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Nessus posted:I tried connecting to a foundry session on my gaming laptop and it made my card chug harder than FFXIV and I still couldn't see anything on the map. It's possible the GM was doing something wrong since he was intending to show me, a non-campaign-player, some cool poo poo he'd set up on the map. Yeah, it might have been some advanced walls + lights + effects + big map fuckery. Some of those plugins murder even pretty good PCs. You can do that in Roll20 as well, though.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:31
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Lumbermouth posted:"Easily accessible by players" is also high up in there. No one I run games for is going to install a client to play a game, let alone connect to a self-hosted server. Nobody has to, so there you go. It's literally a url you click on and it runs in your browser. Wherever you're hosting it needs to have some beef (either a machine or in the cloud), but my out-of-the-box gaming PC handles it just fine - if you can host a 6 player game of TTS, you can easily host Foundry. Edit: Megazver posted:Yeah, it might have been some advanced walls + lights + effects + big map fuckery. Some of those plugins murder even pretty good PCs.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:34
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A lot of people do not have their browsers configured correctly for 3D rendering, which usually is what causes that black screen. It is why atropos is so hard & heavy about creating a client - which a lot of us system/module devs are against for obvious reasons. I can't imagine calling Roll20 the best VTT though, with the constant performance issues and 10 year old UI/feature set.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:38
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Having worked extensively in R20 and Foundry, I can say with conviction that neither is actually very good at addressing the core needs of the playerbase and that a well-designed 3rd option would eat both their lunch. Whatever D&D Beyond rolls out next year will almost certainly strangle both of them, in certain ways. Foundry is a chore to mod/add anything in and, in the games I run, is extremely hit-or-miss with automation implementation and the documentation is generally awful. Add-ons are also incredibly spotty. The automation that is well-coded is a nice have, but I feel like the time it saves me is largely eaten up by the time I have to sink to do the things it doesn't. R20 is incredibly barebones and a bunch of it's paid products don't even really do what they say on the tin. But, when I need to add/mod stuff, it's typically in seconds, as opposed to minutes/hours in Foundry. The ability to work on things directly as a player without having to rely on a DM is also great, for games I'm not running. Any new VTT could do all of the following and just eat everyone's lunch:
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Jul 18, 2022 17:43
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Toshimo posted:
Care to elaborate?
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Jul 18, 2022 17:46
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Toshimo posted:Having worked extensively in R20 and Foundry, I can say with conviction that neither is actually very good at addressing the core needs of the playerbase and that a well-designed 3rd option would eat both their lunch. Whatever D&D Beyond rolls out next year will almost certainly strangle both of them, in certain ways. Very funny that you think an official D&D product will be well designed
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Jul 18, 2022 17:49
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Toshimo posted:Whatever D&D Beyond rolls out next year will almost certainly strangle both of them, in certain ways. Sure, if the entire history of D&D digital tools never happened.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:50
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beyond will only be d&d so i could not care less about it
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Jul 18, 2022 17:53
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Piell posted:Very funny that you think an official D&D product will be well designed No. I think the 1st party product could be total crap and still just Hoover up user numbers because it's 1st party and had DNDB integration.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:56
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Andrast posted:beyond will only be d&d so i could not care less about it You don't have to care. But the VTT companies who will hemorrhage income will definitely have to care.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:57
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Toshimo posted:
I'm also interested in knowing what you mean by this.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:19
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Toshimo posted:Foundry is a chore to mod/add anything in and, in the games I run, is extremely hit-or-miss with automation implementation and the documentation is generally awful. Add-ons are also incredibly spotty. The automation that is well-coded is a nice have, but I feel like the time it saves me is largely eaten up by the time I have to sink to do the things it doesn't. To add to this, while my own tool of choice is Foundry for anything I plan to play for longer than a session or two, Foundry's ecosystem is largely driven by plugins and modules written by its community. On the one hand this is great because it's not beholden to the whims of "whenever roll20 decides to update" and people can add in as much automation as they feel like; on the other hand it runs into some issues that I feel are common to large, distributed open source communities: * Quality of plugins varies extremely widely, as does quality of accompanying documentation; it's pretty much whatever the guy writing the plugin decides to provide. * The bazaar-style community around third party plugins kind of discourages them from integrating better with one another; you get situations where there are a number of different and mutually incompatible community plugins that provide for some unfilled niche (eg lighting) and if you want to integrate your code with theirs you have to spend a lot of time working out the differences between them. * Foundry is still very much in a stage where it changes its APIs frequently even between minor versions, so plugins that used to work can spontaneously break on newer versions of Foundry until (if) the author or someone else decides to update it. tl;dr it's still JavaScript with all the attendant difficulties of that ecosystem
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Jul 18, 2022 18:36
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Arrrthritis posted:I'm also interested in knowing what you mean by this. For any given game, on aggregate, you have many more players than DMs. These are your customer base. Both Foundry and R20 are incredibly DM-driven: They revolve around the notion that there is a DM who is the Primary User and the players are merely clients. Often, core features are locked behind DM permissions, and the DM is expected to be the hand-holder. For example: I've done a fair amount of Organized Play for both 5e and PFS. The idea that I should just be able to log into my player account, make up a character sheet, and drag it around with me from game to game with persistence is just not recognized as a need. Additionally, when I was trying to learn and fumble my way through both systems, what I needed was to be able to just mock up a character, throw up some target dummy NPCs and work my way through learning the sheet and its interactions. Neither system is set up to do this. I think this is one of the large hurdles about why players have such difficulty acclimating to the sheets and VTTs. Having a single-player environment where players can set up their characters and test would give a lot of more invested players a way to learn the ropes without having to beg a DM for a sandbox or to import/export their sheets. And this extrapolates to other ways the VTTs operate, but the core is: Don't top-down design for the DM to be the Operator who does out things to Clients. Make a system where the players can do what they need to do before game time so that we don't sit down to the table and have to eat our game time with troubleshooting.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:45
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The only ones I've used are Roll20 and foundry, and I generally prefer foundry, but there are advantages to both. (Note my experience here is with pf2e and dnd5e) Foundry has a far far higher level of automation that just works. It's not universal, there are still things missing that need manual tweaks (damage resistance and immunities in pf2e don't automatically work yet, for example), but in general whether it's combat, building out your character sheet or pulling in fully built NPCs from the bestiary, stuff is straightforward in a way that it simply isn't in Roll20. The plugin system is a mixed blessing. In general, they're great. But because each game system is also different, not all of them are really one button "click install and now you're done." For example, there's a plugin that automatically plays animations and spell effects. It's great! Really adds to the cool factor and immersion in games. But it only comes with a few 5e weapons and spells set up in it by default. If you want to use it fully, you need to add effects packs, sound libraries, and then a fourth plugin that's just a full configuration file to set up everything for Pathfinder support. And documentation for this is all over the place. None of it is difficult, but it takes time on the part of the DM to get things going. That brings me to the major foundry disadvantage though. It's inherently a standalone product, with no real support for being part of a larger ecosystem. If I spend all this time setting up plugins to work nicely on one game I'm hosting, there's no easy way to export all the configuration stuff in one go. I just have to do it again in both games I'm hosting, because some plugins support exporting their config, and some don't. Also, If you want to move your character as a player between games, you need to export it and copy over some json to whoever's hosting. Doing this in Roll20 is much easier. So foundry needs a bigger investment in general from the DM side, and as a player, if you want to play around with it at all, you have to buy it. But I think the price is worth it considering everything you get.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:52
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Toshimo posted:For any given game, on aggregate, you have many more players than DMs. These are your customer base. Both Foundry and R20 are incredibly DM-driven: They revolve around the notion that there is a DM who is the Primary User and the players are merely clients. Often, core features are locked behind DM permissions, and the DM is expected to be the hand-holder. While SA has had conversations about not putting all of that work on one player at the table, it's really the only spot I've seen that really questions it. So it's natural most products still build around selling to that one user. With VTT you now also add "IT/computer wrangler" to the list of stuff the GM is in charge of. Even more so if it's expected you'll know some simple coding to make the VTT really shine.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:01
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah, I think this also goes back to the norms of "the GM does the work" when it comes to organizing, learning the rules, buying the materials, and wrangling the cats. Chicken and Egg, though. If you continually design this way, then how can things change?
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Jul 18, 2022 19:08
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Players aren't customers because what are they paying for? Are they all gonna pay a subscription each month to play on that VTT only? That would crash & burn. Foundry is economical because you can buy it once on sale and split the cost 6 ways so it costs the price of fast food dinner. Roll20 is the same way with the subscription.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:13
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Foundry does technically allow you to export and import character sheets as a player. To take your character around. I think at the paid tier of R20 you also have a character vault. And then in Foundry you just set permissions to allow the players some autonomy as far as what you want to allow them to do. But yeah they cant do it without a server instance up. Dexo fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 19:17
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Dexo posted:Foundry does technically allow you to export and import character sheets as a player. Yes, they all have some form of workaround, but it's just that: workarounds. It's not core functionality and if I'm wishlisting for a theoretically complete app, it should have this use case.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:26
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alg posted:Players aren't customers because what are they paying for? Are they all gonna pay a subscription each month to play on that VTT only? That would crash & burn. So... players will chip in for a purchase of Foundry or a split subscription for Roll20 but they wouldn't pay separately because that would crash and burn? That seems kinda contradictory! And, personally, I'd happily pay a low monthly sub for a VTT that worked halfway decently, and I'd very much prefer that to the model of, "The DM handles everything except for player input."
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Jul 18, 2022 19:28
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Darwinism posted:So... players will chip in for a purchase of Foundry or a split subscription for Roll20 but they wouldn't pay separately because that would crash and burn? That seems kinda contradictory! Yeah because they would pay once....or a very small amount. Are you gonna find 6 players to pay $10 a month to play on one VTT?
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Jul 18, 2022 19:29
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VTT could work like Nintendo's online service, where you pay yearly and it's not that much. Like five bucks a year and you can buy a five-pack for $20 (adjust figures as necessary)
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Jul 18, 2022 19:34
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Nessus posted:VTT could work like Nintendo's online service, where you pay yearly and it's not that much. Like five bucks a year and you can buy a five-pack for $20 (adjust figures as necessary) A VTT is an always online solution though, with instances for each game that have to be open to the Internet, with storage behind them, and enough compute to host all these assets and sync rolls, etc. Nintendo's online service is basically a web store with a couple messaging servers nobody uses.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:37
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alg posted:A VTT is an always online solution though, with instances for each game that have to be open to the Internet, with storage behind them, and enough compute to host all these assets and sync rolls, etc. Nintendo's online service is basically a web store with a couple messaging servers nobody uses.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:39
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I think the other issue here is there isn't a 1 stop VTT, so like it's gonna be hard to convince everyone to chip in x per year/month/whatever every time you want to play a game on a new platform. That's also why Toshimo is correct that the D&D official VTT will cut into the competition regardless of quality. Why pay anything more for VTT or roll20 pro when you already paid that for D&D's app? Especially when the D&D app already has all the materials you digitally purchased from WotC and now you'll need to rebuy them. That's also where the roll20 and drivethru merger makes sense, since they can add some value by potentially combining some licenses -at least going forward.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:43
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The Lancer character creator is still the best one I've seen.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:46
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Also like the main games people play are DM driven in 5e and PF. And if they aren't then yeah just give players the assistant GM role or add permissions and don't let them see or do anything you don't want them to. I do like that Beyond allows players to dick around on their own. But they also have to spend money on it or use my library. Which costs a sub price to beyond too. But yeah it really just seems like there is no good answer for that Outside of just giving your players access to what you want them to also be able to do as far as creating characters and dragging things onto sheets. Like I let my players handle their own items and character generation and allow them to drag stuff from the various compendiums. Edit: Yeah Comp/con loving slaps. It and Beyond are probably the reasons I was able to get some of my friends to even look at playing 5e/Lancer because they made it like actually fun to put together a character for "normies" Dexo fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 19:47
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Coolness Averted posted:I think the other issue here is there isn't a 1 stop VTT, so like it's gonna be hard to convince everyone to chip in x per year/month/whatever every time you want to play a game on a new platform. That's also why Toshimo is correct that the D&D official VTT will cut into the competition regardless of quality. Why pay anything more for VTT or roll20 pro when you already paid that for D&D's app? Especially when the D&D app already has all the materials you digitally purchased from WotC and now you'll need to rebuy them. I don't play 5E but I think Foundry already imports from D&DBeyond.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:51
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alg posted:I don't play 5E but I think Foundry already imports from D&DBeyond. There's a module that does it. I think I'm done running 5e games but it was why I still have a D&D beyond sub to allow my friends to create a character based off of the books that I own there.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:54
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Taking the same character to different games/tables is also a niche need and not very common outside of organized play, which is a very small subset of TTRPG players.
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Jul 18, 2022 20:04
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Toshimo posted:For any given game, on aggregate, you have many more players than DMs. These are your customer base. Both Foundry and R20 are incredibly DM-driven: They revolve around the notion that there is a DM who is the Primary User and the players are merely clients. Often, core features are locked behind DM permissions, and the DM is expected to be the hand-holder. Overall, I agree with this. I don't think i've ever seen a monetization model for VTTs that's really convenient when making it player focused (telling someone they need to purchase X before they can play is a pretty big hurdle when recruiting new players), but I do think having a model that doesn't rely on one person doing all of the heavy lifting would be a net boon for the VTT. Character import/export functionality and having a 'training ground' where you can (as a player) a) learn the VTT and how to utilize its automated processes and b) test out your own scripts against dummy targets would be a huge boon to whatever VTT decides to adopt it. I would probably consider it more important than import/export because if a player is already familiar with how to target and use their powers properly then that cuts down on a lot of troubleshooting time in-game.
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Jul 18, 2022 20:07
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Justin posted:Mr. Simpson [owner of TTCombat] opens his public statement by saying that he has not read the statements that he is responding to. That’s a weird flex, but I guess it was too difficult for him to read, so away we go… Found a juicy string of wargame hobby industry drama. Secret Weapon Miniatures and TTCombat (Carnevale, Rumbleslam, Droplfeet Commander, Dropzone Commander) are fueding publicly with increasingly unbusinesslike language over what is either a failed licensing or acquisition deal, depending on who you believe. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/secretweapon/hd-bases-by-secret-weapon-miniatures-0/posts/3520768 - wherein, SWG says they can't find buyers for their company because TTC is claiming they have a license deal with them. https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/06/10/secret-weapon-statement/ - TTC says this is all Justin's [SWG owner] fault for paying himself a living wage and taking a vacation that year, and closes with TTC posted:Safe to say we wish that we had never crossed paths with Justin McCoy. Fightin' words detected. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/secretweapon/hd-bases-by-secret-weapon-miniatures-0/posts/3551096 - Justin breaks out the receipts and gushes. TTC posted:Are there any KPIs in place, i.e. how much retail product does each member create each hour/day? (We expect staff here to make as a minimum $200 per hour RRP of retail product... ). Justin posted:Not only did I spend my “vacation” running TTC promotions every day, I kept a daily work log at the request of Louis Simpson, in an app he instructed me to install on my phone, so that he could see what I was doing every day. Still, it was a nice change of scenery. I've always suspected TTC of running a miserable sweatshop of a company. https://community.ttcombat.com/2022/07/08/secret-weapon-update/ - An angry facebook post of a response that both claims to refute the previous post but also... TTC posted:I have been made aware of another pack of lies posted by Justin McCoy of Secret Weapon Miniatures. I honestly will not waste my time reading it and hope to make our response far easier for interested parties to read. Counter-receipts, but if I'm reading them correctly, they don't refute much of anything at all. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/secretweapon/hd-bases-by-secret-weapon-miniatures-0/posts/3552900 - The most recent update, and where the top quote comes from. Justin brings out even more evidence and contradicts TTC on a line-by-line basis. My experience with TTC is exclusively through their publication of Dropship and Dropfleet Commander, wherein they've hosed up the rules, proved incapable of performing basic editing or proofreading (or solid command of the English language), and before they banned me from their facebook community groups for 'being overly critical of the brand, would you walk into a grocery store and tell people the produce sucks and act surprised when you're asked to leave?', every interaction with the owners and senior staff of TTC leads me to believe Justin. I look forward to watching how this continues to play out with bated breath and steaming popcorn. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 20:11
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piL posted:All of this reminds me of an idea I had rolling in my head off and on for a decade or so--ive wondered how long it will be until a tabletop system emerges that is principle designed for online play, vice emulating an actual tabletop. Sometimes I feel like pathfinder 2e is this system. I play it in Foundry and so much of the work is handled by the pf2e module it's amazing. We're also now playing in the official Abomination Vaults module which has been extremely impressive. I honestly don't know if I'd play pf2e without Foundry help in the future, I feel like so much of the work is built in.
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Jul 18, 2022 21:11
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^^^ Along those lines, I've looked at Punks in a powderkeg, and the first party module is loving fantastic. All the little fiddly stuff is done for you, it's great.
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Jul 18, 2022 21:25
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Yeah I suppose so. I haven't played pathfinder 2e, and it's been years since I've played pathfinder at all, but I played the video game version and was started st thr complexity. I forgot how many neurons I've devotes to this hobby. I'm mostly thinking about difficult to math/audit stuff like a life path system or systems that are complex or frustrating to adjudicate, like hit locations. I could see a modern vtt designed system providing dwarf fortress level hit location fidelity providing super fun moments for players
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Jul 18, 2022 21:41
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piL posted:All of this reminds me of an idea I had rolling in my head off and on for a decade or so--ive wondered how long it will be until a tabletop system emerges that is principle designed for online play, vice emulating an actual tabletop. One More Multiverse is in open beta right now and this is one of their design goals. Whether they stick the landing remains to be seen.
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Jul 18, 2022 23:47
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wizzardstaff posted:One More Multiverse is in open beta right now and this is one of their design goals. Whether they stick the landing remains to be seen. Is One More a phone typo for Marvel?
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Jul 19, 2022 00:37
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CitizenKeen posted:Is One More a phone typo for Marvel? Not unless the VTT is secretly backed by Disney but I feel like they would have put that on the Kickstarter disclosure.
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Jul 19, 2022 00:46
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The GM pays talk reminds me of Hero Lab. For a long while, it had an “extra machine” license option which let you activate the software on an extra machine, with all your add-ons. When they “upgraded” to Hero Lab Online, they removed this option and were inundated with requests to have it back so that a GM could share their license with players. They clarified that the extra machine option was never intended for this, but eventually relented - but only by adding a cheap “apprentice” subscription, which could only gain access by being given it by a “patron” subscription. Then Pathbuilder ate it whole. But the fundamental model of the GM having to be both the facilitator and the initiator is kinda weird and busted and is going to be a pain to sell into.
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Jul 19, 2022 01:29
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Slyphic posted:Found a juicy string of wargame hobby industry drama. Secret Weapon Miniatures and TTCombat (Carnevale, Rumbleslam, Droplfeet Commander, Dropzone Commander) are fueding publicly with increasingly unbusinesslike language over what is either a failed licensing or acquisition deal, depending on who you believe. What were you saying on their facebook page that got you banned? Were you literally like "this game is loving poo poo, go play 40k" or what?
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Jul 19, 2022 05:51
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