Which Virtual Tabletop Do you reccomend?

[Kennethray]

I initially ignored this thread but I am glad I took a look. I have been using roll20 for years now even though we all meet in person. I use it for the maps and initiative tracker. Before pf2 I never used the dice roller for my at home games,now I use it for the secret roll. For someone like me that uses roll20 for the maps, initiative tracker and things like npc pictures would any of these other vtt fit better?

[thenobledrake]

Kennethray wrote:

For someone like me that uses roll20 for the maps, initiative tracker and things like npc pictures would any of these other vtt fit better?

It's a matter of preference for me, but I like Foundry better for those things.

Initiative Tracker: Where in roll20 I would have to click each token and then open the relevant sheet and hit the initiative roll, with Foundry you can box-select all the combatants right click one then click the combat state toggle, and that will populate them into the combat tracker where you can click roll initiative for each.

Plus there is a plug-in that puts a turn marker around the token of whoever's turn it currently is and announces it's their turn in the chat log if you want more visibility than just whoever is at the top of the list (roll20) or is highlighted in the list (Foundry's default).

And you can see status effects on the combat tracker (as well as on the token) and set up a particular thing to track like putting each creature's AC next to their name if you wanted to.

So for me it's a lot more helpful than the Roll20 one.

NPC Pictures: Foundry is set up so that you can have a character sheet (for PC or NPC) have a piece of art and also a token art. I know Roll20 can do that too, but the interface for it and UI when trying to show the art to other people feels clunky - while in Foundry you just right click the character in the actor directory and select the show art option.

Maps: I've never set up a map for vision blocking/fog of war in Roll20, so I'm not sure if the following is inherent to that system or bad choices made by my GM: you can see where your character can see, but there is no distinction between the ares you've never seen before and the ones you have seen but don't currently have line of sight to.

In Foundry, there is. Full black for things you haven't seen, and transparent black over things you can't currently see (which also hides tokens that are there so players don't see whether or not movement has happened outside their line of sight).

Foundry also has adjustable settings for walls so that you can alter whether they can be seen through or moved through, including limiting things directionally so you can have things like ridges you can see down from but creatures below would just see the ledge not everything on top of it, or one-way mirrors, or illusory walls you can walk right through.

Plus the wall settings can be used to mark terrain features you can't see through while still letting the art be seen, so the aesthetic isn't marred by random black spots where art could be.

[Gortle]

Malk_Content wrote:

As the gm you can run from your app. Only players connect from their browser. They dont need an account or anything, you just setup the player for that game and they select it from a drop down once connected.

If you've got the server up people can connect, so you can have a dedicated server if you want. You can even pause the game so people can connect and edit characters but not look around the map etc.

You can give people whatever permissions you like, so you could have a connecting player with full gm permissions.

I'll check it out.

I don't normally like the systems that require you to host your own server. Its just another point of failure. I find it more reliable cloud based. Especially convenient if you need to access when the GM doesn't have his server up.
Mostly I use Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.

Fantasy Grounds has more features, most are great but there are still a few gaps, and you still have to do manual work arounds. It also has a seriously non-standard and anti-intuitive user interface.

Roll20 is what I prefer. A few dice macros, fog of war, upload maps and images, sharing a map with tokens. That is all I need. I play a lot of different systems too. I don't want to have to rebuy everything again.

Sound wise I typically use Skype or Discord.

[Grankless]

You can pay a couple bucks to any ol' hosting service and just have your game hosted that way. The Forge is a popular one built for Foundry use (non-affiliated), but you can use like, anything.

[Kennethray]

I was watching a video on foundry and realized something. I buy all the books on roll20 as well as the physical copy, but I use the roll20 compendium to look items/spells/monsters/conditions much quicker than looking them up in the books. Is that something that can be done on foundry?

[3Doubloons]

Kennethray wrote:

I was watching a video on foundry and realized something. I buy all the books on roll20 as well as the physical copy, but I use the roll20 compendium to look items/spells/monsters/conditions much quicker than looking them up in the books. Is that something that can be done on foundry?

Everything that's available through the PRD or CUP are either already in the game system or planned to be, no additional purchase necessary

[Grankless]

You can also click and drag everything on to your sheet and have things actually work, which is much more than you can say for Roll20's equivalent.

[thenobledrake]

Foundry's compendium types are segregated, so you aren't hitting the same search box for everything.

That comes with the downside of needing to know which thing to search in (feats/features, items, bestiary, spells, etc.), but is balanced by the upside of never having anyone trying to add a weapon to their inventory and it not working because they are accidentally trying to drag a proficiency instead.

[Malk_Content]

Oh an as a gm, pf2 monsters have a button to just automatically apply the weak/elite templates. That has been great.

[skizzerz]

thenobledrake wrote:

Maps: I've never set up a map for vision blocking/fog of war in Roll20, so I'm not sure if the following is inherent to that system or bad choices made by my GM: you can see where your character can see, but there is no distinction between the ares you've never seen before and the ones you have seen but don't currently have line of sight to.

In Foundry, there is. Full black for things you haven't seen, and transparent black over things you can't currently see (which also hides tokens that are there so players don't see whether or not movement has happened outside their line of sight).

Foundry also has adjustable settings for walls so that you can alter whether they can be seen through or moved through, including limiting things directionally so you can have things like ridges you can see down from but creatures below would just see the ledge not everything on top of it, or one-way mirrors, or illusory walls you can walk right through.

Plus the wall settings can be used to mark terrain features you can't see through while still letting the art be seen, so the aesthetic isn't marred by random black spots where art could be.

Roll20 does have the first feature you mentioned (keeping track of where players have been before). It can be a performance killer on old hardware or overly large maps, so some GMs don’t use it for that reason. Others simply probably doesn’t know it exists because the name of the feature has absolutely no relevancy to what it does (if someone told me that “Advanced Fog of War” was the name of the feature to make roll20 show where your character has been in a muted color rather than black I’d be having questions).

Quite a few of foundry’s other lighting options beat the heck out of roll20 though such as one-way walls, walls that block movement but not vision (useful for windows), and “terrain walls” that only block vision if two are in your way, so you can show things like boulders or other vision-blocking terrain but have players be unable to see past it. Also doors that players can open/close themselves (can be locked so only the GM can open them too), making that common thing require fewer clicks compared to roll20.

In my limited experience with foundry compared to my extensive experience with roll20, setting up said walls on Foundry takes longer and is more fiddly. Probably would get faster as I get used to their keybinds but it’s not nearly as simple as just using Roll20’s polygon tool to lay wall lines.

Getting maps aligned to the grid is also faster with Roll20’s drag-and-drop and resize method compared to foundry and its insistence that you can only have one background image per map.

I see a lot of promise in Foundry though and am excited to see where it goes. They’d benefit greatly from hiring a UI designer to fix its cluster**** of usability issues. Just because every other VTT is godawful to learn (and roll20 is no exception here) doesn’t give an excuse for things like unlabeled icons with no tooltips, inconsistent or just unintuitive keybinds in various areas of the app, and other UX papercuts that add up to a frustrating and unintuitive learning curve.

If you were just starting out fresh to VTT, I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend trying foundry out despite what I wrote above. That price compared to the competition largely can’t be beat, and roll20 has its own glut of UX issues and learning curve (hi initiative tracker I’m looking at you)

[Grankless]

Foundry also has polygonal lines and you can add additional images to a scene with the tiles tool.

[thenobledrake]

skizzerz wrote:

Getting maps aligned to the grid is also faster with Roll20’s drag-and-drop and resize method compared to foundry and its insistence that you can only have one background image per map.

Strangely, grid alignment in roll20 was one of the things I had the most difficulty with - unless I had pre-sized the map to 70 pixels per square and cropped-off any partial squares around the edges (that I am very agitated are extremely common among professionally commissioned maps)

I'd constantly have grid misalignment that just wouldn't go away and would look like it matched up in one part of a map but be off as you moved further along.

My switch to Foundry coincided with me picking up Dungeondraft and running an AP with some low-res and some inaccurately scaled maps so thus far I've not had any experience other than the ease of being able to select the image I'd drawn, type in it's dimensions, and have everything lined up.

[Captain Morgan]

Foundry also has a module to make it easier to resize maps. It can still take a bit but I think it is easier than Roll20 or map tools with that module installed.

[Megistone]

thenobledrake wrote:

skizzerz wrote:

Getting maps aligned to the grid is also faster with Roll20’s drag-and-drop and resize method compared to foundry and its insistence that you can only have one background image per map.

Strangely, grid alignment in roll20 was one of the things I had the most difficulty with - unless I had pre-sized the map to 70 pixels per square and cropped-off any partial squares around the edges (that I am very agitated are extremely common among professionally commissioned maps)

I'd constantly have grid misalignment that just wouldn't go away and would look like it matched up in one part of a map but be off as you moved further along.

My switch to Foundry coincided with me picking up Dungeondraft and running an AP with some low-res and some inaccurately scaled maps so thus far I've not had any experience other than the ease of being able to select the image I'd drawn, type in it's dimensions, and have everything lined up.

Maybe this goes a little OT, but besides the possible vtt switch I was considering a tool to design maps. And my proficiency in visual arts is below untrained...

I have heard about this Dungeondraft and I watched a demo, but since you are actually using it I'll ask: how easy it really is? If you need to design a small, simple dungeon (say, three rooms, a corridor, just a few props) as the location for a couple encounters, how long does it take?

[thenobledrake]

Megistone wrote:

Maybe this goes a little OT, but besides the possible vtt switch I was considering a tool to design maps. And my proficiency in visual arts is below untrained...

I have heard about this Dungeondraft and I watched a demo, but since you are actually using it I'll ask: how easy it really is? If you need to design a small, simple dungeon (say, three rooms, a corridor, just a few props) as the location for a couple encounters, how long does it take?

Dungeondraft is the quickest and least art-skill-reliant mapping software I've ever used. Bit of background: I've tried out every mapping software I've ever heard of over the last 20 years, and until Dungeondraft I kept going back to hand-drawing in photoshop.

The tools let you drag room shapes onto the grid and it draws and layers the walls and floor (and shadows) correctly as you do. Then you pick your door look and point and click where you want them to be and it automatically snaps into place and removes the wall as appropriate. Then you grab the object tool and click things into place where you want them - and the layering is automatic by default so that you don't accidentally have beds flying above the walls and such.

I've only been using the program for about 7 maps thus far (a three ring circus tent, the circusfolk camp outside that tent, a church & graveyard, a barn with a loft, a mill, a bit of field with a river through it and a couple trees, and a small tavern) and I think I've only spent maybe 3 hours total making them. Something like a simple 3-room dungeon (a tomb, for example) I could see putting together in 20 minutes or less - and the most time consuming part has just been looking through the art library to decide which objects to use (i.e. do I want round tables or square tables? Do I like this chair better? I wanna put some candles on the tables... oh, and a torch sconce on the wall!)

[Henro]

Yeah, dungeondraft is ridiculously easy to use, while still being decently powerful in a lot of the ways that really count.

[Megistone]

Thanks for the feedback!