The D&D thread

Arden said:

How are you liking Foundry? Im on roll20 but was considered switching.

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It is the best $50 you will ever spend in your life. Roll20 is a shitfest of bugs, lag, inconvenient tools, ugliness, and rigidity. Foundry has stable releases, is as fast as the machine you host it on, a variety of useful tools that are much more efficient than Roll20's counterparts, a crisp, beautiful UI (that includes TABBING FOR FILLING OUT CHARACTER/NPC SHEETS), and is completely modular, boasting thousands of community made mods to add functionality to the core Foundry platform.

Depending on your system, you may have to purchase compendiums from the Roll20 marketplace in order to help streamline adding content to your game in Roll20 (such as creatures from a Bestiary). In Foundry, those compendiums are FREE. (At least, for Pathfinder 2e they are, which is what I run.)

Kriptini said:

It is the best $50 you will ever spend in your life. Roll20 is a shitfest of bugs, lag, inconvenient tools, ugliness, and rigidity. Foundry has stable releases, is as fast as the machine you host it on, a variety of useful tools that are much more efficient than Roll20's counterparts, a crisp, beautiful UI (that includes TABBING FOR FILLING OUT CHARACTER/NPC SHEETS), and is completely modular, boasting thousands of community made mods to add functionality to the core Foundry platform.

Depending on your system, you may have to purchase compendiums from the Roll20 marketplace in order to help streamline adding content to your game in Roll20 (such as creatures from a Bestiary). In Foundry, those compendiums are FREE. (At least, for Pathfinder 2e they are, which is what I run.)

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Yeah, I watched the vid Dashel posted earlier and it looks pretty great. I'm going to give it a shot I think. One question though:

I designed my own system and I'm playtesting it with a group. Roll20 has enough flexibility that I can use a custom system with it, but is Foundry the same way? I'm not limited to only already-established systems am I?

You can develop your own custom system in Foundry using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. If you're looking for a "sandbox" kind of system with editable parameters that don't require you to write code, I'm not sure if that exists, but it's the type of thing that may have been developed by the community as a mod or a system.

Kriptini said:

You can develop your own custom system in Foundry using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. If you're looking for a "sandbox" kind of system with editable parameters that don't require you to write code, I'm not sure if that exists, but it's the type of thing that may have been developed by the community as a mod or a system.

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I can't code for shit, unfortunately, but I'm sure there are youtubes out there that might cover how to do that kind of thing in Foundry.

Kriptini said:

It is the best $50 you will ever spend in your life. Roll20 is a shitfest of bugs, lag, inconvenient tools, ugliness, and rigidity. Foundry has stable releases, is as fast as the machine you host it on, a variety of useful tools that are much more efficient than Roll20's counterparts, a crisp, beautiful UI (that includes TABBING FOR FILLING OUT CHARACTER/NPC SHEETS), and is completely modular, boasting thousands of community made mods to add functionality to the core Foundry platform.

Depending on your system, you may have to purchase compendiums from the Roll20 marketplace in order to help streamline adding content to your game in Roll20 (such as creatures from a Bestiary). In Foundry, those compendiums are FREE. (At least, for Pathfinder 2e they are, which is what I run.)

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Going from fantasy grounds to foundry vtt is like going from roll20 to fantasy grounds. Once the initial teething problems you have are sorted out you'll wonder why you waited so long.

DirkDonkeyroot said:

Going from fantasy grounds to foundry vtt is like going from roll20 to fantasy grounds. Once the initial teething problems you have are sorted out you'll wonder why you waited so long.

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This is a genuine question (seriously, zero patronization) -- Do you really feel Foundry is that much better than FG? If so, why? Does Foundry have the same level of rules automation as FG? With the right extensions, there's very little that isn't auto-calculated and applied. Though the 'calculations' almost always require some set-up.

I love FG, but at times, it DEFINITELY has issues that make me want to smash my computer. For one, the UI looks and functions as well as something I'd expect from a Computer Science Senior. The second major gripe is being forced to purchase features from modders that should be incorporated in the base program. The last is being almost forced to learn another language to automate combat, checks, conditions, etc.

However, the platform has exploded in popularity and, now that Unity is live, there are a ton of upgrades in the pipeline. I know several of the projects are going to address many of my concerns but which and how quickly...I have no idea.

*Late edit*
I've noticed that FG seems to be the least played major VTT and though I can't put my finger on it, there almost seems to be some unspoken rule among all the woke idiots that play D&D to never mention FG. Is there some original sin associated with FG or something or is the program just harder to use and thus the audience is smaller?

*Second edit*
Just saw that Foundry supports animated battlemaps and character/monster tokens......super fucking jealous....that alone makes me want to spin it up just to play around with it, but goddamn I have almost $500 invested in FGU just from the license, extensions, and the few mods I've actually purchased (I have like 260+ pirated =P).

Yeah Foundry is definitely better in all aspects when it comes to the platform itself. Yes it is either on par or very close to FG in terms of automation. It might even be more advanced. The paladin in my group has an aura around him that triggers when players are within 10 feet of him automatically for example. Like the tokens glow and light up in real time similar to a video game. It's very cool. I dont think FG can do that, but maybe it can. The AE spells are animated and auto calculate damage. Eldrich blasts fire out of the warlocks hands and hit targets. Animated tokens is another example, you can pull any gif into Foundry and make it a token. This is all free not a paid special mod.

Then there is music and sound, which I don't even remember if thats in FG? I have playlists in Foundry, I can set music or sounds to play when players open a door or approach an area. I can have combat music on loop and switch to more ambient sounds when they are traveling... I pulled in Skyrim music for that, it's great.

Showing images is easier, adding anything to the game is easier.

Speed is much better, much more accessible with just Chrome browser instead of a client to run.

The ONE thing I really miss about FG, and maybe foundry does this now and I just don't know, is FG had modules where they'd prep the encounters on the maps. You can click and all the monsters are ready, populate on the map and are ready to go. Along with their loot ready to be delivered in parcels. i loved that as DM.

RE Woke people... I vaguely remember some sjw accusations for one of these platforms. I didn't care about them. I thought Roll20 looked like crap so I went with FG initially. Then we saw Foundry and made the leap.

Foundry has come leaps and bounds since I jumped over a year ago, so the learning curve might have eased up a lot. But it's definitely superior. It's also like 50 bucks so you can try for little investment, especially if you have DND Beyond stuff already.

What my dude here said. I hadn't logged in for a few months, since my gaming has been in person for a while, so I needes a whole bunch of updates behind and needed to get reaquainted with the program before I answered Grabbit. Dashel is correct, it's just all around better. Also, there's an import from 5etools that goes by the name of Plutonium, I'm not sure if it's currently up to date though.

Dashel said:

Yeah Foundry is definitely better in all aspects when it comes to the platform itself. Yes it is either on par or very close to FG in terms of automation. It might even be more advanced. The paladin in my group has an aura around him that triggers when players are within 10 feet of him automatically for example. Like the tokens glow and light up in real time similar to a video game. It's very cool. I dont think FG can do that, but maybe it can. The AE spells are animated and auto calculate damage. Eldrich blasts fire out of the warlocks hands and hit targets. Animated tokens is another example, you can pull any gif into Foundry and make it a token. This is all free not a paid special mod.

Then there is music and sound, which I don't even remember if thats in FG? I have playlists in Foundry, I can set music or sounds to play when players open a door or approach an area. I can have combat music on loop and switch to more ambient sounds when they are traveling... I pulled in Skyrim music for that, it's great.

Showing images is easier, adding anything to the game is easier.

Speed is much better, much more accessible with just Chrome browser instead of a client to run.

The ONE thing I really miss about FG, and maybe foundry does this now and I just don't know, is FG had modules where they'd prep the encounters on the maps. You can click and all the monsters are ready, populate on the map and are ready to go. Along with their loot ready to be delivered in parcels. i loved that as DM.

RE Woke people... I vaguely remember some sjw accusations for one of these platforms. I didn't care about them. I thought Roll20 looked like crap so I went with FG initially. Then we saw Foundry and made the leap.

Foundry has come leaps and bounds since I jumped over a year ago, so the learning curve might have eased up a lot. But it's definitely superior. It's also like 50 bucks so you can try for little investment, especially if you have DND Beyond stuff already.

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FG doesn't have any sound built-in right now, but it's on the short list. However, Syrinscape has a mod that allows you to run their entire sound library in conjunction with FGU.

Apart from a few basic effects like rain, fog, snow, 'underwater blur,' and a couple others, animation doesn't exist. Many are planned, but who knows wtf they'll be or when they'll happen.

Effects like auras following players around do exist, but they require two separate, paid mods running in conjunction.

Since my post earlier, I've watched an hour of various YouTube videos about Foundry and it looks really, really attractive. The animated spells, tokens, maps, etc all really do it for me. Also, that Token Attacher mod really scratches my creative itch. It empowers people to really explore their creativity and allows people to do things that I have been attempting to do in FG with the anemic effects package.

As attractive as Foundry is I still really like where I'm at with FGU. Maybe it's because I have a billion mods installed and the platform is so far from baseline it's almost a new client, or maybe it's the fact that I'm finally starting to feel like I understand how it works. Maybe some of both /shrug.

I'll probably mess around with Foundry for fun, but I don't think I have the time OR the energy to learn to DM on an entirely new platform after burning the candle on both ends for weeks trying to power-learn FGU.

And about the woke stuff, I know Roll20 had some dumb shit going on a few years ago when the creator/founder or whatever made some stupid comments about how he didn't need any more "white people" to use Roll20 or something ridiculous like that. His comments caused a huge uproar and a number of high-profile D&D YouTubers jumped ship to other VTTs. However, FG wasn't involved in that at all as far as I know. And FG being 'hush hush' around the woke-tards is really what I'm curious about. I wonder if FG is where those former Roll20 YouTubers ended up and the defection caused semi-quiet boycott.

**Edit, added video** I remembered Cody made a video about it.

Seananigans said:

I'm of a similar mind on Foundry, minus the sunk cost issue. I've spent plenty of time and money on FG(U), but not condensed in the immediate term like Grabbit.

My first questions that come to mind would be:
-As a DM, how friendly is the interface for having as much info at you fingertips (ideally open and visible) as possible? Being browser-based, I can only imagine it's limited to one screen. I use 2 screens in FG and that's still not enough, I wish I had a third.
-Being browser-based, is this data hosted by Foundry and all players and the DM log into their server for access? Such that a service outage on THEIR end can end the session? And such that you're at the mercy of their data storage for your entire campaign? Or is it peer-to-peer like FG?

FG is great, but they really suck ass at designing good UI, and the frustration often gets to me. I'll admit, Foundry is looking mighty enticing, especially considering I'm at a point in the campaign I'm running where I'm creating homebrew anyway (as opposed to pre-gen module content that FG is good for).

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Roll 20 is browser based and you can have as many pop outs open as you want on as many screens as you want.

Is there any official WotC DnD art page anywhere similar to this for MtG: MTG ART - The Art of Magic: the Gathering
Or anyplace I can get art from them digitally?

Grabbit Allworth said:

This is a genuine question (seriously, zero patronization) -- Do you really feel Foundry is that much better than FG? If so, why? Does Foundry have the same level of rules automation as FG? With the right extensions, there's very little that isn't auto-calculated and applied. Though the 'calculations' almost always require some set-up.

Click to expand...

I can only speak from my experience with the Pathfinder 2e system on Foundry, but its automation is *almost* as good as FG. Seriously, it's very close, and you can add additional automation into Foundry on your own through the use of rules elements which are simple to learn an understand. Also, when Paizo releases new source books for classes, items, spells, etc., all of that content hits Foundry the same day instead of needing to wait for the content to be ported (and having to pay for that new content, too).

Grabbit Allworth said:

I love FG, but at times, it DEFINITELY has issues that make me want to smash my computer. For one, the UI looks and functions as well as something I'd expect from a Computer Science Senior. The second major gripe is being forced to purchase features from modders that should be incorporated in the base program. The last is being almost forced to learn another language to automate combat, checks, conditions, etc.

However, the platform has exploded in popularity and, now that Unity is live, there are a ton of upgrades in the pipeline. I know several of the projects are going to address many of my concerns but which and how quickly...I have no idea.

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99% of all Foundry systems and mods are free. There is a very small section of "premium" content but it pales in comparison to the sheer amount of free functionality available from community mods. Since my purchase of the Foundry, I've gotten the Pathfinder 2e system and all content from all released books from it, as well as tons of mods and maps for free. (Yes, they even have an impressive selection of free, ready-to-go battlemaps.)

Grabbit Allworth said:

*Second edit*
Just saw that Foundry supports animated battlemaps and character/monster tokens......super fucking jealous....that alone makes me want to spin it up just to play around with it, but goddamn I have almost $500 invested in FGU just from the license, extensions, and the few mods I've actually purchased (I have like 260+ pirated =P).

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Let me put it to you like this. You can spend another $500+ by continuing to purchase assets in FGU over another X years of using it as your VTT, or you can spend $50 in Foundry to get all of the same stuff for one price that will never ask more from you over the years.

Seananigans said:

My first questions that come to mind would be:
-As a DM, how friendly is the interface for having as much info at you fingertips (ideally open and visible) as possible? Being browser-based, I can only imagine it's limited to one screen. I use 2 screens in FG and that's still not enough, I wish I had a third.

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The Foundry host client (which is NOT browser-based) only allows you to have one screen open, but you can create dummy users to connect to your own game and open it on multiple windows to display however much information you want.

Seananigans said:

-Being browser-based, is this data hosted by Foundry and all players and the DM log into their server for access? Such that a service outage on THEIR end can end the session? And such that you're at the mercy of their data storage for your entire campaign? Or is it peer-to-peer like FG?

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Your choice. I host off of my local machine, (and setting it up was really easy,) but there are also reasonably-priced third party hosting options available.

For anyone interested in what building a homebrew battlemap looks like in Foundry, I have a recording of a stream I did for a buddy on how to do it. The system used in the video is Pathfinder 2e but the principles should apply to building maps in any system.

I decided to give Foundry a shot and while there is definitely a learning curve involved (and the system I want to use is still in active development) I am very impressed with what it can do compared to Roll20.

Qhue said:

I decided to give Foundry a shot and while there is definitely a learning curve involved (and the system I want to use is still in active development) I am very impressed with what it can do compared to Roll20.

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I think the last few pages has inspired a lot of behind-the-scenes conversation (I know it has in my circle) and you're not the only one seriously considering taking a stab at Foundry.

The support from the community sealed it for me. Already made a map that has animated full color lighting, locked doors, triggers that auto-pause the game when a PC steps on an area, and directional sound that has definitive origin points on the map.

It feels like what an online tabletop game platform should be. Not just a digital version of paper but a real augmented system.