Virtual tabletop for face to face game

[Aaron the Paisley]

I'm wanting to integrate a VTT into my home game. Basically I want it mostly for maps to help speed the game up so the players aren't waiting while I draw the map on the battle mat. I would also like to use fog of war.

I am going to use a flat screen TV laying on the table as a second monitor. I don't want to spend a lot of money on the vtt as we are looking to start using Playbook as soon as it is available for android.

Are there any virtual tabletops out there that have official Pathfinder content, e.g. Syrinscape?

Thanks for the advice.

[Eretas]

I can't help you, but i will follow the answer. What is Playbook? Il will check for that.

[Flamephoenix182]

I know Roll 20 is starting to get more pathfinder stuff, It even has a bit of a built in SRD (Still being updated).

Are you going to have real minis or the monitor (like on top of glass or something) or are you looking for digital minis? Do you want the characters stats in the program as well?

Roll20 has a pretty good pathfinder character sheet inside it, with shortcuts for dice rolling, but you would really need at bare minimum 2 computers (one for the GM) and one for the players, and even this isn't super great since then the other players cant really be looking through their character sheets and planning their next turn while another player is going.

[Claxon]

I've heard good things about Roll 20, but I don't use it myself

[skizzerz]

For a free VTT, MapTool is pretty good and usable. roll20 is also solid, and I've used it for my own in-person games, but the free tier is pretty limited as to what you can do (no dynamic lighting/line of sight, although it does have a barebones fog of war implementation).

I do not know of any VTTs that have officially licensed Pathfinder content, something I hope Paizo changes in the near future since it is quite apparent that Game Space is going absolutely nowhere.

[Aaron the Paisley]

Eretas wrote:

I can't help you, but i will follow the answer. What is Playbook? Il will check for that.

Playbook looks to be a great way to integrate technology into a face to face game. Currently it's only available for ipad. Know Direction did an interview with then a while back.

Playbook

Know Direction interview

[Aaron the Paisley]

Flamephoenix182 wrote:

Are you going to have real minis or the monitor (like on top of glass or something) or are you looking for digital minis? Do you want the characters stats in the program as well?

We would probably be using digital minis since the players usually just throw a dice on the mat to represent their characters. Character stats aren't a necessity

[Flamephoenix182]

Aaron the Paisley wrote:

Flamephoenix182 wrote:

Are you going to have real minis or the monitor (like on top of glass or something) or are you looking for digital minis? Do you want the characters stats in the program as well?

We would probably be using digital minis since the players usually just throw a dice on the mat to represent their characters. Character stats aren't a necessity

Then I say roll20 would be the cheapest way to go. Assuming you had access to say a laptop for the PC's to share (It also works on mobile but it requires a subscription).

As mentioned above the free version doesn't have dynamic lighting but it has fog of war that you can manually adjust which I have done before in combat, it's not too hard to keep up an approximation of the lighting. (the dynamic lighting wouldnt be that useful for all the PC's using one laptop or computer since everyone would just see what the best vision character can see anyways.

[Claxon]

And really, with a laptop you just connect it to a the TV. It's pretty easy to use a TV as a monitor.

Then you as the GM can just move everything about on the field.

[Flamephoenix182]

Claxon wrote:

And really, with a laptop you just connect it to a the TV. It's pretty easy to use a TV as a monitor.

Then you as the GM can just move everything about on the field.

Yes, this works as well, so long as you don't want any hidden information from the players. as if they are sharing the "gm's" screen they would be able to see anything on the GM layer, or through the fog of war if you have it set up that you can see through it

[Prometeus]

Hi there guys, I am the DM of our group and we use MapTools with a TV or Projector.

To be honest i'm always looking for better alternatives to this but for the last 2 year i feel that Maptool cover all of the basics that a party needs during a fight.

Positioning, change sizes of digital miniatures, hide from sight items and enemies, fog of war, etc.

I use my laptop with her lab, music, maptools and google sheets for loot

What other apps or programs can handle maps besides Roll20 or Maptool??

[Urath DM]

I've toyed with Fantasy Grounds, D20Pro, and Roll20. I'm also looking at Battlegrounds RPG edition.

I looked a bit at MapTools and found the Java dependencies and addiitional bits of people's house rules baked into some the Pathfinder stuff to be not what I wanted. It may be different since then.

The issue with most is that the GM has more "visibility" than a player would. They're all geared toward managing visibility for both types of participants, so that's something to watch out for.

Battlegrounds has a comparison chart of VTT features on their site, comparing MapTools, Battleground, D20Pro, and Fantasy Grounds.

Roll20 is probably the least difficult to set up. Create an account, create a Game, pick the rule set, and invite players (who also need accounts). The GM can switch to a player-view after setting things up, so as long as you can hide the display while making changes the players should not see, that should work. Roll20 supports vision and lighting, but I think that's only if someone in the group has a paid subscription for the extra features.

d20Pro is not hard to set up, and is being updated fairly frequently with materials from their big Kickstarter a couple of years ago. A successor program from that Kickstarter is still in development.

I think Fantasy Grounds is more pre-disposed toward distributed play, as it doesn't really have ways to hide material from the GM's view at all. All controls on player viewing are based on it being remote.

D20Pro is similar, but they also talk on their site about ways to use it for face-to-face gaming as well as remote.

For lightweight use, Roll20 is my recommendation at this time.