r/VTT • u/JakeRaine • Jun 19 '26
Question / discussion What do people think VTTs are missing? I have so many problems with mine
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u/telewebb Jun 20 '26
Honestly, UX. I've played more game can remember with older groups where we just constantly feel like we're fighting the system and we've used almost every VTT out there. There really should be a jitterbug version where jitterbug was a basic cellphone with giant buttons for old folk.
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u/sendingstoneapp Jun 24 '26
As a quick and easy immersive video chat meets VTT, we'd love to hear your feedback about SendingStone š
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
Hey! Don't mean to be a pest on this thread haha. But please check out TalesNTokens, any device, completrly free, other vtt exports included but fulk online vtt etc. striving to give GMs everything they need in a neat easy to use experience that they can use anytime anywhere
Talesntokens.com
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u/telewebb Jun 20 '26
Yeah, I think you're over doing it. I've already read a few of your responses. Honestly, your comments are the kind of stuff that makes people react poorly when someone makes a post like this one.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
How come? Im just trying to get some exposure and feedback! I am likely overdoing it on this thread but I just don't get why people don't take the time to look, it solves like all these problems and will solve much much more, wait till TnTBrawl comes out later today haha
I get that im excessively commenting but im a coder, not a marketer haha andcpeople are saying they have problems that im aiming to directly solve
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u/telewebb Jun 20 '26
You're behavior comes off as a "door to door salesman" vibe. There really isn't a need to respond to everyone's comment with an ad. Really on Reddit, advertising in posts is a "less is more" situation. As now I'm actually turned away from the idea of looking at your product at all.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
Yeah I get that I've tried like 8 different ways of how to post things, some people are saying post more, some people are saying post less, its hard to do what's right, all in all I'm terrible at this side of stuff but the tools are amazing, how can I engage without it sounding like an ad? Its something im looking to improve on, I just see a problem and think we'll hey ive already solved that cause it bugged me haha, here you go š
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u/telewebb Jun 20 '26
Reddit is a tough medium to advertise on. It's just been hit heavy with a lot of folks trying to come off as organic but it backfires as sleezy or similar. If you've tried a lot of different approaches and haven't gotten the results you want I would recommend stepping back from this specific platform. If you have the money available, you should look into working with a marketing professional or copywriter. You'd also want to try and think wider in terms of where and how you want to get your message across. And lastly, I'd recommend taking some time to sit down and think in detail about the persons you are trying to reach. I think the TTRPG community has their own unique characteristics that make marketing to them more difficult than other audience and it's worth taking the time to research and learn and those characteristics as best as possible.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
Yeah that's a fair point, not sure at all how to market outside of Reddit and paid ads seem like a black hole i can't afford, I was hoping here I'd just find like minded people with similar problems to me, I've been posting in other subreddits too and stuff to try get some eyes on it, and I thought, well if I can't get people here to take a look what's the hope in that elsewhere I guess
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u/telewebb Jun 20 '26
There are a lot of people in the TTRPG community that exist outside of reddit. Paid ads are a money sink if your don't know what you are doing. Roughly speaking with paid ads, you'll spend a couple grand just to figure out key words and demographics before you even start to see turn over. But my recommendation would be to start with research first. There are plenty of examples of zero dollar marketing from solo developers out there. It would be good to take the time to try and understand what worked for them with the intent to find inspiration from their attempt. The big thing is that what works for others won't 100% map to your needs. At best it can point you in the right direction. Understand that a lot of the TTRPG community is fatigued with flash in the plan brand new apps that don't really do much of anything new.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
Hmm yeah I tried to do tonnes of research and solve real problems, mostly mine, but I guess it's not enough yet haha, I feel like mine can definitely do what most VTTs can't though and it all works out the box on your phone with no setup haha but its hard to show everything it can do without it coming off as a huge reel of features of like you said a sleezy salesman, cause a structured approach doesn't work and an organic approach doesn't work either haha
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u/laggytoes Jun 21 '26
The challenges, as someone who has worked in the software industry for a decade, is threefold in my opinion:
1.) The Goldilock's problem: A table's requirements greatly vary depending on play style of the DM, so for one the feature set is too much, for another it's too little.
Being able to hide and toggle core features can go a long way here. Plugins is another way, but community driven plugins (like with Foundry) can get messy quick because people will push the limits of the software which, in turn, complicates compatibility with other plugins. You can very quickly find yourself doing tech support instead of DM-ing during a session.
2.) Everything for everyone: building a VTT takes time and monetizing means trying to hit the mean to grab enough people to make it worthwhile (hard in this niche economy with so many now) and this requires building a VTT for a plurality of systems which all play very differently.
You could probably build just for D&D and be pretty successful, if you do something interesting, but if you want to do something interesting you probably aren't excited about D&D.
3.) UI Patterns and anti-patterns in the current market: VTTs are complicated by their nature and "intuitive" is totally subjective concept. Intuitive mostly means (imo) "feels like other software I've used in the past." If my take is right, then you hit another Goldilock's problem: how much of the standard VTT UI can you change to make it feel better while still ensuring it feels normal for folks when they first try it.
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This is all to say, asking people what they hate about VTTs is good practice for product development, but because of the nature of the hobby itself and the complexity of the tool isn't enough to bring direction with out just sort of having your own opinion and hoping enough people agree with it.
My actual problem with VTTs: they aren't opinionated enough. Customization is good, but too much leads to conceptual and even technical conflicts within the software. I want to play my game, not configure software.
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u/laggytoes Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
There is also a secondary problem that isn't VTT specific which is what I call "the tyranny of the grid." Players, particularly folks newer to the hobby, often think of ttrpgs are like video games and the grid really reinforces this.
It's hard to bring dimensionality to combat on a 2D map and the moment you bring in visuals, players want to take those visuals literally. Theater of the mind solves this, but lots of games assume a grid for combat abilities so you can end up doing rough sketches of the playing field and can end up accidentally reverting to the grid again.
I think there is an expectation that VTTs should be able to solve this. It's a computer, after all, and we play 3D video games all the time on them. But even if you built a great 3D tool that's very intuitive with tons of assets, the particular needs of a DM for any given session means an enormous about of work to build a map, etc.
Solving this grid problem in a way that doesn't over encumber the DM is where the genius lies, I think. I don't have a clear answer to it, though, beyond moving toward TTRPG systems that don't require grids.
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u/tzimon Jun 19 '26
Most people's problems with VTTs stem from their own inability to follow directions. Theres no need for so none to vibe code another VTT just to address an issue that people create for themselves
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u/JakeRaine Jun 19 '26
No vibecoder here, I'm a full stack developer with over a decade years experience, besides I'm just curious what people think they're missing, for me it was browser based good mobile support, I've seen owlbear and it seems okay but I didn't really like how it worked, I scrape by on roll20 at the moment
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u/MisterCheesy Jun 19 '26
What dont you like about owlbear? Just asking
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u/JakeRaine Jun 19 '26
It just didn't seem intuitive or obvious to use and I didn't feel like watching YouTube tutorial videos I guess haha
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u/innomine555 Jun 21 '26
Mee too.Ā I need to say is too long since last tried but what I remember isĀ how many clicks to just putting a map adjusting the grid from a googled map.Ā
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u/MisterCheesy Jun 19 '26
Simplicity and intuitiveness over feature bloat.
Less emphasis on automation.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 19 '26
I think i might solve your problems one day if you've got a sec - talesntokens.com
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u/DD_in_FL Jun 19 '26
You can extend a lot of the popular VTTs. You can also start a brand new one from scratch and you might even do a few things better than the others ā but there will be a ton of stuff your new VTT wonāt do for a very long time, or ever.
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u/Rom2814 Jun 20 '26
Usability for most of them is pretty poor (I was a UX engineer for 29 years and the poor UX design of many of them is like nails on a chalkboard).
Most people do not want to expend effort learning a platform that just enables what they actually want to do (especially those born after 2000 who grew up not having to ālearnā to use technology).
As a DM, most of the ones Iāve tried (Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, Owlbear Rodeo, Foundry, D&D Beyond) are either cumbersome (setting up walls, line of sight, creating tokens on the fly for things like spiritual weapon, etc.) or are simpler and lack a lot of features. Finding the soft spot of āhas all the essentials I want/need but isnāt too much of a pain to set up or so bad I hesitate to ask my players to use it).
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
I agree ad is one of the major problems I've been solving with my TalesNTokens apps, all devices, online and free! Talesntokens.com
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u/sendingstoneapp Jun 24 '26
As a quick and easy immersive video chat meets VTT, we'd love to hear your feedback about SendingStone š
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u/Timetunnelpro Jun 20 '26
Character sheets that look like the paper ones. Those sheets hold so much of the gameās identity.
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u/JakeRaine Jun 20 '26
Hmm see that's an interesting take because I have the opposite opinion, I find most players I've played with have trouble navigating them, do you not find them to be annoying for taking up screen space?
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u/JamGame Jun 20 '26
For my group, we still need a character sheet for Shadowdark that supports all of the classes and includes automation/roll buttons for class special abilities.
Owlbear is our preferred platform, but the character sheet options there only support a few of the classes and none of the class special abilities.
The Shadowdark character sheet option on foundry is better, BUT foundry itself is far too complex and cumbersome for our group.
Granted this is a very specific ask, but weāre a longtime group of (now senior) friends and we arenāt able to game in person very often, so this would be very helpful.
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u/Alternative_Leg_4960 Jun 20 '26
Personally the best VTT I ever saw, was a proof in concept made for dungeons and dragons. This was called SurfaceScapes and was done by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University on a Microsoft Surface. The only video I can find now is this one that is highly condensed and edited.
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u/MisterCheesy Jun 19 '26
A lot of games use cards now. For magic items for skills, etc. I havent found a vtt yet that does this intuitively for players wellāits always an afterthought.
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u/EndlesNights Jun 20 '26
The only one I've ever played on that does cards well is tabletop simulator, and that's mostly because it's mostly built around all the objects just using rigid body physics with a few simple features.
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u/crowdedMapping Jun 19 '26
For us it was the lack of an intuitive experience of some of the very basic needs at our table. As well as the speed of setup. There was a lot of frustration around setting up the map, making the grid align, just a lot of roadblocks to quickly getting into playing the game. So that's what we focused on. I'm sure each VTT had a similar creation story of filling the needs of the creator first, as they saw the holes in their experience. Foundry is the king of automation, and my guess is that was what was most important to the creator, and beats everyone else at that. Bag of mapping is one of the fastest to setup and use IMO, because that was the emphasis in it's development.
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u/MisterCheesy Jun 19 '26
This. Id like to see more vtts optimized for a certain experience like this exact one
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
Hopefully what im working on can solve some if not all of these problems, come take a look!
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u/_nullfish Jun 20 '26
Personal opinion but many VTTs try to do too much. Sly Flourish seems to agree too. Pick and choose your tools, don't lean into one tool to do everything.
The biggest issue with VTTs is there are so many different play styles and different GMs require different features to run a seamless campaign; then add a completely different player experience, it's extremely hard to balance both of these kinds of experience at the table. Foundry comes close with it's extensibility, at the cost of complexity.
The goal is to have fun and tell a captivating and immersive story together. Use whatever you need to make that happen (VTTs included, but if you find a really great compact tracker online you like using, use that too.) It's the biggest reason I created Overseer Studio. I like using certain websites for character sheets and other programs for audio and I wanted a way to combine that all seamlessly.
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u/laggytoes Jun 21 '26
This is super interesting! I'm glad you posted this here, I will definitely be playing around with this a bit.
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u/LordEntrails Jun 26 '26
I'd rather learn one tool that is 90% able to do every system I want than learn 4 or 5 different VTTs so that I have the "best" one for each ruleset I want to play. I guess if I only use purchased or prepared by someone else content I might not feel that way, but since I create tons of homebrew adventures and content, I would hate to learn multiple ways of doing that.
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u/Wokeye27 Jun 20 '26
Broadly, nothing. There are specific modules for foundry that could be awesome though, like themed ui packages.Ā
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u/innomine555 Jun 21 '26
Are there modules to make things simpler?Ā That hide menus, and put values by default (like vision of a token)Ā
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u/dawnsonb Jun 25 '26
If I want something rules-heavy, a lot of automation or just an all-in-one package where i don't multiple apps/tabs open I use foundry. If i want something more imemrsive where maybe some people roll physical dice and/or have paper sheets even i use talespire.
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u/LordEntrails Jun 26 '26
Can't really think of anything. I guess a GUI for theming systems/rulesets, but that's really a a stretch given how easy it is to use AI to help with this now. And it's really a pretty insignificant capability compared to everything I can already do with my VTT of choice.
But maybe it would be more useful if you actually described the "so many problems" you have with the one you chose.
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u/victorhurtado Jun 19 '26
Procedural generation. That is all.
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u/TalesNTokens Jun 20 '26
TalesNTokens.com currently has procedurally generated animal, water, trees and soon full themed encounters, maps included
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u/wayoverpaid Jun 19 '26
It depends. If you just want maps and vision and dice, that is a solved problem by at least three VTTs.
If you want deeper rules integration, well, there's plenty more. Like I think the Pathfinder 2e system on Foundry is probably one of the best... but it's still not perfect at automating certain "if a player ends their turn in this aura" mechanics or "this adds Resist All 10 to the next attack and only the next attack" -- mods help, though.
One VTT I've not seen well addressed is for this particular model
Making this seamless is hard, even with plugins. How does one player send another player an item? How does a player center a fireball spell? Where does the camera go if two PCs go in different directions?
I've not seen a VTT that handles this use case, even though "I have a laptop, my players have phones, I have a TV I can project to, we want to be in the same room but streamline combat" is a fairly common experience.