Most Useful and Used Cross-System RPG Product for VIRTUAL Play

[MNblockhead]

There is another thread (Your Most Useful and Most Used RPG Products) asking about most useful and used RPG products, but it felt like going into online play tools would be a bit of a derailment. So I thought I would start a new thread, specifically for assets used for online play.

I'm interested in what software, hardware, and digital assets you find most useful and most used for playing games online, particularly for multiple systems. I'm not making this a + thread, answer how you will, but for my answer I'm avoiding physical books, physical dice, and other items that I would use in a physical game, which might also be useful for prep and reference in game. I'm also avoiding system-specific assets like digital versions of rules and adventures.

Foundry VTT
I've tried a lot of VTTs, but have settled on Foundry for running my games. I mainly got it for the battlemap functionality, but stuck with it for the ability to customize and expand its feature set with community modules. With improvements to its Journal functionality over the past two versions, I now use it for world building as well and have migrated all my content from RealmWorks into a Foundry world. It supports a lot of game systems and there are generic systems and modules that allow you to create your own systems. Playing around with Foundry has become a bit of a hobby in and of itself. The most useful mods for me (ignoring game-specific settings and mods) are:

• Dice So Nice! - customizable 3D dice rolling. This is so commonly recommended it is almost core functionality. It is solid, reliable, well maintained, and looks and sounds nice.
• Spotlight Omnisearch with Dig Down. Dig Down provides deeper indexing of your content. Spotlight Omnisearch adds functionality similar to a MacBook's Spotlight Search. Not only can you search through all your content, you can drop things on a battlemap or add links to items into a journal just with drag and drop. It also has mini apps built into the search bar, like a calculator, various trackers, you can jot quick notes that are added with a time stamp to a QuickNotes folder in your Journal, and more. You can also search and change settings from it, which is convenient when you have a lot of mods installed.
• Moulinette. All of them. Moulinette makes finding, adding, dropping, playing, etc. maps, tiles, tokens, music, sound effects, and art to Foundry.
• Simple Fog. For low prep games or anytime you just want to open a map, apply fog of war, and manually reveal the map as the characters expore, Simple Fog is the way to do it. Since the Extradinary League of Developers has took it over it has been stable and updated to work with new Foundry updates. This really should be a core functionality of Foundry. But this mod adds this functionality in a solid, easy to use way.
• Pop Out! Allows you to pop out windows and certain UI elements in Foundry so you can drag them to another screen. Great for adventure notes, references, and other journals. I used to pop out the initiative tracker but not I use a stream deck (see below).

Stream Deck
I mostly use this with Foundry with the Foundry Material Deck module. But the device was originally targeted to Twitch streams and their like. It is basically panel with a grid of LED button whose icons and text can change based on which profile you select. When running games I find it nice to have physical button for common macros, sound effects, controlling the initiative tracker, etc. Helps me reserve more screen real estate for the journals and the map and requires less clicking around during the game. I've also created a general profile for my Mac. If you have multiple computers you can have different profiles for different computers and operating systems.

Multiple Monitors
Not really gaming specific, but I would not enjoy running games online without multiple screens. I have two external monitors and when I run games I use both of them, plus my laptops screen.

Discord
I don't really like Discord, but I can't get away from it. It is by far the most popular audio/video conferencing app among gamers and my players asked that we switch to it from Google Meet. I've tried using Foundry's audio/video conferencing, but I didn't like the screen real estate that was lost and the controls seemed a bit wonky. We don't use video, only audio, and the voice quality in Discord has been reliably good, even for players that don't have great internet. I works well on most devices, including smart phones. On the rare occasion a player's internet has gone down, they can rejoin Discord on their phone with cellular data. Discord also makes it easy to jump on a separate voice channel with an individual player when you need to have a discussion with them without the other players hearing it. I've played around with streaming background music using Discord and various discord apps, but now use Foundry exclusively for that and only use Discord for audio conferencing.

I could list a lot more, but the above are my must-have list for any game I'm running online. What about you?

 

[overgeeked]

Roll20 because it’s free. Not the greatest VTT, but it does what it needs to well enough. I don’t use it as a computer to run the game and do all the math. It’s a virtual tabletop and use it as such.

Discord because it’s free. Mostly for audio.

Dyson’s maps because they’re free. Grab one that’s close enough and go.

 

[coralwave]

FOUNDRY:

• Dice tray: gives you a nice GUI for rolling dice beeneath the chat, no idea why it's not a core feature yet.
• global progress clocks/ hourglass: for when you need to present progress or real time.
• crunch my praty!- gone are the days of dragging each token seperately during exploration
• GM vision: adjusts the darkness level for you so things stay visible even if you click a player's token
• scenery- because not only is simplifies phased maps, it lets you upload a GM map with notes on/ around the rooms that only yoou can see
• drag upload- life saver when you need to add tokens/ tiles quickly- prompts you to determine what is it you're uploading
  
• forgot the name, but there's a module that adds a tab on the right side section that lets you browse your files with preview when you hover and show players directly from there. chef's kiss
• shared vision- the idea of each payer only seeing what their PC sees sounds good in theory, but often frustrating in practice

GENERAL (copied from other thread):

• Kenku FM: integrates into discord, each player can set ther own voice
• Craig (discord bot): lets me record our sessions and can save each player (and Kenku) as a different track so it's easy t o adjust. no need to remember everything, just record and listen later on X2 speed
• Mipui - probably the lightest dedicated shared real time mapping tool I know. nothing needed but the link.
• Tabletop audio: excellent ambient sounds