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I'm pretty lost on what "innovations in VTT" need to be driven. VTTs to me are more like utilities, all I really care about is ease of use and reliability. Competition in health insurance or power companies has never lead to a better consumer outcome, just a more confusing one. I just end up always using TTS because so far its the one where me and all my friends can figure out how to get it to run and what the main buttons do.
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Dec 31, 2021 23:20
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Mostly I find my barrier with the VTT's I've tried to just be clunky UI. Like... over-sized junk, too many submenus, completely divorced in some cases from how other programs operate and thus requiring re-learning a lot of reflexes users have, either too much or too little detail in any given interaction, etc. I just want mIRC with a neat little board attached. All the rest can go rot.
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Dec 31, 2021 23:36
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The problem is roll20 is dogshit for crunchy tactical games, which has resulted in there being a dozen different alternatives for those, but roll20 is also merely tolerable for the other 90% of RPGs out there, and no one has actually done anything better (with less friction when it comes to importing stuff) for PbtA/FitD/etc.
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Dec 31, 2021 23:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Mostly I find my barrier with the VTT's I've tried to just be clunky UI. Like... over-sized junk, too many submenus, completely divorced in some cases from how other programs operate and thus requiring re-learning a lot of reflexes users have, either too much or too little detail in any given interaction, etc. If there was also an easy shared Paint-like program integrated into Discord, the rest would just work fine with bots.
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Dec 31, 2021 23:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:If there was also an easy shared Paint-like program integrated into Discord, the rest would just work fine with bots. This would be a gamechanger tbh
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Jan 1, 2022 01:31
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Runa posted:This would be a gamechanger tbh Yeah. I've played and ran games on Discord with its audio chat and posting things in specific channels, using bots to roll and sometimes for rules references, which was fine for more Theater of the Mind games. But even then it would be nice to share a single thing to point at.
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Jan 1, 2022 01:33
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Lemon-Lime posted:The problem is roll20 is dogshit for crunchy tactical games, which has resulted in there being a dozen different alternatives for those, but roll20 is also merely tolerable for the other 90% of RPGs out there, and no one has actually done anything better (with less friction when it comes to importing stuff) for PbtA/FitD/etc. Playing caaaaaards. It's the hill I will die on, but I enjoy and make card-based games and so far the only VTT that handles cards even remotely well is Tabletop Simulator -- which is horrendous for everything else RPG. I even made my own macro-enabled spreadsheet to help people play See Issue X because the alternatives were all garbage!
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Jan 1, 2022 01:38
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Tulip posted:I'm pretty lost on what "innovations in VTT" need to be driven. VTTs to me are more like utilities, all I really care about is ease of use and reliability. People want a lot of different things from VTTs. Some want a dice roller and a grid that they can draw freeform on. Some want blank character sheets that they can do what they will on, rules be damned. Some want a fully automated system so someone can just press their Swing Sword button and the whole process resolves automatically. Some want a map that mimics Ye Olde Minis On A Table. Some want the future we were promised where our minis basically play out a physics engine with lighting and collision. Everyone has their own idea of what a VTT should be and the secret sauce is that they all want it to do what each individual at the table wants in a personalized fashion without overriding what they want personally. That's the dream.
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Jan 1, 2022 01:50
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The big issues with VTTs for me is that they either have severely limited character sheets - e.g. Roll and Fari, or require daft amounts of coding to make a sheet. Astral has GUI based sheet creation which is almost decent, but basically ran like poo, and is now just in maintenance mode. re: drawing on the VTT, it's dead now, but Infrno was the best of them in that regard. You could drag and drop pictures onto it, free hand, or it had a whole Visio-style wireframe symbol library. Angrymog fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 02:34
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Wishing you all a 2022! 
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Jan 1, 2022 05:27
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Wishing you all a 2022! Why would you do that to anyone, you monster.
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Jan 1, 2022 05:37
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Grey Hunter posted:Why would you do that to anyone, you monster. I will not suffer it alone! 
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Jan 1, 2022 05:51
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Happy new year, folks! I'm probably the only person on the planet who had a good 2021, so here's hoping the rest of y'all can have a good 2022.
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Jan 1, 2022 07:16
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah. I've played and ran games on Discord with its audio chat and posting things in specific channels, using bots to roll and sometimes for rules references, which was fine for more Theater of the Mind games. But even then it would be nice to share a single thing to point at.
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Jan 1, 2022 17:40
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Splicer posted:https://www.owlbear.rodeo is pretty nice for this I've been in a game that used that, but it's pretty much like using Foundry, or Roll20, or whatever. I'm talking about something that's actually integrated into Discord so I don't have to look at more than one window for the actual game (I imagine I'd still be looking at notes and rules/setting PDFs).
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Jan 1, 2022 19:05
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King of Solomon posted:Happy new year, folks! I'm probably the only person on the planet who had a good 2021, so here's hoping the rest of y'all can have a good 2022. Sorry my very weird luck has damned the rest of the planet, though.
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Jan 1, 2022 19:41
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King of Solomon posted:Happy new year, folks! I'm probably the only person on the planet who had a good 2021, so here's hoping the rest of y'all can have a good 2022. There were some ups and downs but I got my disability approved and had a very positive experience with another person I fancy so on the whole it was honestly not a bad year.
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Jan 1, 2022 21:43
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Tulip posted:I'm pretty lost on what "innovations in VTT" need to be driven. VTTs to me are more like utilities, all I really care about is ease of use and reliability. Competition in health insurance or power companies has never lead to a better consumer outcome, just a more confusing one. I just end up always using TTS because so far its the one where me and all my friends can figure out how to get it to run and what the main buttons do. Clunky UI is a big part of it, but there's some outright omissions. I've just finished running a PF2 fight in which there were three giant fish monsters and two dragons. Dragons can fly. Fish can dive. These particular fish can also change the local water level, although the effect they use for doing so is notoriously badly worded. This was a fight from a published module, so it was all known about by Paizo. Flight is standard in d20 games beyond mid-level, and the water affecting spell is available at level 10. Even though it's been part of D&D games for years, physical tabletops are notoriously bad at this, and sure enough the table was regularly erupting with "I'm flying 15 foot up." "No, the water level increased by 10 feet, so now you're only 5 foot above it." Yet no VTT that I'm aware of has ever attempted to deal with any of this. A few will allow you to mark a mini with a single height in the way you could on the tabletop. None of them update that height label if their movement changes the terrain height below them. Nor will they measure distances correctly in 3D. Ironically, the one with the biggest potential headstart on this is TTS due to it using a fully 3D environment, but I don't believe it supports it either. A key part of strategy in PF2e is stacking conditions on enemies, due to a change to the critical rules. Most of these conditions are imposed by critical hits and last until "the end of [the hitter's] next turn". This means that if a PC crits an enemy who already has those conditions, they aren't repeated but they are extended and now last until the end of the new hitter's next turn. This makes keeping clear track of when they end is extremely important for target selection. But again, while many VTTs will allow the conditions to be imposed on actors and calculate the effects of their existing, so far none that I have seen will keep track of when they end or deal with the extension process. LatwPIAT posted:There were some ups and downs but I got my disability approved and had a very positive experience with another person I fancy so on the whole it was honestly not a bad year. I had a disaster which wiped out a ton of ability to experiment in gaming (and was largely my fault, which made it worse) and also decayed to the point where going back to regular work became a lot more stressful than it needed to be. However, since I had friends who lost jobs or lost relatives to the virus or even to the vaccine side-effects, and acquaintances who were abruptly told they now had lifelong disabilities and one of whom was murdered by her boyfriend, I don't complain about it too much.
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Jan 1, 2022 22:31
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Oddly this year has been pretty good for me. A lot of highs. Some real nasty lows, and RTO has been a near all-time-low event for me mental health wise, but I compare it to the rest of my post-grad school life and it comes up relatively high.hyphz posted:Clunky UI is a big part of it, but there's some outright omissions. I suppose this is part of why I don't really see platform competition resolving much. If no VTTs are even attempting to develop the features you're looking for, it isn't helping you that there's more than one, as well as the competition having an intrinsic anti-feature in that, because they have clunky UIs and some amount of buy-in, getting a group to just move to a VTT at all is an effort that increases with the variety of VTTs.
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Jan 1, 2022 23:12
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hyphz posted:Clunky UI is a big part of it, but there's some outright omissions. Forge does both of these things with plugins, and for pure text games, allows you to put visual novel pictures up and type text across someone's monitor just like that.
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Jan 1, 2022 23:20
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When it comes to the headache of measuring heights and ranges I much prefer the Lancer solution of 'only the further distance counts'. For example, an Assault Rifle has range 10, this means it shoots both 10 spaces away, and 10 spaces high at any range, up to 10. If an enemy is 11 spaces away you can't shoot them. If an enemy is 11 height away, you also can't shoot them. Movement works the same, if you have speed 5 and flight then you can start your move on the ground and finish it 5 away and 4 spaces up, or any kind of movement in (5,5). Much less of a headache than doing pythagoras.
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Jan 1, 2022 23:28
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I don't think I'd blame a VTT for not handling something rulesets are poo poo at. D&D and it's ilk can't handle 3d combat. Not supporting decks I think is pretty valid as a complaint, but things like flying and underwater combat shouldn't be a thing unless just counting as hazardous terrain or something like advantage or something where you treat it like a status "can't be hit by melee until hit by ranged/you do something to overcome the fact they're flying." Designing a setpiece like that just strikes me as something that was cool in someone's head they didn't actually test/use -or if they did they just handwaved it instead of using the game's actual rules.
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Jan 1, 2022 23:41
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On the one hand, I spent a big chunk of 2021 almost dying in a hospital, but I also didn’t die so I guess that’s a wash????
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Jan 1, 2022 23:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:On the one hand, I spent a big chunk of 2021 almost dying in a hospital, but I also didn’t die so I guess that’s a wash???? Same hifive hospital buddies
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Jan 1, 2022 23:50
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Forge has a plugin, where you just type the height you want to ascend to or descend to, and it'll give your character a thingy, and calculate your movement for you.
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Jan 1, 2022 23:51
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How can it be 2022 when 2019 was just last year
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Jan 1, 2022 23:55
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dwarf74 posted:How can it be 2022 when 2019 was just last year Many people are asking this.
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Jan 2, 2022 00:04
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bewilderment posted:When it comes to the headache of measuring heights and ranges I much prefer the Lancer solution of 'only the further distance counts'. This sounds rad. Do you know where it is in the PDF of the Lancer rulebook?
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Jan 2, 2022 00:05
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Boba Pearl posted:Forge has a plugin, where you just type the height you want to ascend to or descend to, and it'll give your character a thingy, and calculate your movement for you. Isn't Forge just hosted Foundry? Or is it exclusive to their story thingy? Coolness Averted posted:I don't think I'd blame a VTT for not handling something rulesets are poo poo at. D&D and it's ilk can't handle 3d combat. Not supporting decks I think is pretty valid as a complaint, but things like flying and underwater combat shouldn't be a thing unless just counting as hazardous terrain or something like advantage or something where you treat it like a status "can't be hit by melee until hit by ranged/you do something to overcome the fact they're flying. Fly has been in D&D books since AD&D? At least? Heck, the name of the game has a flying creature in it. I don't think this washes as an excuse for the system any more. 
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Jan 2, 2022 00:15
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hyphz posted:Isn't Forge just hosted Foundry? Or is it exclusive to their story thingy? I also would assume and expect a professional designing an adventure and selling it for money not to include setpieces that compound and rely on the bad part of the rules -without including a subsystem or sidebar guiding you on how to avoid the pitfalls.
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Jan 2, 2022 00:28
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hyphz posted:Isn't Forge just hosted Foundry? Or is it exclusive to their story thingy? I got the names confused, it's called Foundry, not Forge 
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Jan 2, 2022 03:43
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Boba Pearl posted:I got the names confused, it's called Foundry, not Forge On that topic I hate the way foundry and forge share logins but don't easily hop between each other. Like if you're using a single login like that if I go to the wrong site and you're hyping them between eachother there should be an easy link to go between them.
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Jan 2, 2022 03:59
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This is kind of a weird question but as someone who knows the general metaplot and pitfalls of Shadowrun, I've heard it said multiple times that Shadowrun 3e is the best version of the game (and not in a "it's good" way but in a "most functional or balanced" way). Could someone confirm/deny that for me and just explain how the gently caress that game generally works, I had a discussion about Shadowrun with some folks and that jogged the 3e thought loose and now I'm curious.
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Jan 2, 2022 04:22
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iirc isn't a large chunk of that 4e was the edition that ditched the chromed up aesthetic and added more 'modern' scifi stuff like synthetic flesh, plastics, and wifi hacking? Like I'm not saying each iteration didn't get worse but I distinctly remember most of the bellyaching about 3e to 4e was the changes in setting assumptions and push to bring riggers and hackers into heists rather than playing seperate minigames away from the party. 4e was a significant system change too, but I can't speak to if it really was better or worse. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jan 2, 2022 |
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Jan 2, 2022 04:32
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I just mean from like a baseline mechanical standpoint; 4e has the best shift in like scope and world by adding wifi everywhere and doing their damnedest to make the Decker not just sit in a sim-rig constantly jacking off away from the party, don't get me wrong, I also just see 4e's mechanics and balk. I dunno. It's not really come up in an edition war sense, that's pretty much reserved for 5e walking back the setting changes and 6e for being loving broken, just in a pleasant nostalgia way of "Shadowrun 3e was fun".
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Jan 2, 2022 04:54
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I played 2e/3e for decades, and 5e for about 6 years. 4e answered the question of why are we still using wires in a wireless world, but also kind of opened up a bunch of flaws to the world itself. Why is everything wireless, and what benefit does it bring? It's mostly left as an open exercise to the GM and the reader. The rules for hackers/deckers give slightly more reason for them be on the team, but the rules for hacking themselves mean they'd probably be much more effective with a gun than doing anything against the opposition using their hacking skills. Unless the GM decided to throw in a closed door or an alarm system. Major changes also included using standard target numbers (5+) instead of the old variable system, and when you roll dice, you roll attribute + skill instead of just skill. Much of the excitement of the older system was succeeding at rolling really high target numbers and having success mean something with one one success. In 4e, you need multiple successes for extended tasks, and most things were met with opposed rolls, which means your excitement of rolling really well could mean jack poo poo if your opponent also rolled well. Math nerds often despaired at SR's probability curves regarding variable target numbers ( you rerolled 6s if the target number was higher than 6, so a TN of 7 was guaranteed for every 6, and an 8 was most likely), but the system played very well with how the TNs always shifted up and down. That, and 2nd and 3rd edition kept adding new toys which made the game always feel like there were doodads around the corner. With 4e+, most of what was added just shifted dice pools up or down some dice, which is just not as sexy. They also kept the character advancement rules from 3rd almost wholesale, even when they didn't make sense for the rule changes anymore.
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Jan 2, 2022 05:16
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In every edition hacking has always been "now you go do your thing in La La Land" while the rest of the team does the run/has fun/twidles their thumbs. One of Shadowrun's greatest flaws is how the rules themselves split the party. The only thing 4e really changed was that their are advantages for bringing the hacker along so they could hack much easier at the risk of being shot at.
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Jan 2, 2022 05:19
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Why is everything wireless, and what benefit does it bring? Unfortunately this also applies to the real world. The Internet of poo poo is real.
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Jan 2, 2022 05:19
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I think my brain edited out the experience I had trying to run SR4ae. If I recall the hacking issue wasn’t the hacker going off on their own, it was that they introduced smartphones to the setting (“Commlinks”) and stated there were no other personal computers. That meant that if you wanted to obtain someone’s personal information, instead of hacking the corporate mainframe where it was stored, you just had to hack their phone. And most Commlinks had such bad security stats that doing so would be trivial. What they wanted to do was to give hackers an active role in combat by letting them hack the enemy’s cyberware or defend their buddies from the enemy doing so. What they actually did was ruin downtime hacking and since there is already the issue of not modelling the opportunistic nature of hacking, it made the mechanical dissonance even stronger. hyphz fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jan 2, 2022 |
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Jan 2, 2022 06:00
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4e was the only version of the game I've actually played, and we avoided the hacker problem by virtue of the fact that none of the players build a hacker PC. On the occasions when the GM wanted to feature the cyberspace part of cyberpunk, we'd contract it out to a friendly NPC. Who eventually got his own plotline, as he had been the subject of cutting edge corp experimentation in full-body replacement cybernetics, and we learned that his nickname of "HIAB" stood for "Head In A Box" and he wanted revenge/liberation. That particular game went hard on the "punk" side of cyberpunk. We helped to build the Seattle Ork Underground into a mutually assisting community and resisted corporate exploitation and absorption. Fun times. Part of that stuff made it into official metaplot when the GM did some freelance work for CGL.
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