My old gaming group has gotten together in the last few months to play. We're all in different time zones so using a VTT has been key (Roll20). And to be clear I have 0 interest in the WotC version of VTT with this new ruleset.

Positive:

• The VTT removes a lot of the things I didn't like about 5E (the math is basically automated so players never forget to add some bonus).
• The visual of seeing the dungeon around them works nicely, especially with dynamic lighting. I like popping a monster in at the edge of their view and having them notice it without my saying anything.
• I really like as the GM, seeing what is in neighboring rooms and being about to drag them over into the combat very easily.
• I found out how to create buttons so the players (and the GM) can just click for all the major actions which sped things up a lot.

Negative:

• It is really odd to shift to theater of the mind when you don't have a map. Everyone is staring at a blank screen and that could be a big negative if not super-prepared.
• 5E has all monsters share the same template and the VTT does that as well. So every Bugbear has the same AC and weapons and if you are not careful they may all share the same HP and all drop when the GM reduces one.
• I'm running Lost Mines which did a marginal job on some things as they stayed close to the source material and didn't add any extras to take advantage of the VTT. Having interiors for all the buildings in Phandelver would have been nice. I found pretty much all of them online and was able to use them but that would have been nice. Having battlemaps for the roads for all those wandering encounters while travelling also would have been nice.

Anyway I was wondering if anyone on the board uses VTT and if they have any advice or suggestions.

I haven't used Roll20 in awhile but there are API scripts that separate and randomise the tokens you drop, group saves and checks are helpful to.

For ToTM scenes just put up an image to represent the scene so you're not looking at a blank screen.

As I recall there are a lot of time and labour saving APIs for 5e, they're worth looking into.

I've gotten very good results out of Foundry. You can either host it yourself (including just running it from your PC) or get a subscription with The Forge that covers the server costs.

One thing I have noticed with the WotC content on Roll20 is that they will give you all of the maps in the books but nowhere near all of the maps you will need.  There are sellers on DTRPG that will fill in the missing maps but that's an extra cost.

Roll20 is garbo, do yourself a favor and do a one-time buy of Foundry or Fantasy Grounds instead; you'll get features in excess of the subscription features in Roll20 and you won't be on the hook to pay forever.  You can pay places like Forge to host Foundry for you (in which case don't buy the license, it's covered in their fee), but it's not difficult to self-host a Foundry site unless you have a truly bad Internet connection and Fantasy Grounds also just runs off your computer.  Your players would need to get the (free) client to connect to you for Fantasy Grounds, where Foundry just uses web browsers.

For both of those, adding maps is stupid easy, you just dump them into a folder on your drive and from there you point the VTT to the file you want to use as a map.  They'll have lots of options like grid/hex and scaling and lighting, but in a lot of cases you can just go with the default instead of tweaking too much.  Depending on how much effort you want to put in, you can draw walls and doors on the maps to restrict line of sight for the players so they don't see the entire map, both the VTTs I mentioned calculate lighting and walls and only show the players what the PCs would be seeing from their position.  I usually spend just a minute or two on a given map to add walls and light sources, it doesn't need to be extravagant.

In the case of tokens for monsters, there's a checkbox in Foundry for a monster's token that tells it whether the token should be linked to the monster or if it's a separate entity.  If it's linked, changing something like HP on the token will impact the monster's sheet and therefore any other token of the same monster, so leave that unchecked.  Then the VTT will treat every token as a separate creature and you'll avoid that issue.  PCs on the other hand should be linked to their token so changes persist between different scenes.

Something else if you go with Foundry is to look at picking up the Dungeon Alchemist map builder (also a one-time purchase).

Not only is it easy to use, but it can also diectly export not only the maps, but the walls, doors, windows, and lighting from DA into a file that just loads right into Foundry so you don't even need to do that setup work.

Another important thing for Foundry are its system plug-ins. Content creators have built systems with custom character sheets, automation of features (click a target, hit the attack button on your sheet and will take into account any conditions and roll the attack and apply damage/effects to the target). More popular settings like SWADE, PF, and Exalted have more feat (and most are free), but even if your favorite doesn't exist, there's a free "system builder" plug-in you can get and even my neo-Luddite self only needed a few work nights to set it up enough to be able to run my own system with character sheets and automated checks for the players.

Quote from: Chris24601 on July 23, 2024, 04:47:34 PMI've gotten very good results out of Foundry. You can either host it yourself (including just running it from your PC) or get a subscription with The Forge that covers the server costs.

I hands down prefer Foundry but OP is using roll20.

Using Foundry, how difficult is it to set up encounters?
With Roll20 I've added a few encounters, but then had to add buttons to the token so I can have them attack without pulling up a character sheet. Something that makes the game wonderful but is a pain to do and should be the default.

This advice might not be helpful to you, but I've found using Roll20 that paring back on a lot of that automation actually saves you time. For a while I made character sheets for all the monsters, rolled their attacks from their sheets and tracked hit points on their tokens. After trying it both ways, I've gone back to just tracking hit points on a piece of notebook paper and rolling attacks from the dice roller (or occasionally just with physical dice on my desk). I only use the monster sheets as an easy way to sort tokens. It's the same for me with the dynamic lighting system. It's faster in play, but it takes so long to set up that I just use the fog of war feature and adjust it as I go.

On the topic of theatre of the mind: One thing I started doing recently for fights I didn't want to deal with a battlemap for was to use the abstract battlemap from Ryuutama. There's probably a better one out there, but I just happened to have the file on hand. The point is that it's an extremely easy a way to plop tokens down on the table and give your players an idea of who is in striking distance. Essentially "Theater of the Mind+".

I haven't run games on Foundry, but I've played in a fair few. The impression I get is that if you are computer-savvy and want to automate a lot of your game, it is superior to Roll20. However, it is also extremely temperamental. I don't think I've ever played a session in Foundry without having at least one pause while the GM tried to sort out a technical issue. Roll20, as primitive as it is, always works.

Quote from: ForgottenF on July 30, 2024, 10:25:55 AMThis advice might not be helpful to you..

The advice was very helpful, thank you.

Quote from: Ruprecht on July 30, 2024, 10:11:29 AMUsing Foundry, how difficult is it to set up encounters?
With Roll20 I've added a few encounters, but then had to add buttons to the token so I can have them attack without pulling up a character sheet. Something that makes the game wonderful but is a pain to do and should be the default.

I definitely recommend Foundry over Roll20, with one caveat. If you're just looking for something free, use Roll20. The moment you spend money, switch to Foundry. Also, wait until around November because Foundry usually has a Black Friday sale.

I haven't played much with the encounter automation tools in Foundry, but I use it a lot for dungeon and battle maps. I track everything manually.

It does do what you want Roll20 to do natively, or at least, it does what I think you want from reading your post. Every token its own character sheet, but it's linked to a character library. So you create an actor called "goblin" and then you populate 12 goblin tokens by dragging that "goblin" onto the battle map. Each goblin token has the stats of the master goblin character sheet you started from, but when you update the hit points of one token it doesn't effect the others. You can see each individual goblin's sheet by double-clicking the token.

You can name the goblins individually, or you can click a few checkboxes in the master goblin sheet to autopopulate individual names like "goblin 1" and "goblin 2" or "sad goblin" and "angry goblin".

There is some initial setup required if you don't want to pay a lot of money. For example, you could spring for a licensed VTT module that contains the 5E bestiary, or you could just spend an evening creating entries for the monsters you've decided you want to use. Replace 5E with your favorite OSR game if you're so inclined. I imagine there's community stuff out there, but I don't know what the landscape looks like. Worst case scenario you're just entering some monster statblocks and looking through a google image search to find some artwork to use as tokens.

Since it's all locally hosted, you create an archive to store all of your monster statblocks in case you want to use them later in some other game.

I am trying CauldronVTT.  I tried Foundry.   Foundry is pretty nice,and supports my favorite game, Index Card RPG, but then i have to open up my pc firewall etc to get people in.  I have an overly elaborate router and switch setup at home.

But Cauldron is free, and relatively simple, but still takes a lot of time to setup maps, fog, characters, tokens, loot, npcs, etc, etc, etc.

Im still working on a one shot with it, and want to play it, but havent finished yet.
Ive got to get it all finished.

The Cauldron dev is pretty helpful, I had to ask him a few questions one day.  And he added a few features I asked about.

Lets go into VTT's:

Roll20 owner will literally put you in a camp if he could.  He hates white guys.

NEXT

Foundry VTT - popular, lot of younger people use it, pretty good chance if you pick up randos from there you'll run into the pronoun gang.

Fantasy Grounds - hardest interface to learn, largest number of grognards and the player base will not ask the DM if
he's into assplay and do they mind if their character is a Half Assed Baboon named Trixie who is transitioning

My two cents, go Fantasy Grounds, you'll be happier with the player base.

<Deleted> I found the info with a simple search of the site.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on July 31, 2024, 05:57:24 PMMy two cents, go Fantasy Grounds, you'll be happier with the player base.

I use it and I love it and I get all types of players when I post my games in the Fantasy Grounds Forums.

Plus they dropped the price:  $25 for the regular version and $50 for the ultimate.