Looking for some alternate VTTs

[KainG]

Hello all, I'm looking for some alternative VTTs that might serve my needs. I have a heavily house rules PF campaign, and I want to be able to create my own character sheets, and possibly other sheets such as for settlements, kingdoms, army units, etc, and automate as much calculations as possible. I have a background in programming and am familiar with HTML and JavaScript.

I've tried the following so far:

• Roll20: This is what my group is currently using. The HTML and CSS are easy customize the look, and the auto-calc does 99% of what I need it to do and generally easy to figure out. Reason why we want to switch is Roll20's performance: poor map navigation and very limited layers, dynamic lighting is a huge resource hog, unstable voice-audio connection.
• Foundry: Great: basically everything is customizable, and anything we could every want could be coded. Bad: I need to be a full-time professional JS dev to do what I need. Knowledge and experience I can get eventually, but I just don't have the time available to write hundreds of pages of JS code. And the code behind Foundry is way too complex for me. I tried modding the PF1 system that the community created, and I keep ending up breaking the whole thing.
• Astral: I only just started looking at this one, but so far map performance is really smooth with my large world map, and custom sheet creation is easy: it's as close as WYSIWYG thus far, and creating stats and formulas is pretty straightforward. Downside: correct me if I'm wrong about this one, but there is no way to create a central sheet, right? I can make a template sheet and have my players copy it, but if I later make a change to the template, every sheet from before has to be individually and manually updated; this is a huge hassle I don't want to deal with.

I'd love to hear what other VTTs are out there that perform great especially with large maps and lighting, easy to customize and update, and any other fancy features.

Thanks!

 

[darjr]

One that works as a chrome plugin inside of DNDBeyond is AboveVTT.

AboveVTT

Integrated VTT for D&DBeyond

chrome.google.com

You can click on your DNDBeyond dice and use the combat tracker and DNDBeyond assets you own. It also supports youtube videos as maps.

 

[darjr]

There is also Owlbear Rodeo which is not meant to integrate rules but be a quick way to run a game. Simple and to the point of a digital battlemap and nothing more. It's elegant and easy to use and fast. Don't need any assets to start.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePe1wJC53_7fbBbSECG7YQ

 

[darjr]

Mythic Table

Mythic Table is an online tabletop platform for playing your favorite roleplaying games with your friends around the world.

www.mythictable.com

I've used Mythic Table. It's completely open source and the dev team is on discord. Used it for a while. I think they now have built in chat and video.

 

[drl2]

You're going to have trouble on any system if you're trying to build a home-brew-ish character sheet with a lot of automation but limited coding.

I'm most familiar with Foundry and myself and a friend have both been looking into ways to use it for Mighty Protectors. He's had some luck creating a very simple character sheet using fillable PDFs with PDFoundry and we've created a couple of basic macros to support it. I've tinkered a bit with the Sandbox System Builder which, while potentially somewhat complex depending on your needs, offers a lot of flexibility without coding.

(That said, I've decided to just learn the Foundry API and write a system for it. So far the API part is easier than getting the &^%^* CSS flexboxes and grids to look the way I want them to )

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

Shard Tabletop

I've been using Shard since Nov last year, clearly digging it.

Getting a map up, tokens added is a breeze even for the non-technically inclined ... unlike some of the others I tried out.

Once you get the basics down, easy to add new spells, items, subclasses takes minutes.

Has a really active and helpful Discord community, and support from the operators often happens in minutes!

Some great partners for content as well.