I was expecting.

 

[SlyFlourish]

That said, I'm curious for how long the licensing deal is (how many years) or if WotC can pull the plug at any time...

I'm not super familiar with Foundry – if WOTC cuts ties, can they prevent you from using what you already bought? I know they could with Roll20 or D&D Beyond but can they do that with Foundry? I thought what you bought stays local to your Foundry instance. Do I have that wrong?

 

[SlyFlourish]

For those complaining that there isn't the full core books – take a look at the Level Up A5e ruleset. It's still core 5e but with tons of stuff going on and with a very dedicated development team: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/a5e

I think this is outstanding news. It's one of my "little candles" that light up or go dark depending on whether Hasbro's behavior is helping or hindering the larger 5e TTRPG hobby.

By supporting Foundry, they're spreading D&D to platforms beyond their own including Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and now Foundry. I think we would not have been surprised if Hasbro said "yeah, the digital version of 2024 D&D is going to be only on D&D Beyond, Maps, and the 3d VTT". So seeing that they are indeed supporting what we might consider to be their digital competitors is fantastic for the hobby. It means we get to enjoy D&D on the platforms we prefer or the ones in which we've already invested significant time and money. We get to choose the platforms that best support the game we want to play.

On hearing this, I started spending a fair bit of time with Foundry and it definitely has a steep learning curve. I can tell why people love how extensible it is and how seamless it can make a game with dynamic lighting, system integration, auto-assigning damage and effects and all the rest. Very cool. But probably not for me. I love to have my tools separate so I can use the right tool for the right job and switch out as I need. For me that's Owlbear Rodeo and Discord with some other basic tools (good old BBEdit to handle initiative, damage, and theater of the mind combat).

Clearly releasing D&D content on Foundry helps Hasbro – they get to sell on lots of platforms. But it also helps us because we get to choose where we buy it based on our own preferences. I'm very happy about that.

I also think that Foundry is a touch more resilient than pure online only platforms like Roll20 and D&D Beyond. If you buy a module for Foundry and download it – you have it. It doesn't phone home except for updates. If you run it locally and then move to a Foundry hosted service, I believe you get to move your license keys with you so you can actually run it on multiple foundry servers. It's not pure full interoperability but it's not too bad. It's still not very practical to say you can keep playing with whatever you bought forever but it's not bad. Foundry is different that way since you're running your own server or paying for someone to host your server.

Anyway, I think supporting Foundry is outstanding news and I applaud Hasbro/WOTC making the choice to do so.

 

[Cergorach]

That sounds about right. For whatever reason, my employer doesn't let me stream Twitch, so I didn't see this, Thanks for the info. The $30 price point is about what I was expecting.

You could rewatch it here: Still available for a while.

I'm not super familiar with Foundry – if WOTC cuts ties, can they prevent you from using what you already bought? I know they could with Roll20 or D&D Beyond but can they do that with Foundry? I thought what you bought stays local to your Foundry instance. Do I have that wrong?

My question was more related to how long they would be able to create official products and if WotC could stop the license deal if they decided their VTT would be the only D&D platform. What you're asking is something else. Foundry VTT comes in a number of components. Foundry VTT is in Foundry's own control. Licensed modules are not, so if a license deal ends could mean they would need to stop distributing them. But as many of us are running it on our own servers, we can make backups of those modules and reinstall them again. But those paid modules also have a license key. Foundry VTT installation is linked to our Foundry account, which has the license keys of third party modules, which grants you access to your purchases. To me it looks like that when you activate a content key, that gives you access to the download, when you've downloaded it, you can make backups.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Another cool aspect of Foundry I forgot to mention is the guerrilla interoperability going on in Foundry with connections to D&D Beyond such as the stat block importer and Mr. Primate's D&D Beyond importer. They let you pull material you bought on D&D Beyond and move it into Foundry. I think that's fantastic.

 

[SlyFlourish]

My question was more related to how long they would be able to create official products and if WotC could stop the license deal if they decided their VTT would be the only D&D platform.

Sure, but that's true of every product in existence. They could stop making books. They could stop selling anything at any time. From a practical stand point we really only need the core books and the rest can be filled in with material from other publishers until the heat death of the universe.

What you're asking is something else. Foundry VTT comes in a number of components. Foundry VTT is in Foundry's own control. Licensed modules are not, so if a license deal ends could mean they would need to stop distributing them. But as many of us are running it on our own servers, we can make backups of those modules and reinstall them again. But those paid modules also have a license key. Foundry VTT installation is linked to our Foundry account, which has the license keys of third party modules, which grants you access to your purchases. To me it looks like that when you activate a content key, that gives you access to the download, when you've downloaded it, you can make backups.

This is what I'm more interested in. It's one thing for WOTC to stop selling material and something else to take away our ability to use the stuff we already bought. That's a risk with Roll20 (and even D&D Beyond). It's less of a risk on Foundry where we can run our own instances and move our own license keys from server to server. From a practical standpoint it's not a huge difference. Who bothers to even back stuff up like this when we can just reinstall it from the website when we switch machines – but it's a slightly more interoperable difference between pure web-hosted services and Foundry.

 

[Cergorach]

Who bothers to even back stuff up like this when we can just reinstall it from the website when we switch machines – but it's a slightly more interoperable difference between pure web-hosted services and Foundry.

I'm not doing that structurally yet, but I intend to. I even intend to store all the different releases of Foundry VTT on my NAS and eventually backup to MDISC (longterm strorage on blue ray) with a ton of parity files. The same for all the modules I've bought and probably for a LOT of free resources as well. I'm looking into Github and cloning modules and game system.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I'm not doing that structurally yet, but I intend to. I even intend to store all the different releases of Foundry VTT on my NAS and eventually backup to MDISC (longterm strorage on blue ray) with a ton of parity files. The same for all the modules I've bought and probably for a LOT of free resources as well. I'm looking into Github and cloning modules and game system.

Nerd.

=)

 

[Azzy]

I'm not super familiar with Foundry – if WOTC cuts ties, can they prevent you from using what you already bought? I know they could with Roll20 or D&D Beyond but can they do that with Foundry? I thought what you bought stays local to your Foundry instance. Do I have that wrong?

Yes, it's all local (assuming you're not using the Forge). There might be issues if a major Foundry update causes internal conflicts with the existing library structure (always back up Foundry before major updates), but I don't believe that, once downloaded, it's possible for WotC to "take the toys away".

 

[MNblockhead]

I'm not doing that structurally yet, but I intend to. I even intend to store all the different releases of Foundry VTT on my NAS and eventually backup to MDISC (longterm strorage on blue ray) with a ton of parity files. The same for all the modules I've bought and probably for a LOT of free resources as well. I'm looking into Github and cloning modules and game system.

Man, that's dedication to long-term availability of your software. I think technology is going to change so much in the VTT space, and I don't replay to many adventures, that I really don't bother. I host Foundry on forge-vtt and use snapshot backups, the that mostly so I can roll back if an update (or more likely me tinkering with mods like a drunken gnome) messes things up for me right before game day. For rules and adventures I love and want to have for a long time, I generally have both physical books and PDFs in backed up cloud storage.

The only thing I've done close to what your doing is when development on Realmworks ended, I made a VM with Realmworks installed so I didn't lose my homebrew world, which I hope to revisit.