The thought of switching VTTs is so daunting

[TheSword]

I think you need to decide which is best for the game system you’re playing.

I played with Roll20 for 4 years and still do use it for D&D but I switched to Foundry for WFRP 4e after playing it on Roll20 for 1 year.

Personally I think Foundry is a better system now. I have to use the Forge to host it because I couldn’t get self hosting to work but it’s a very small subscription fee (5$ per month). Some of the features on Foundry are lovely - full portraits apppear when you hover over a token; there is HUD for common token actions (awesome as DM) and you can add automatic teleports of tokens and token duplication to represent multi-level areas.

However I just can’t replicate the amount of official support roll20 has for D&D.

When 5.5 comes out I may well switch to buying on D&D beyond as apparently there is an export mod for Foundry which might be worth me looking into.

 

[Zaukrie]

I think you need to decide which is best for the game system you’re playing.

I played with Roll20 for 4 years and still do use it for D&D but I switched to Foundry for WFRP 4e after playing it on Roll20 for 1 year.

Personally I think Foundry is a better system now. I have to use the Forge to host it because I couldn’t get self hosting to work but it’s a very small subscription fee (5$ per month). Some of the features on Foundry are lovely - full portraits apppear when you hover over a token; there is HUD for common token actions (awesome as DM) and you can add automatic teleports of tokens and token duplication to represent multi-level areas.

However I just can’t replicate the amount of official support roll20 has for D&D.

When 5.5 comes out I may well switch to buying on D&D beyond as apparently there is an export mod for Foundry which might be worth me looking into.

I mean, we use DNDbeyond for all character stuff and Beyond20 to send rolls to foundry. There are mods, that cost money, that slow l allow you to import things also.

 

[Iosue]

I haven't checked in on AboveVTT in quite a while - what's the word on the future in relation to Wizards own VTT?

I imagine the AboveVTT devs have discussed it on the Discord, but I'm not on it, so I don't know what they might have said. As of yet, they haven't somehow spiked the code to make AboveVTT unusuable, as it has worked fine in all my tests, at least on Chrome. I imagine they won't do anything while Maps is still in Alpha, since AboveVTT is currently a net positive for DDB. Users have a powerful incentive to use DDB at no cost to Wizards. I suspect that AboveVTT will be done once Maps moves to Beta, and Wizards wants to migrate users to their subscription platform. Ideally, this would be done once Maps has roughly equivalent functionality as AboveVTT, but I'm not assuming that will be the case.

I am not adverse to switching to a DDB-internal VTT, nor do I think Wizards has some moral obligation to allow AboveVTT to keep running. In fact, it felt so much like a fight to prep on Roll20 that I was entirely prepared to move over to Maps right now. I only looked into AboveVTT because I figured Maps' lack of player-side functionality (aside from the very excellent character sheets) would be less than satisfying for my players. I looked into both AboveVTT and Beyond20, fully expecting them to look nice in demos, but actually be hard work, buggy, and laggy in actual play on my computer. That was true for Beyond20, and initially for AboveVTT when I tried it in Firefox, but then I gave AboveVTT a run in Chrome, and it ran beautifully, even with its animation features.

The real test will come at the next session, when we try running it with 1 DM and 6 players. But, even if it does end up a little laggy, I'll probably just turn off the lighting and wall features and go straight with Fog of War. Already prep is much more intuitive and easier than Roll20 (and that's with years of experience with Roll20, and basically a week and change of puttering with AboveVTT). It's truly a marvel that this was all accomplished by volunteer devs for free, and I'm seriously considering becoming a Patron just to give such hard work some recognition. Its days might be numbered, but it's just what I need for the immediate future.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Its always interesting reading people for whom the question about a VTT always comes down to "How well will it handle D&D5e?" I mean, not surprising around here, but I'm still living in a headspace where, while D&D was the big dog, it wasn't assumed by everyone to be the only game in town...

 

[Zaukrie]

I imagine the AboveVTT devs have discussed it on the Discord, but I'm not on it, so I don't know what they might have said. As of yet, they haven't somehow spiked the code to make AboveVTT unusuable, as it has worked fine in all my tests, at least on Chrome. I imagine they won't do anything while Maps is still in Alpha, since AboveVTT is currently a net positive for DDB. Users have a powerful incentive to use DDB at no cost to Wizards. I suspect that AboveVTT will be done once Maps moves to Beta, and Wizards wants to migrate users to their subscription platform. Ideally, this would be done once Maps has roughly equivalent functionality as AboveVTT, but I'm not assuming that will be the case.

I am not adverse to switching to a DDB-internal VTT, nor do I think Wizards has some moral obligation to allow AboveVTT to keep running. In fact, it felt so much like a fight to prep on Roll20 that I was entirely prepared to move over to Maps right now. I only looked into AboveVTT because I figured Maps' lack of player-side functionality (aside from the very excellent character sheets) would be less than satisfying for my players. I looked into both AboveVTT and Beyond20, fully expecting them to look nice in demos, but actually be hard work, buggy, and laggy in actual play on my computer. That was true for Beyond20, and initially for AboveVTT when I tried it in Firefox, but then I gave AboveVTT a run in Chrome, and it ran beautifully, even with its animation features.

The real test will come at the next session, when we try running it with 1 DM and 6 players. But, even if it does end up a little laggy, I'll probably just turn off the lighting and wall features and go straight with Fog of War. Already prep is much more intuitive and easier than Roll20 (and that's with years of experience with Roll20, and basically a week and change of puttering with AboveVTT). It's truly a marvel that this was all accomplished by volunteer devs for free, and I'm seriously considering becoming a Patron just to give such hard work some recognition. Its days might be numbered, but it's just what I need for the immediate future.

Beyond20 isn't a VTT..... You thinking of something else? Beyond20 sends rolls from DNDbeyond to VTTs like rol20 and foundry.

 

[Iosue]

Beyond20 isn't a VTT..... You thinking of something else? Beyond20 sends rolls from DNDbeyond to VTTs like rol20 and foundry.

Yes, I know what Beyond20 is, and that was my experience. I installed the Beyond20 Firefox add-on, fired it up on Roll20, and the first attempted test roll sent the Game Chat into Dark Mode, but the read-outs were black-on-black, rendering them useless. I fiddled with the Dark Mode settings, and eventually shut everything down and tried again. I eventually got it to work okay (some rolls outputted as per the the Roll20 character sheet, and others did not, and I could never figure out why), but thinking about getting it working smoothly for 6 more people (of varying technical ability) just made me say, "Yeah, okay, this is already too much hassle."

I had a similar issue with AboveVTT wherein, using the Firefox add-on, it seemed to work okay, but then the Orc monster sheet in the combat tracker stopped sending modified rolls to the game log. If I rolled an attack, instead of rolling a 1d20+4, it just rolled a straight d20. Same with damage. I was about ready to throw in the towel on AboveVTT, too, but its functionality was otherwise so tempting that I thought I might as well give it a try in Chrome. When I did so, I had absolutely no problems. Everything worked, as labeled, as intended, right "out of the box," as it were. I suspect the same would be true if I used Chrome for Beyond20, but at that point I was already happy with what I had found.

 

[aramis erak]

I've used foundry and gTove. I'm on edge about whether to depart the Winblows OS, and so am hesitant to actually buy a Foundry license (was using a player's install). I like that it's host-locally. We had the correct adventure pack installed, and the rolling became a big problem when I set a non-standard association for an edge case roll (diagnosing a drive problem on heavy machinery and int, rather than HM and str.)

gTove is free, no ads, and handles the maps decently.

• It's default for figures is to treat the 2d images as GW-style paper minis. The view is 3-D, spinable on the z-axis...
  • the "back" of the counters is grayscaled; they can imply facing.
• Has a nice tool for matching the grid to the image using a two-pin method. Unfortunately, this works well only if the features are near top-left, rather than the bottom right scalebar of most maps.
• I don't use the stat tracking features; I prefer to use paper.
• It lacks sheet functions AFAICT.
• the die-roller appears physics based
  • we aren't using the built in dice anyway - I've my own die-roller.
• its directories are on one's google drive. So, yes, you do need a google account.
• The images in the Alien Heart of Darkness PDFs, once extracted, resulted in crashiness in all browsers tried (Win 10 & 11 chrome & edge; Chrome on android, iOS safari.)
• While it's locally hostable, I can't figure out the dependencies to do so. Not familiar with "yarn"... and am only vaguely aware of node.js

As I said, I like foundry...
but... it hates my chromebook: resolution too low.

 

[osarusan]

I'm sort of curious about different/new virtual tabletop choices and switching it up.
If you play online, did you ever switch VTTs? Why did you switch?

How did you find the new one?

Recently I switched from using Fantasy Grounds for close to 15 years to Foundry VTT.
The switch wasn't super easy, as I was intimately familiar with FG (as were my players) and I liked it a lot. And in some ways, FG is more intuitive than Foundry. But Foundry, while young, seemed to be developing at a faster rate and also seemed far far easier to create custom rulesets and content for. The main reason for me was support for alternate rules systems. FG has great support for things like D&D and Call of Cthulhu, but for less-popular systems like Mythras or HackMaster it was lacking, and the process for making new rules systems was arcane.
Looking back I am glad I switched, and my players are too. I don't see myself going back; but I also hope I don't have to switch again, because really... we just want to play the game instead of bothering with learning how to use VTTs.

 

[damiller]

When I started I used maptools and google hangouts. Thats all there really was. Then Roll20 came along and I said to myself "I wonder if it will last" but it was free so I figured "might as well". I've been using it for 10 years. I know there are better platforms, but I works for what I want to do!

 

[Reynard]

Recently I switched from using Fantasy Grounds for close to 15 years to Foundry VTT.
The switch wasn't super easy, as I was intimately familiar with FG (as were my players) and I liked it a lot. And in some ways, FG is more intuitive than Foundry. But Foundry, while young, seemed to be developing at a faster rate and also seemed far far easier to create custom rulesets and content for. The main reason for me was support for alternate rules systems. FG has great support for things like D&D and Call of Cthulhu, but for less-popular systems like Mythras or HackMaster it was lacking, and the process for making new rules systems was arcane.
Looking back I am glad I switched, and my players are too. I don't see myself going back; but I also hope I don't have to switch again, because really... we just want to play the game instead of bothering with learning how to use VTTs.

Do you have any recommendations for YouTube channels or specific tutorials for making the FG to Foundry switch? I would like to give Foundry an honest go for the same reasons you enumerated, but as the thread title says, it has been daunting.