What's your VTT of choice?

What’s your VTT of choice?

  • Roll20

    Votes: 44 22.1%
  • Fantasy Grounds

    Votes: 33 16.6%
  • Foundry

    Votes: 77 38.7%
  • D&D Beyond Maps

    Votes: 3 1.5%
  • Owlbear Rodeo

    Votes: 26 13.1%
  • Other

    Votes: 16 8.0%

Ember is so big, you might not be able to use the forge. I asked the forge about it during the KS, and they didn't have a good answer.
Ah, didn't know that. Worry about what the performance will be line if I host the game from my computer. I didn't pay for alpha access and I'm not going to even seriously look at it until full release, so hopefully someone will come up with a hosted solution by then.
 

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Other, perhaps, than to gently suggest sticking to the live table instead.....
My group plays weekly on Foundry. If we stuck to the live table where we managed to get together twice last year to play in person, we would be limited to basically playing one shots with how much time would pass between sessions. So while my preference is in person, I am more than happy with using a VTT if it means weekly play and actually playing a lengthy adventure path through to completion.
 


Microsoft Teams.
Yep, when I had to start running games online after moving for work, I used Google Meet. Good voice, video, and screen sharing even with people in multiple countries. Didn't need real high bandwidths or powerful computers. If we were more TOTM players and didn't like battle maps so much I could see us having stayed with Google Meet. But I was sharing a screen where I had a player facing instance of Map Tool and I had to move all the tokens. So I dove head first into the world of VTTs.
 

Foundry VTT:

Two years ago I went looking for a VTT as we were playing very irregularly (one of our people was not in the country and we would only play when they visited). One of my requirements was that it needed to be web based, no clients/plugins required. As we played very irregularly, I also didn't want monthly costs. And finally, I don't remember what exactly, but just before there was another service that just self-destructed, I didn't want to be able to run the software/content without depending on a company that could self-destruct at any time. Nice to haves were modularity and the ability to customize/mod.

I tested a couple of options, and finally found Foundry VTT, which hit all my requirements, nice to haves, and then some. Tested it for a while before I was comfortable with it enough to show it to some in our group and they needed some time to get comfortable with the idea to play online, but it worked out well. There are now bi-weekly sessions on my FVTT server.

The biggest issue with FVTT is that all the options are overwhelming. People wanting D&D 5e fully automated from their first ever use of Foundry are going to have difficulties, especially if they're non-tech people (but even for us tech people). I think if you're coming from in person play, you really only need two modules beyond the rules: Dice so Nice! and Dicetray, the first shows 3D dice rolling on screen, the second makes rolling dice easier and way more intuitive. We needed some additional modules for our groups particularities (for it working on an iPad and making ad-hoc battlemaps). These days our DMs are gaining more and more familiarity with FVTT, combat goes faster then in person and with integrated tech there can be more immersion then we ever tried before (mostly sound/read aloud texts).

If self-hosting seems daunting, there are services out there that do that for you for a fee. I self-host on a Raspberry Pi 4 (multiple installations on the same machine), but that's part of my tech hobby and my pnp RPG hobby. But the advantage is that if a service ever self-destructs, you can just move your content and your server to something else.
 

It's a hard question! Voted "other", for the record.

Sometimes I don't use VTT at all and just do a webcam stream of a physical table. It works quite well for games where I have to draw a lot of stuff on the spot and other players don't really need to interact much with it.

Most of the time I hack together a bespoke piece of software to handle specific mechanics or keep very specific generators in one place. Private VTT, if you will. It's 50/50 between online and offline: our club has uhh screen tables, and it's quite nice to be able to easily track clocks in Blades and generate NPCs with a random artwork, traits, allegiance and whatnot with a single click.

Rest of the time I use R20 and just place character sheets on the, well, virtual table as pictures and draw over them. Never used any of the automation tools as a GM, and find them very annoying to use as a player: they are fiddly, restrictive and inconvenient to access.
 

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