What's your VTT of choice?

[MNblockhead]

Cheap is relative and lots of folks don't like subscriptions. But I do like that the option exists.

So I get that it doesn't have to be hard to use. I don't think any VTT really is if you stick to the basics. But is that what Foundry is good at? Competing with Owlbear? No, it shines when you are willing to invest time in all the modules and community add-ons, or so it seems most people in this thread have said.

Kinda. But no. Without a single mod installed, Foundry is by far offers the best battlemap prep experience of any VTT I've tried, and I've put a lot of hours in to all the major VTTs and many of the less popular ones. Next, it depends on the game system. Pathfinder 2e and WFRP4e offer very well designed game systems that allow you to do a lot without any mods.

I just got fed up with the D&D 5e game system for found and ended using D&D beyond for character sheets and running combats and using foundry for the battlemap and moving tokens around and for the journals.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, but mod management and troubleshooting is one of the biggest frustrations less-techie folk encounter when diving into Foundry. Don't get me wrong, I love how much you can mod Foundry and love the mod community the grew around foundry. But for new people, I always recommend using it without any mods for a while (except Dice So Nice!, which really should just be integrated into Foundry core by this point).

Just out of curiosity, how good is the basic dice coding in Foundry? One thing you do find when gaming outside the D&D sphere is a lot of idiosyncratic die rolling processes.

 

[kronovan]

Is that remotely or only locally?

FGU has only ever run locally. It's a locally run server application that runs on Windows, MacOS or Linux. It's because of the newer edition's use of the 3rd party Unity Engine that it's referred to as Fantasy Grounds Unity (FGU); previous edition is known as Fantasy Grounds Classic (FGC.) There's a free client (officially called the Fantasy Grounds VTT Demo), which players download and run to connect to a FGU server. The free Demo client is what's referred to as a thick-client, in that it's an executable app that's run locally on a player's PC. It's not so thick though - takes up about 400 MB of space.

FGU is flexible in terms of how you host clients. You can run your FGU server on a LAN and just have local Demo clients connect to it over your private network. Or you can host remote Demo clients across the Internet. If your players connect remotely there's 2 ways to do that; 1) if port forwarding is enabled on your router for your FGU server app, you can have clients connect over the Internet directly to your PC; 2) you can use Smitework's cloud hosting service, which facilitates the Internet connections between your FGU server and remote clients. It should be noted, that the previous edtition (FGC) could only use port forwarding.

It's very simple to switch between Cloud hosting and Port Forwarding. There's 2 radio buttons on the FGU Load Campaign page and it's as simple as clicking one or the other on to enable the different hosting mode. While I'm homebrewing or configing a campaign, I always launch in LAN mode which gives me the security that if I forget to set a password, no unauthorized users can connect. I have the necessary port forwarding config'd on my router, but I've had so few problems with cloud hosting that I have that entry disabled.

 

[kronovan]

My experience has been the reverse but maybe it's just timing. We used Foundry for a PF2E game and Fantasy Grounds for D&D5E and SotDL. Foundry had updates that would break or move things around (partially I think because the GM used lots of add ones). FG we havent had an issue with in years.

Oh heck yeah. IME if you use lots of fan-made add ons for Foundry, you can be in for some fun. Personally, I've found FGU extensions to generally fair better for reliability. Part of that is no doubt due to FGU's seamless auto-update feature, which fan-made extensions uploaded to the Forge also utilize. Still, if a core update breaks an extention, auto-update isn't much help if the creator isn't posting a fix.

It's just the core engine that I've found a bit more reliable for Foundry. As an example, the new FGU mapping features added in December, had me as both a player and GM experiencing problems for weeks. I can't remember having such a prolonged period of problems during any Foundry feature update. That said, as I said in another post earlier in this thread - I use Foundry less than FGU, so it might just be I haven't used it consistently enough to have experienced something like that.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Is that remotely or only locally?

Sorry, I am not sure what you mean here?

 

[Bomberooski]

My first D&D online experience was on Tabletop Simulator. And although it takes a lifetime to learn how to maneuver the UI for that system we had an absolute blast using it and I remember our DM having super cool minis that really brought the game to life. Haven’t used it in years but man those were super fond memories.

Now we use Roll20 (DND Beyond connection has it’s hooks in us) and I’m happy with it for what we need. But I’m always super curious about other VTT’s out there so thanks to those in this thread that have given some detailed descriptions for what they are using

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

radio buttons

The radio I'm operating right now has at least 40 buttons on it (I probably lost count) and not a single one of them is a 'radio button'. We should probably retire the term.

 

[el-remmen]

For the game online game I run, we use OBR for exploration mode but Zoom with a camera (pointed at the table) for combat. We also roll our own dice and use the honor system.

The online game I play on is also OBR but with Discord for voice and using the dice roller (which I am not a fan of but tolerate).

 

[kronovan]

The radio I'm operating right now has at least 40 buttons on it (I probably lost count) and not a single one of them is a 'radio button'. We should probably retire the term.

Ha ha. For sure I'm old school when it comes to the terms used in User Inteface design. Circles that you can click on & off is what we called radio buttons back in the early days of Windows programming. I don't know what a modern word for them would be?

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Ha ha. For sure I'm old school when it comes to the terms used in User Inteface design. Circles that you can click on & off is what we called radio buttons back in the early days of Windows programming. I don't know what a modern word for them would be?

I suspect the term 'radio' is going to go the way of 'parasite' - kids today don't know it means 'guy who never throws dinner parties, but he's a good conversationalist so you invite him to yours'.