Virtual Tabletops


Online Campaigns General Discussion


Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Three questions:

1. What VTT applications are available these days?
2. Which one should I use?
3. Why should I use whichever one you suggested above rather than one of the others?


Players seem to have coalesced around three - Roll20, FantasyGrounds, and Foundry. I'm pretty new to all of them so I won't comment other than Roll20 seems to be the most popular, so unless you intend to play with a stable group that has agreed to play one of the others, chances are you'll end up having to learn Roll20 in addition to one of the others.


Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Good to know, thanks.

Dark Archive

Ed Reppert wrote:

Three questions:

1. What VTT applications are available these days?
2. Which one should I use?
3. Why should I use whichever one you suggested above rather than one of the others?

This is the golden age of VTTs!

The main ones we see used in the online region are as mentioned Roll20, Foundry and Fantasy Grounds. There's also smaller, but dedicated, followers of Astral, D20Pro, MapTools and a few more I'm not familiar with, people even use Google Slides for some games.

The main pros and cons of the primary three are;

Roll20 - Easy to use, the easiest in fact. You can have a new player rolling dice and playing within a couple of minutes, similarly as a GM you can drag a map onto the page, a few tokens, and be running a bare bones (but entirely workable) game with only 10-15 min setup tops. It has options and tools for both players and GMs to invest far more time, for a commensurate increase in options if you desire. It's also usable entirely free (though it has a sub model for more options if you desire as player or GM). It's hosted online, which can be both good and bad. Pro; you don't need to know anything about how it runs, just go the website and boom you're done, Con; if the site goes down *everything* goes down and you're stuck (but do note this is very rare and usually only occurs when a large swath of the net has issues as well).

Foundry - Pretty, no really pretty. Don't underestimate this, it looks like a video game in many ways and many players will be familiar with the 'action key' layout and probably pick up more advanced options quicker than they may on other VTTs. It is, in my opinion, a bit more complicated on the player and GM side, requiring more knowledge and a bit of time learning it. It does require the GM to purchase a copy of the software themselves, I believe it's $50, but players do not require one. It is self hosted, or hosted through a service like Amazon Web Services, etc. Pro; You don't rely on websites which can go down, Con; if you're hosting it then the speed of your PC/net can impact things potentially, or you have to pay for someone else to host it (usually low fee). This also means that you might need to walk players through connecting to your game a little, and that unless you are running it 24/7 they cannot connect to upload/edit characters, etc.

Fantasy Grounds - The most feature strong of the bunch in my opinion, but also far and away the most complicated. Players are likely to need a crash course in how to play and use it which may take some time if they've never been exposed to it before, GMs are going to need to sit down and schedule some time to learn the program before they even consider running on it. As payment for all this you really do get an experience that can almost be considered a video game in some ways, with a huge array of tools for the GM to use. This is also a paid piece of software that again, the GM needs to purchase, though they also have a sub model I believe. Like Foundry it is self hosted or hosted by a third party and all the comments for that apply here as well.

Hopefully that's helpful, a lot of VTT games are organised and occur over discord, you can find the Online region VTT lodge here if you're interested, we have a lot of members and a ton of games, good luck finding games and may you always roll 20s!

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