What VTT(s) do you most dislike and why? (Defenders welcome to defend)

[Distracted DM]

Does anyone have opinions on Talespire? The DDB-Sigil alpha really made me think "oh this is Talespire but with DDB plugged in," but I only played around with TS a little bit probably... two years ago? More?

 

[MNblockhead]

A number of VTTs brought up here that I've not played around with. Life's busy at the moment, but I'm interested in trying some of them. I've been hearing a lot about Talespire. I've yet to dive into a 3D VTT (other than playing around with mods for Foundry, which is a rabbit hole of configuration I've saved myself from falling down).

I use Forge for foundry too. My biggest beef with Foundry is that it is quite technical. Feel like I have to do an IT degree to get it to work how it should.

Did you try to just use the core features? I think this here is the biggest issue Foundry has. The modability creates expectations that you can make it work exactly how you want to. If your expectations are high, especially with automation or some of the most impressive animated and 3D effects, you can spend countless hours to almost get there. Some user just love the process, but most get frustrated and give up. I'm in the middle, I got frustrated, when back to the just core, determined what was most important to me and slowly added mods back in with intention.

1) Tabletop Simulator. This is what we started with during the pandemic. It's not great at doing any of the math of D&D, but it does most accurately replicate the experience of sitting around a table. The fact that you can accidentally knock over miniatures or roll your dice off the table was actually fantastic. That said it was very slow and clumsy to use.

Sounds cool, I kinda want to check it out. Is it run from a browser or is it dependent on running software on your computer. I'm wondering if the performance is due to needing a beefy PC or if they just don't have enough resources on their server to deliver a good, smooth experience to users, especially during busy times.

2) Roll20. This is the VTT I got to know best. To me it's the most extreme of things that are great (simple to use, quick to load) with things that are maddening (trying to integrate music, lighting slowing everything down, no way to free draw with a pad or touch screen).

Yep. Like many VTTs, you'll enjoy them more if you keep your wants and needs low. I could live with out good music support, because I mainly want a VTT to focus on providing good battlemap functionality. I can do voice and music in Discord.

But the lighting was dealbreaker. I really, really enjoy dynamic lighting and automatic fog of war reveal. When I was testing Roll20, I was prepping Rappan Ahtuk. Even the highest tier subscription didn't give me enough storage for all of my maps. So, I thought, okay, well I'll just prep certain maps before a session and remove them when they are unlikely to be returned to. And, given how interconnected everything in that megadungeon is, at least it is pretty easy to throw up a map and use manual fog of war.

But then I tried to prep a large set piece map. Just prepping it for dynamic lighting made it unusable.

In foundry I can run that same map with dynamic lighting, regional sound, animated tiles, teleporting locations, and atmospheric effects (rolling blood mist) with a couple hundred tokens dropped on it. It take a bit longer to load in the browser, but I ran it (hosted in the forge) on crappy work-provided housing internet in the mid-east for players in the US and ran it over two 8 hour sessions with no issues.

3) Foundry. The DM running our 5e game loved Foundry. But she spent more time playing with all the fidgets and mods than prepping an adventure.

I've been there. But most of my playing with widgets happens outside of the game. For the most part the battlemap stuff didn't negatively affect my sessions--I would say the enhanced the sessions. What did OFTEN negatively affect my sessions until I learned better was my attempts a automation. There was ALWAYS something that would not work. The dirty secret of automation is that even if 95% of the time the automations work, that other 5% of the time, when a power doesn't work, when conditions were not applied properly, etc. it causes outsized disruptions to the game and more likely leads the DM having to mess around with the software instead of focusing on running the game.

When I'm running or playing in an RPG online, I want to really feel like I'm at a table. Extra bells and whistles, like animated backgrounds or macros that calculate everything for me, actually take me out of the game. So between all three I've had the most positive experiences from Roll20.

Yeah, I hear you. But there are some DM QOL things that VTTs SHOULD be great for, but frustratingly are not for most systems. Like AOE effects. I would LOVE a computer to automate rolling saves, rolling and applying damage and applying conditions to a group of 20 goblins. It is PAINFUL to try to do that using digital NPC charactersheets when there is no automation. And for the D&D 5e system in Foundry, even with mods, I could never get to my happy place because there were too many exceptions to what "mostly" worked. I just went back to a note pad and pencil.

I believe that Fantasy Grounds handles this stuff much better, but I could never host a game from my location with my internet on FGC or FGU. I probably could now that I'm back in the US, but I'm already invested into Foundry.

All of them have such awful user interfaces that fail to address the most obvious, core use cases that they literally make me angry. So all of them. I dislike all of the them most.

I'd love to hear more about this. What core use cases do all VTTs fail to address that make you angry? For me it is poorly handling the application of damage, saves, and conditions to multiple tokens.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

I was about to post something like this to r/vtt but I’m trying to come off as less cynical. And yet I’m about to reassess that approach as this is exactly the sort of info I’m seeking. It’s kinda astounding how many VTTs out there fail to meet user needs in exactly the same way.

 

[chuckdee]

I have Fantasy Grounds Classic Unlimited and Fantasy Grounds Unity unlimited. I've only barely used them. The interface is archaic, and having to get people to install clients is a pain. I used to have firewall problems with Classic so by the time unity came out I was using Foundry and that was all she wrote for FG. Other than Rolemaster. It's the only one that has Rolemaster, so I keep trying.

 

[TheSword]

Did you try to just use the core features? I think this here is the biggest issue Foundry has. The modability creates expectations that you can make it work exactly how you want to. If your expectations are high, especially with automation or some of the most impressive animated and 3D effects, you can spend countless hours to almost get there. Some user just love the process, but most get frustrated and give up. I'm in the middle, I got frustrated, when back to the just core, determined what was most important to me and slowly added mods back in with intention.

I restrict my modules to mainly cosmetic ones, hover over tokens, nice dice rollers etc.
I also mainly play WFRP on Foundry because the support is excellent.

The bigger issue is the basic use of of items to drive everything in the system. It feels clunky. Roll20 seemed much simpler from that point of view.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Though I have to say, unless port forwarding just defeats you, the modern incarnation of Maptool is not difficult if you're just using it for maps and tokens. And while there's no technically official support (I'm not sure what that would even mean), the Discord is quite good in assisting you.

 

[MNblockhead]

I restrict my modules to mainly cosmetic ones, hover over tokens, nice dice rollers etc.
I also mainly play WFRP on Foundry because the support is excellent.

The bigger issue is the basic use of of items to drive everything in the system. It feels clunky. Roll20 seemed much simpler from that point of view.

I didn't try DMing in Roll20 long enough to appreciate the difference. How does it handle the various objects? The only complaint I have with items in Foundry (and actors, scenes, tables...all the objects) is that things can get messy quickly and managing items and other objects in your world can be drudgery. I would like to see the interface better handle bulk actions for filing items. I would also like to see some more innovative organization features. I'm more of "tag" person than "folder" person. I wish I could apply tags to items, individually and in bulk, and navigate by tag. It would also be nice if there were a "source" tag or some way to filter items by their source. It would help if you import a lot of content from multiple modules and want to see only those items from a specific module.

 

[aramis erak]

I’ve used Maptools, Forge, and one I cobbled together using javascript.

My own was, by far, the worst. Hideously bad. It allowed a double handful of tokens to be moved on a map… but all the tokens and the maps had to be preloaded on the site by FTP. Players had to manually click to update their screen.
It worked, barely, when coupled with using VOIP.

I don’t even have the code anymore. At least, I don’t think I do. Actually, I do. I just checked.

 

[LordEntrails]

I'm going to jump on the anti-Roll20 bandwagon. Not because of the trouble with the interface or getting maps setup or storage or even performance and stability, but because to me perhaps the most important part is the company and people behind it.

The Orr Group and Roll20 community staff were just horrible to customers. None of them should have been in a customer facing business. It takes me a long time to forgive corporate behavior like that. I still won't buy VW or Audi because of DieselGate etc. I've heard Roll20 is getting better, but even if they had a better product I won't soon be giving them forgiveness for their past sins.

 

[MNblockhead]

I’ve used Maptools, Forge, and one I cobbled together using javascript.

My own was, by far, the worst. Hideously bad. It allowed a double handful of tokens to be moved on a map… but all the tokens and the maps had to be preloaded on the site by FTP. Players had to manually click to update their screen.
It worked, barely, when coupled with using VOIP.

I don’t even have the code anymore. At least, I don’t think I do. Actually, I do. I just checked.

Yours may have been the worst, but your still a hero for getting that far!