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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 8185609" data-attributes="member: 20741">Throat-clearing intro: I found this thread fascinating.  You see, I'm not a Roll20 user as I consider it to be too limited for my tastes, and I'm also not a 5e player/GM (I run PF1, PF2 and Starfinder). So the issues many keep bringing up as being synonymous with "VTTs" are really just complaints about Roll20.I began with FG1 back in the day and then moved to D20Pro for nine years. I got Foundry VTT last May when it was released, but the Pathfinder support just wasn't there initially to justify it. The community developers have really beavered along though, and it's quite playable now for both PF1 and, especially, PF2.I have to say though. I am jealous AF of the extra bells and whistles you 5e GMs get with Foundry VTT. There are awesome spell animations and automation available for 5e on Foundry VTT which don't work with the Pathfinder community build rules. I would kill to be able to use those spell animations in my game, tied to each spell by default! They are off the charts awesome in a 5e game![Speaking of animations, before this winter is out, fully animated tokens will be supported in Foundry VTT. From arbitrary view angles, too. So your token becomes a sprite, with different anims for walk, ready, melee attack, ranged attack and spell casting. And 6 diff poses for death, too. That's coming soon according to rumour.]It's also apparent that there are a lot of people posting here who have only recently switched to VTT play as a result of Covid and for those people, VTT play is seen as an intrinsically inferior good. While I get that, I can say that I switched to VTT a little more than nine years ago, and exclusively VTT for seven (going on eight) years now. I would never, ever, go back to face to face gaming. I live in a large city and if I had to travel to game? I'd be playing about 1/8th as much as I do. If I'm lucky. I ran a battle in PF1 at the entrance to the temple in part VII of the Savage Tide Adv Path. The entrance featured a lot of sight blocking pillars around which the battle took place, so LOS was critical and impacted the combat HUGELY. In Foundry, each player's LOS is individually calculated in real time. The player does not have perfect tactical information. At the same time, if you have explored part of the map, the map remains visible if you lose sight of part of it, but will not refresh or update to reveal tokens that move into areas you cannot actively see.Here is what I am talking about. The added complexity to this fight created by the column terrain was really remarkable and turned a run of the mill fight into an epic tactical battle. Now, if you have on foot in the TotM camp, you probably won't like that. If, otoh, you got your fill of TotM back in the early 80s? This is right up your alley.[ATTACH=full]132022[/ATTACH]This screen capture is taken from the perspective of one of the players. That player cannot see what is behind the shadows cast by those columns. The amount of time taken by the PCs (who are all Arcane casters, every one of which can and was flying in this fight) was pretty interesting. Everybody's LOS was very different depending where on the map they were of course.As for VTT use generally?  Every one is different, but I consider creating a complicated group of modules and/ or Adv Path installment and getting it all into Foundry VTT (a task which I have just completed last night for Abomination Vaults Vol 1 and two connecting modules, Menace under Otari and Troubles in Otari) to be an immensely satisfying accomplishment. Creating it and covering everything, from custom art, custom tokens not just for monsters, but for spells, abilities, items and loot containers -- took me some time, sure. Add in to this props and effects, custom maps in DungeonDraft, work in Photoshop and in Foundry VTT itself? It was a learning process both to learn quirks and get my workflow down.But that's one of the points worth making: establishing your preparation workflow takes time, but you become much better at it over time, too. Relatively early on, your workflow proficiency takes off, on the graph it would be an 70 to 80 degree angle -- to the point where you are spending perhaps a fifth or a sixth the time you did initially to accomplish the same task. This time efficiency understates (by a lot) the effect of familiarity and workflow in many cases, too. So a "holy crap" that took me 20 hours to do all of that" becomes a far more manageable 2 to 4 hours for every 20-25 hours of play.For some people, this will never be enjoyable for him or her and all I can say to that GM is "Well, they have pre-made campaigns designed by others for you to buy; Use those." If you don't like doing it yourself? You don't. No amount of advice or pro tips will change that emotional experience for you.[But for general VTT enjoyability when others build it and you just buy it to run? You might tell your players they have to plug an ethernet cable into their computer. Wi-Fi and VTT play is a really bad idea and slows the game down for everybody. Be firm in your insistence. Yes, really. ]And if you DO enjoy puttering about building things in a VTT? If, for you, that becomes "gaming by other means"? Then you'll LOVE Foundry VTT and I urge you to get it, install it, watch Youtube tutorials for inspiration (baileywiki  's Youtube vids are awesome) and get playing with it. For 5e, especially, it is a treat, but PF1 and PF2 support is pretty robust now, too. On the PF2 side, the new character sheet is awesome and supports automatic character download in real time from Herolab Online. Type in the token share code and POOF - the sheet is in game and looking spiffy! It even supports multi-monitor set-ups, so a player can log in via chrome and "pop out" their sheet to move to another monitor (where it remains "hot" for "click here" rolling purposes). but is out of the way of the main map.[ATTACH=full]132023[/ATTACH]And as I've said, on the 5e side? It's even better frankly. Give it a try. It's only $50 and supports direct import from D&D Beyond.</blockquote>

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