D&D 5E Which Virtual Table Top are you using right now and what do you like best about it?

[Hussar]

@LordEntrails I mean, since I was being responded to by @MNblockhead directly, I wonder how I could possibly have thought you were directing the commentary at me. I said the UI was ugly, he said beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and then you and @Oofta start responding with commentary about being stupid and a troll.

Ah well, just chock it up to a misunderstanding, I guess. It looked an awful lot like I was being called a troll and stupid for simply saying that the UI was ugly.

But, you've clarified, so, I guess I was mistaken that you weren't actually talking about me. Fair enough. Time to move on.

 

[Oofta]

@LordEntrails I mean, since I was being responded to by @MNblockhead directly, I wonder how I could possibly have thought you were directing the commentary at me. I said the UI was ugly, he said beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and then you and @Oofta start responding with commentary about being stupid and a troll.

Ah well, just chock it up to a misunderstanding, I guess. It looked an awful lot like I was being called a troll and stupid for simply saying that the UI was ugly.

But, you've clarified, so, I guess I was mistaken that you weren't actually talking about me. Fair enough. Time to move on.

Just as a public service announcement ...

If you feel like I, or anyone else, violated the policies of this message board I would recommend hitting the "report" button on those posts.

My posts were meant as self deprecating humor, nothing more or less. But intent and tone do not always carry on posts, but this is a well regulated board and bickering back and forth a dozen times means far less than the red letters of an admin. Trust the admins to do their job.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, @Oofta, you are correct on this. I let myself get carried away. My bad. A simple misunderstanding that led to me getting my back up. Mea culpa.

 

[MNblockhead]

I used google draw with a shared map recently. Pulled resources from the net. It worked reasonably well in a pinch.

If you use the Google suite of products, check out Jamboard. Even when using full-featured VTTs, I think Jamboard (or MS Teams Whiteboards) just work much more smoothly for multiple people to mark thing ups. For example, I can throw up a maze and they have to work through it together, each player using a different color to draw what path their character takes. Or, just throw up a wilderness map and have the party mark up the map to plan out their travels.

 

[MNblockhead]

@MNblockhead Quoting you to say thanks for your posts a month or two ago where you covered a lot of this. Our group had been poking around at various Roll20 replacements for a while, and your posts helped get me off the fence enough to run a short (few sessions) adventure on Foundry. The whole group loved it -- especially our main DM -- and we switched our main campaign over to Foundry about 6 weeks ago.

It's been great, and our experience so far matches up with yours. We are also using Forge for hosting -- even though we have several folks in the group who could set up the servers, it's well worth it for us. Thanks again!

Edit: Even beyond the flashy stuff in Foundry, the thing I like best is that it has actually sped up our group's play. Our main campaign is at in tier 3 now and there were a lot of things slowing folks down. The speed up in mechanical/rolling/bookkeeping stuff has given us more session time for everything else.

Glad you are liking Foundry. I don't recommend it for everyone but I am a huge fan and am running all my games in it now. You are probably further along than I am on the automations.

When I first started using Foundry, I was like a kid in a candy store, installing every cool third-party extension that caught my eye until I had some real performance issues. So I went back to just the core and slowly added in the most loved and useful and best supported extensions playing with them for a while until adding more.

I'm still finding combat automations a bit wonky. It is great when fireball can be cast, the area of effect template applied and all the saves and damage rolls automatically made and applied. But a lot of the automation seems hit or miss. For example, one character has a ring of spell storing with fireball saved on it. If he wants to cast it, then we have to do it manually.

Foundry automation is nowhere near as mature as Fantasy Ground and it doesn't offer officially license content. You can get the SRD and if you have D&D Beyond, you can get an extension to import content you own on D&D Beyond. But you can't just buy the core books, much less official adventures like you can on Fantasy Ground and Roll20.

On the other hand, with all of the extensions being developed for Foundry, you have MUCH more ability to customize HOW the automations work, what level of automation you want, how you want the program to look, and all kinds of quality of life tweaks.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yeah, the funny thing is I don't even really like Roll20 that much. It's just the one that my virtual dart landed on when I was scrambling to find a VTT. Were I to choose today I might make a different choice.

For example, owlbear rodeo actually looks like it supports my style better than Roll20 but I have reservations on whether I can prep games ahead of time (particularly setting up icons, the occasional pre-drawn map).

You might also want to check out Role. Currently it is in early access for Kickstarter backers (Role: A New Kind of Platform For The RPG Community).

I think that this might be a great option for those that do not need or want all the bells and whistles of more feature-rich VTTs. Or, maybe, better said, want a tool that focuses less on having every VTT feature and automation and which instead focuses on making an intuitive and pleasant design, that has excellent video conferencing built in, a character sheet that gets out of your way but is easy to pull up the info you need when you need it, simple rolling, and a dead simple virtual battlemap feature.

It is not going to scratch the itch of those who want fog of war, line of sight, lighting, and heavy automation. But for those who want to play game virtually, with easy to use character sheets and virtual-battlmaps, it is worth watching.

Best way I can describe it is to imagine Zoom added some TTRPG features. First and formost it is a web-conferencing platform, but one made for running games.

 

[Raunalyn]

Glad you are liking Foundry. I don't recommend it for everyone but I am a huge fan and am running all my games in it now. You are probably further along than I am on the automations.

When I first started using Foundry, I was like a kid in a candy store, installing every cool third-party extension that caught my eye until I had some real performance issues. So I went back to just the core and slowly added in the most loved and useful and best supported extensions playing with them for a while until adding more.

I'm still finding combat automations a bit wonky. It is great when fireball can be cast, the area of effect template applied and all the saves and damage rolls automatically made and applied. But a lot of the automation seems hit or miss. For example, one character has a ring of spell storing with fireball saved on it. If he wants to cast it, then we have to do it manually.

Foundry automation is nowhere near as mature as Fantasy Ground and it doesn't offer officially license content. You can get the SRD and if you have D&D Beyond, you can get an extension to import content you own on D&D Beyond. But you can't just buy the core books, much less official adventures like you can on Fantasy Ground and Roll20.

On the other hand, with all of the extensions being developed for Foundry, you have MUCH more ability to customize HOW the automations work, what level of automation you want, how you want the program to look, and all kinds of quality of life tweaks.

I have been curious about Foundry.

How difficult is it to add content? FG is as simple as copy-pasta, so I'm wondering if Foundry is as easy.

 

[MNblockhead]

I have been curious about Foundry.

How difficult is it to add content? FG is as simple as copy-pasta, so I'm wondering if Foundry is as easy.

Depends. With or without modules?

Straight out of the box, it is no harder or easier than any other VTT I've used. You can copy past most of the stuff, though character sheets and stat blocks need extra love if you want to make use of any automations using them. But where Foundry shines are its modules. Most are free but some module makers use Patreon to support the maintenance and continued development of their modules.

I have a D&D Beyond subscription and bought a lot of the official WotC content for it. With the Virtual Tabletop Assets module, I can can import D&D Beyond content directly into Foundry. This works very well for character sheets until you start using a lot of home brew stuff, though even then I've been surprise. It works very well for monsters and spells as well. The developer make the module free but to get upgrades and some exclusive content, you need to subscribe via Patreon. He is even making some offical adventure modules import from D&D Beyond with the maps having all walls drawn in and lighting effects added.

Also, I use World Anvil there is an official Foundry module (free) that allows you to import World Anvil content.

For maps, if installed locally, you just have all your assets saved to the appropriate folder, same as Fantasy Grounds. There is a bit of an extra step to load an image as a battlemap compared to Fantasy Ground. You have to create a new scene and then select the player and (optional) DM image, from there the process of sizing the image and grid is similar to other tools.

If hosting Foundry with a service like The Forge, you have to upload the assets to their server. I didn't find it to be a big deal but there are different pricing tiers for how much data you are hosting, whereas running Foundry from your computer is only limited by your computer's storage capacity.

 

[Scott Christian]

Role just handed out early access for backers. So far, I really like what I see. Granted, they still have quite a bit of stuff to add, but what they do have is really well implemented.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

I am wondering how long D&D Beyond will allow scraping of content and use on other platforms. I know that for 4th edition there were a few parsers that could grab the WoTC text from the online subscription, but there were no authorized VTT then.

The one big advantage of FG is the very extensive 3rd party library of modules available. Roll20 has some content, but FG is very deep in 5e. Buy the module and it is ready to run right away.