Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7991654" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like VTTs are being pulled in two directions, as well-illustrated by the first and second posts in the thread.On the one hand, you have the desire to just have something extremely polished and attractive and easy to use, but quite narrow in application. That's pretty much exactly what 4E was intending to do, but didn't succeed at (to the point where it's relatively little-known that it even tried, at this  point). To use these well, you'd also require polished content - probably official adventures and so on all being adapted.On the other hand, you have the desire for easily-extensible, easily-moddable, community-friendly VTTs, where content created by DMs or which wasn't designed for a VTT, can very easily be incorporated and made functional without much in-depth technical knowledge or the like.And these two visions aren't really compatible. Elements could be, but as a whole? No, the objectives and values are too different.As for which will succeed? I think its going to be the polished and narrow version, over any less-polished but more broadly-useful design. Why? Because the polished and narrow version can potentially attract a lot of investment, and potentially deliver good monetization, and the broadly-useful, customization-friendly one, cannot.With a polished and narrow design, you can sell everything:Rulebooks/adventures - As VTTs already doDice for rolling on screen - Beyond is starting on this, and has plans for some really fancy stuff*Minis - Potentially both for PCs and the enemiesDungeon tiles/maps for building your own stuffAvatars/frames/titles/backgrounds for videos/emotes and so on for players (and possibly animated minis)You can also get subscriptions out of people, as is already done, of course.The level of accessibility is also likely to be very high, in that neither the DM nor the players will need to know much to get going. A polished UI could also boot out the need to know /commands to cause a lot of stuff to happen (which you do for the VTTs I've used). The only major potential issue I see is that the sort of flashy 3D apps some people are envisioning are not going to work on a lot of the devices people use for gaming right now (some of which can barely cope with Roll20).The downside of polished and narrow is that to reach this level of polish, you're probably going to need to support only one game. But because 5E is so huge, well, there's your game. This is literally the rationale D&D Beyond is using for creating a VTT (which they started work on before COVID). Initially when they made Beyond, they said "no VTT" because the audience simply wasn't large enough for a single-system VTT. But that changed, as 5E's audience expanded, and the number of users on Beyond skyrocketed.So now they're working on a VTT, and it is certainly going to be the narrow/polished kind. Whether it will have a 3E map initially is unclear. I suspect not, but I suspect it will acquire one before too long.[USER=1207]@Ristamar[/USER] I agree with all your points very strongly. I find most VTTs lower immersion and cause players to treat things a bit more like a video game than TtoM, even very experienced players. And the more detailed, colourful, and flashy the map and map components, the more they do this. It's weird but a plain white room with a grid and so on causes them to actually work on imagining the setting, where some lovely detailed map totally does not. I thus very much hope any future VTTs have good options for very "plain" maps built in. There's some hope I think, simply because of nostalgia for 1E/2E-style maps, which were generally that.* = Like heavily animated dice, for example, a flaming die that "explodes" if you roll a nat 20. Apparently  it uses a physics simulation for the dice, too, rather than a conventional random number generator.</blockquote>

Verification