I've been using roll20 for awhile off and on, and am looking to move away from it.
Here's my list of needs:
1- Wouldn't make the red list in the Most Famous Thread On The Internet.
2- Needs to run in a browser, or be plausibly cross platform enough to run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, ios, Android.
3- Can't charge my players to log in and play in the game I run (it can, of course, bill me)
And my nice-to-haves:
4- I'd love to be able to export my data or save it offline, including icons and maps. When I unsubscribe from roll20 I'll probably lose access to my old maps, so I'll just take screenshots in case I want to recreate them later, but I have never liked lock-ins like this.
What is everyone here rocking?
I use Owlbear Rodeo for maps and tokens and Discord/Zoom for voice/video.
Owlbear Rodeo is pretty minimal and doesn't get in the way. Maps, tokens, fog of war, and dice roller. No character sheets. It runs in the browser and is super easy to use and is very fast and responsive. It's free and there's a Patreon. I haven't seen anything to suggest they are red list.
Owlbear Rodeo is the only one I've looked into a bit actually, and it seems that it's moving to a subscription-only service, and will be ending support for what it now calls "Owlbear Rodeo 1.0" completely. Meanwhile, I'm not clear on how to get started with "Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 beta" or anything. I did notice that there's some way to export from "Owlbear Rodeo 1.0", but it doesn't appear to be active with the 2.0 beta? It's hard to find information because that one is moving so fast right now.
Owlbear Rodeo ticks a lot of the boxes.
You can export your data to a file if you wish to back it up or move it.
The game is run from a browser window for both players and GM.
2.0 is in beta now - go to https://www.owlbear.app/
You can create a free account and run and play games for free with the 2.0. There is a subscription tier that adds stuff (not exactly sure what) but the basics are free.
If you use 1.0, there is a way to export your files in import them into 2.0. There is some info on their blog at https://blog.owlbear.rodeo/
There is also a VTT called Role that might suit your needs - https://www.playrole.com/ - It's browser based.
Lastly there is Shard, which is D&D 5e only - https://play.shardtabletop.com/
I play mostly with Roll20, but have been fooling around with Owlbear and Role. The game I'm playing in for Castles and Crusades is Roll20, when I start my own game soon, I'm probably going to use Owlbear Rodeo with Discord.
Owlbear Rodeo for all the reasons stated in the previous three posts.
I've used both Fantasy Grounds and Foundry, both of which I've found to be solid, but FG is a client-based solution and has I think only Windows and Mac clients, so that narrows it down. Foundry's a one-time buy, which I like, but you have to actually host it either on a local computer or on a server somewhere, so there may be an ongoing cost for people who don't have the means to run a web server out of their house. That aside, it has a really busy community making modules and systems for it and a great deal of support, and is not run by assholes like the roll20 crowd. Nobody on the dev team has made any particular political noise that I'm aware of, left or right, which suits me just fine.
Quote from: Valatar on August 02, 2022, 10:39:35 PM
I've used both Fantasy Grounds and Foundry, both of which I've found to be solid, but FG is a client-based solution and has I think only Windows and Mac clients, so that narrows it down. Foundry's a one-time buy, which I like, but you have to actually host it either on a local computer or on a server somewhere, so there may be an ongoing cost for people who don't have the means to run a web server out of their house. That aside, it has a really busy community making modules and systems for it and a great deal of support, and is not run by assholes like the roll20 crowd. Nobody on the dev team has made any particular political noise that I'm aware of, left or right, which suits me just fine.
Actually FG Unity (the new version) is for PC, Mac and Linux and is really easy to use and the automation is great I loved the older version but I really love the improvements in the new one and cannot recommend it enough.
If the GM/DM has the ultimate version, then players can play for free using the demo version.
Shmeppy also meets your requirements. It's very minimal, much more so than Owlbear. I think I might like it better.
Quote from: GhostNinja on August 03, 2022, 10:06:26 AM
Actually FG Unity (the new version) is for PC, Mac and Linux and is really easy to use and the automation is great I loved the older version but I really love the improvements in the new one and cannot recommend it enough.
If the GM/DM has the ultimate version, then players can play for free using the demo version.
Yeah, FG is perfectly good, if possessing of a slightly steep learning curve. I'd recommend it if not for Venka requesting something compatible with iOS and Android.
We've been using Foundry to play 5e for the past 7 months, and it's pretty good for what it does.
What it does, at least with 5e, is a bit much for my tastes. It expects that you're going to have the entire game rules programmed into it, and that requires a lot of faffing around to use rule variants. It wants to track encumbrance for you, and that requires a lot of creating objects on the server for every piece of gear that could enter the game. It wants to handle all the monsters for you, but that requires that you set up all the monster gear and special abilities formally for your rule system - no winging it. Since the game displays the full rules text for any ability anyone uses, you have to type a lot to reskin the canonical bear.
One of my players said it made D&D too much like a video game for their taste; he spends a long time hunting around through menus to find the right button. (This particular player has been in around 30 hours of games over those 7 months, he isn't a total novice.) We used Owlbear Rodeo 1 all last year; the same player said the experience was "describe what I want to do, maybe roll a die, maybe make some notes on the character sheet" - closer to face-to-face tabletop, and more what he's looking for.
What I might do next campaign is keep using Foundry, but only for maps, tokens, and visibility. The automatic visibility is *nice*. But I think Owlbear Rodeo 2 may be adding in visibility support?
I've used Roll20 and FantasyGrounds. Both are pretty good. In general though, unless playing a game where the game map is necessary, the only thing you need is being able to show a group a map, images, and text -- That can be accomplished with pretty much any teleconferencing tool these days.
Quote from: Zelen on August 03, 2022, 08:09:55 PM
I've used Roll20 and FantasyGrounds. Both are pretty good. In general though, unless playing a game where the game map is necessary, the only thing you need is
I need an interactive crossplatform shared map that has tokens, hand vector drawsings, and hex grids. I'll mostly be using it for 5ed, 3.5, and hopefully some OSR stuff.
I followed Hackmaster's link to https://www.owlbear.app/ , and created an account. At this point, I created a "room" (a game), and free accounts are limited to "basic rooms" (there's custom rooms as well when you subscribe). Then I created a scene (this is a superset of their map function). Then I couldn't zoom, and a google result pointed me to a year old thread complaining that there was no way to zoom without a mouse wheel or touchscreen, so I plugged in a mouse and zoom worked great.
Unfortunately, everything so far has been kind of like this- because 2.0 is still in beta, searching up anything doesn't work, and the UI is not exactly super for me. I don't see how to color the background (I can place an image down, that part is good, but I normally set the background to some appropriate color when in roll20), and I can't find the option to change the background grid to hex mode (I use hex maps sometimes), though I can find people saying that is a feature in 1.0. Maybe I should have mentioned hex in my original post- I kind of thought that was a standard but the popularity of square grids may have made it optional in the community these days.
This thread has been great so far, and I'll play with the other options as I have time. Thanks everyone!
Quote from: Valatar on August 03, 2022, 03:36:30 PM
Yeah, FG is perfectly good, if possessing of a slightly steep learning curve. I'd recommend it if not for Venka requesting something compatible with iOS and Android.
I disagree with it having a steep learning curve as I have had plenty of novices use it without issue. But I missed the part about IOS and Android.
Quote from: Hackmaster on August 02, 2022, 06:52:58 PM
Owlbear Rodeo ticks a lot of the boxes.
You can export your data to a file if you wish to back it up or move it.
The game is run from a browser window for both players and GM.
2.0 is in beta now - go to https://www.owlbear.app/
You can create a free account and run and play games for free with the 2.0. There is a subscription tier that adds stuff (not exactly sure what) but the basics are free.
If you use 1.0, there is a way to export your files in import them into 2.0. There is some info on their blog at https://blog.owlbear.rodeo/
There is also a VTT called Role that might suit your needs - https://www.playrole.com/ - It's browser based.
<snip>.
Role looks pretty good. They just recently released a feature video that explains how one can integrate D&D Beyond if 5e is your thing, but I like that one can use other games as well (custom sheets etc.).
Embed a screen-share in Role of Owlbear, and one has a pretty tidy solution with Video/Audio chat capabilities.
I'll have to look more into Role: thanks for bringing it up.
I like Foundry versatility and the sheer amount of systems and modules, but it might be overkill and the whole server Port setup, Raspberry PI whatever.
There's going to be more options for 5e, due to its presence in the hobby market. The free Chrome plug-in
AboveVTT may be worth checking out: it integrates Beyond and a MAP GUI and other things, with the ability to generate tokens and anything else from Beyond. It's a pretty amazing enhancement for no extra cost.
Quote from: Venka on August 04, 2022, 09:12:51 AM
Quote from: Zelen on August 03, 2022, 08:09:55 PM
I've used Roll20 and FantasyGrounds. Both are pretty good. In general though, unless playing a game where the game map is necessary, the only thing you need is
I need an interactive crossplatform shared map that has tokens, hand vector drawsings, and hex grids. I'll mostly be using it for 5ed, 3.5, and hopefully some OSR stuff.
I followed Hackmaster's link to https://www.owlbear.app/ , and created an account. At this point, I created a "room" (a game), and free accounts are limited to "basic rooms" (there's custom rooms as well when you subscribe). Then I created a scene (this is a superset of their map function). Then I couldn't zoom, and a google result pointed me to a year old thread complaining that there was no way to zoom without a mouse wheel or touchscreen, so I plugged in a mouse and zoom worked great.
Unfortunately, everything so far has been kind of like this- because 2.0 is still in beta, searching up anything doesn't work, and the UI is not exactly super for me. I don't see how to color the background (I can place an image down, that part is good, but I normally set the background to some appropriate color when in roll20), and I can't find the option to change the background grid to hex mode (I use hex maps sometimes), though I can find people saying that is a feature in 1.0. Maybe I should have mentioned hex in my original post- I kind of thought that was a standard but the popularity of square grids may have made it optional in the community these days.
This thread has been great so far, and I'll play with the other options as I have time. Thanks everyone!
Owlbear v1 still works and it's a well-oiled machine, not beta. Yeah, it will probably be dropped at some point, but it looks like they will support an import function to v2. I'm planning to use v1 until it stops working.
www.owlbear.rodeo
More info: v1 will be operational for an indeterminate amount of time until v2 is fully done, and then v1 will be open sourced so still usable if you want to host it:
https://blog.owlbear.rodeo/owlbear-rodeo-2-0-timeline-update/
That's a pretty decent gesture, open sourcing Owlbear 1.0 at some point.
While Roll20 may be behind the times as far as its GUI, arguably it's biggest draw for me is the searchable looking for game option. If one does not have an established group, due to lack of local players, or just wants a quick pick-up game, that's a huge plus in my book.
One could always get the players they like there, and then move them over to something else to use I guess? heh
Yea if Owlbear Rodeo 1.0 goes open source at some point, that's great. One thing I liked about it when I read up on it before was the aggressive client-side stuff. If your team was serious about it and used firefox, it seemed like you'd be almost guaranteed to have full functionality, and if you all used a VPN then many of the "we block this kind of upload" stuff would also go away, as it was ISP-side. You'd still need a coherent way of doing stuff though, and it looks like the big reason they even moved to 2.0 was because they ended up having to do much of the work as peer-to-peer was blocked by an ISP, and of course, that's not something normal people can detect or debug. They even detail the problems that Chrome and Safari have, as only Firefox supports the standards for storing client-side data.
Either way, that's all nice and fine, but Owlbear 2.0 is probably what I want to use. The lower right has a little button which says "5 foot", which is actually all grid-related settings. You can change it to either hex type there, or change it to squares, and modify the look of the grid itself, so that it is more visible over any images you have imported.
I still don't see how to change the base background color from the dark blue/gray default though.
As far as recruiting people from roll20- I had no idea people met and formed games on roll20. If I am looking for players online, which one day I might be, I'd probably use a discord for a specific setting (ex: the Hyperborea discord) or a forum that selects for players I'd want, such as this one. But maybe I'd be missing out, I have no idea. Either way, I want to move away from roll20 as soon as I can, if possible, so I can never give them another penny.
Astral is another VTT app. I haven't used it, but it might be worth checking out. Claims to have free forever option (with enhanced features for subs). Though I have to say I'm partial to FG for having a pay-once-forever option. I've got enough subscriptions.
I did my normal search for <thing> "black lives matter" and got this:
https://www.astraltabletop.com/whats-new/2020-06-05
(by contrast, Shard Tabletop seems to only have some mild advocacy and those silly X-card equivalents, Smiteworks seems to do politics that isn't culture war related, and neither Foundry nor Owlbear Rodeo seem to have any politics- I didn't check Shmeppy or PlayRole)
That's pretty minor as these things go, but if there's options that will work for me and don't do this stuff, I'll try to use them.
I will still get to checking out the other things in this thread though. I suspect at this point Owlbear Rodeo will work, but I'll still try to dig into the others a bit- or at least the ones that could meet my other requirements.