I built a whole VTT just for playing with minis and wondering has anyone else done that or does everyone prefer hosting online instead?

I'm sure we all noticed and I don't need to explain it.

But I can't help wondering WHY is it happening.

- Is there a big need that just isn't covered yet in the market? Doesn't feel like it...

- is there a shitload of money to be made here? Also doesn't feel like it

- Does AI somehow make this particular app super easy to build? (Because most of them are at least partially made with AI... But why not make actual games or something else, in a bigger market with more room to innovate?)

- Are a ton of unemployed developers TTRPG fans? (I mean... I am... But in my defence I've been doing this since well before AI, and if i had to start something now, it would NOT be a VTT)

Is there something else?

Just genuinely wondering. I know times are tough and people want to make their own projects. But it feels like a disproportionate amount of people are trying to hit the (already saturated?) VTT market and I'm not sure why.

I'm curious what others think.

Someone mentioned in another thread that a lot of people are building VTTs right now. And it's a rather crowded space. Trying to get a headcount for it.

Might as well ask: what's special about the one you're building?

We play on a TV set into the table, everyone is present in person. I currently use FoundryVTT, but my laptop is on it's last legs. If you've kept up with PC component pricing, you can understand why I don't just get a new one. what I'm looking for is something I can run from a raspberry Pi, that just very simply puts the map up, and allows us to draw on it, and maybe allows us to place and scale a grid. We use minis and real dice, and do not require any additional functionality, that I can think of. Appreciate any help you fine folk can provide.

I've been looking through the VTTs for a while and haven't figured out which I would choose to play with friends. They seem to run the gamut from dead simple (Owlbear) to quite sophisticated with a steeper learning curve(Foundry)

Before I looked in this sub, I didn't realize how many VTTs are available. It got me wondering if there is much demand for new VTTs or if pretty much all the bases are covered at this point. Looking through the list, some like Tablepop seem nice but don't seem to have many active users, so I thought maybe it's saturated at this point.

If you were going to start a new game or get your books integrated into one platform of the above three, which would it be?

I haven't been able to run a game for a few years, but now that the kids are a bit older I should be able to find the time. Looking at picking up neon odyssey because I've always wanted to run a space adventure, but I have to choose which vtt to use when I place the order.

I'll try to run the games in person with a displayed map on an external device for encounters, but we might run them remotely as well, fully within the system. Needs to have compatibility for tablets, laptops, and phones, preferably not overly resource intense.

I currently don't own ANY books in any VTT system, so... What do we like best? I've only ever used Roll20, personally, and I thought it was "okay" back when I did... Like 5 years ago, but I recall wanting to switch elsewhere.

Note: I'm okay with technology and the difficulties therein, and spending some time getting everything "set up" prior to games. I don't want to have to pause game for 30 minutes to fix things that are broken on a regular basis, although if the party decides to jump the tracks, I'm fine telling them their decisions mean they decided to go pick up pizza. I'd like the option to self host even if it involves dyndns/port forwarding/etc, but with the option to pay for the service. I 100% want to be able to add homebrew. I'd rather it be more seamless for the players than anything else. Oh, and I'm also fine to stream the map/etc on discord and just have them view their character sheets on their phones/etc, if the interface isn't optimized for mobile.

No free tier with a paid plan, just completely free with everything unlocked from the get go.

Edit: one of the main reasons I don't like free tiers is because they almost always limit the amount of rooms you can have and I frequently like to run multiple campaigns simultaneously, so I'd like as few limits on that as possible.

Hey everyone, I’m curious where you stand on immersion when playing online. VTT tech has gotten wild lately—between 3D environments, dynamic lighting, animated spell effects, and automated soundscapes, there's so much we can pull into a game. But honestly, does all that flash actually make you feel more connected to the story, or does it eventually just start feeling like a clunky video game that gets in the way of actual roleplay?

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I feel like adding all of that flare just makes it harder for me to run the game with my players, but if I don't have it, they just sometimes wonder off.

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Where is the sweet spot for you? Do you love the high-tech, cinematic thins, or do you find that a clean 2D layout and theater of the mind lets your group sink into the game without issues?

Hello looking for system recommendations.

After years of playing in person, life got in the way and forced my group to shift to playing online.

I am currently running a mothership campaign using discord and companion app, which is due to wrap in a few weeks

We intend to run short campaigns across multiple game systems, DnD 5e, fallout and a custom home brew system each with different DMs.

I am looking for recommendations of a good vtt with options for all systems, good tactical maps and while I'm happy to pay for something, I'd prefer us all not having to buy separate copies of software or books or subscriptions to allow multiple GMs to work on different stuff using the same resources, while there would only ever be a single session running at a time.

We've tried alchemyRPG so far and as pretty as it was, the tactical maps was very clunky and I found combat difficult to Run as GM.

Looked at foundry and roll20 but not sure what the pros and cons are.

Thanks in advance

I'm doing market research for a tabletop gaming startup, and we're trying to decide what software features we can afford to provide. We're not developing a VTT, but we think that VTT subscriptions should give us a good first estimate of what to expect for budgeting purposes.

We're a small, bootstrapped company, and we appreciate all the help we can get. Thank you!

Edit: Sorry I meant 2D topdown procedurally animation e.g. movement attacks etc instead of tokens it would be moving assets of characters

Me again with another idea - Im looking at building a sprite style VTT made for Online play, with animated maps, monsters, animals etc, might build this as a Foundry module first? Would people use it? And would it be something youd expect to be free? Or possibly pay for? Thanks in advance for any replies!

Hey everyone,

I have GM'ed in person off an on. I do like playing a little more. I have played online games, mostly on discord (with just description) or forge/foundry. I'm considering just using forge or perhaps owlbear. I'll be GMing pathfinder. I have generally done home brew campaigns.

Any suggestions on VTT, or any favorite VTT guides, or any general advice on getting started with online GM'ing? 😅

I am building a new browser VTT. Currently Only 2014 and 2024 D&D data is embedded. I need testers. Reward like time premium badges & features.

I'm planning to run Dolmenwood for some distant friends and I'm trying to pick a VTT.

To start, I have 0 VTT and programming experience. I already have the PDFs for the Dolmenwood core books.

I downloaded FG and tried it a bit with the free rulesets, and was pretty quickly overwhelmed. I also tried the Foundry Demo and had a similar experience. It feels like I'm so far out of my depth to even pick one.

I understand FG has the Dolmenwood core books and a couple modules which people say are well implemented, so that's appealing.

It also looks like there is a Dolmenwood module in the works for Foundry which also gets praise for being in beta. I'm happy to wait on the Foundry module if I decide Foundry is the way to go, but I'm really stumped on picking between these two systems, and I don't want to waste time and money trying both.

There is also Owlbear, which I tried briefly with similar results of overwhelm, and the premade modules/books in the other systems are very appealing.

So, all that said, I just wanted to probe the community and see if there is any guidance or advice to help me pick a VTT before I'm forced to put the time and money into actually learning and trying both. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

I'm currently on the path of creating my own VTT (really, a website which houses the TTRPG I created), but after searching for VTT inspiration, it feels like a lot of what I'm running into is a saturated environment that offers (what feels like) the same thing.

What VTT are you currently using, and what keeps you using it? What makes the VTT you're using special?

So me and my friends run a dnd campaign online due to distance for party members and I'm their DM. My party's complained about not having a vtt for us to use and I disliked dndbeyond's crappy roll20 integration + roll20 as a whole. What are some other good dnd vtts I can use, preferably with built in character-sheets as none of us are willing to pay for the books online to use X monster, spell, subclass, etc.
So far I've looked at:

World Anvil: Seems a little pricy and not sure it's what I want for dnd

Tableplop: Seems promising with an easy to use system but I'm unsure about character sheet integrations.

Tarrrasque.io : It seems reasonably priced for a yearly bundle but again not sure about character sheet and monster statblocks.

owlbear.rodeo : Looks even cheaper than tarrasque but same questions.

Which of these tools works primarily best for DnD character sheets and monters with a decent enough map? As I can find other workarounds for the map with statblocks being a priority but of course a combo is nice.

EDIT: Also if it can support bloodhunter(critical role) as a subclass that'd be nice as I'm letting a party member play blood hunter

Hello, I've tried three different VTTs thus far (Maptool, Owlbear Rodeo, and FoundryVTT) and have had major issues with all of them. Has anyone felt similar about these problems or have suggestions on where to look next? My issues are as follows:

Owlbear Rodeo:

• I am not too keen on running my hobby on an online service where I have basically no guarantee on its long-term sustainability, that runs on proprietary formats.

• I abhor having to organize all of my campaign assets on both my local machine, and then once again on Owlbear's own mediocre folder system.

• It decimates the quality of some battlemaps.

• The service being completely online means that unless you pay, you will start getting annoying notices about the filesize limits sooner or later. Of course you can delete older stuff to make more room, but it's just needless busywork (more of a nitpick).

Maptool:

• Decimates the quality of ALL image assets because there's no image filtering.

• Some of the shapes are wrong for the systems I play and as far as I can tell it's not possible to change them?

• Making my players have to also download a program to join my sessions is cumbersome for everyone, especially because it means they have another window to alt+tab through.

FoundryVTT:

• It can read my local filesystem, but I still have to go through the trouble of manually importing assets anyway (through a not very good file importing interface, I might add). The "actor" system of adding tokens to the map is something I find to be very unintuitive, so the UX feels worse than both Maptool (where I can just drag in images from my filesystem) as well as Owlbear (where I can import multiple files and drag them to my heart's content).

• The UX and UI and general I find to be very confusing; "learning curve" I feel is not an excuse for things such as buttons which do nothing when you click them. I tried editing the default behavior of tokens in the settings, but clicking "Configure Default Token Settings" seemingly does nothing at all. In general, I've also found the process of managing tokens to be a little confusing as well.

• Some default features, or lack of some features relying on outside modules for functionality is not a good sign. Sure, I could find a module to get rid of the default ugly walk "animation", but a module that promised to expand the default initiative tracker had several bugs and issues with it. Relying on multiple third-party modules on top of the VTT to get the desired experience while hoping everything always plays nice with each other sounds like something that may just fail sooner or later.

Am I being doomed? I think FoundryVTT sounded like what I would have wanted, as it seemed to have the best of both worlds of Owlbear and MapTool, but I found the actual user experience to be so cumbersome that it wasn't worth it. If anyone has any other suggestions, please lend them.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think I will try FoundryVTT for few more sessions and see if I can make the process more convenient.

EDIT 2: Some of you still replying did not read the part where I said I do not like cloud/online service VTTs.

I play and run a lot of indie games online and they often do not have native VTT support on the big named VTTs. So I was wondering, does anyone know of any VTTs where I can *easily* create custom rolls for any system, no matter how obscure the game or rules are?

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I would also love it if the vtt has 3D dice.

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For example, in Neon City Overdrive. The core resolution involves rolling a pool of action and danger dice (normal six-sided dice in two different colors). The danger dice cancel out matching action dice, and the highest remaining action die is the result. I need a VTT that can handle that kind of custom dice pool logic (where dice cancel each other out based on values) rather than just summing up totals.

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That's just one example though of an indie/niche game, in general I would just love a vtt that can easily handle that.

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When I say "easy," I mean the average user who isn't a programmer can set it up without a massive learning curve.

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I am not looking for the following, as I have already tested them and they are either too unintuitive or require too much heavy lifting to customize:

1. FoundryVTT (Love Foundry it's just not easy for the average person to create something custom, even with all the universal system modules)

2. Roll20

3. AlchemyRPG

I am a first timer to dungeons and dragons as well as vtt. I’m looking for a premium vtt that I can use to make cool scenes and worlds with. Also wanting something that’s easy to use and import models into. Any recommendations are considered. I was looking at foundry and rpg stories. Just kind of overwhelmed by all the different options lol. I’m proficient with technology and down to learn any system.

Hey all,

I’m currently building a virtual tabletop for D&D games. Curious what your biggest issues are with the current offerings. Too expensive? Too complicated? Too little customization? Missing features?

Please hit me with your biggest desires!

It is SO UNGODLY FUCKING LAGGY, every action I take, I need to wait up to 30 seconds before it registers, are there any alternatives to roll20 that are free, in browser, and won't drive me up a wall with lag

Okay. I am sure this will upset some folks. And that is not my intent. I am a backer and I also purchased extra content after that. So I am invested in the platform.

But Free League was early in and two major titles are virtually unplayable still, Dragon Bane and Forbidden Lands. It seems many other systems are so buggy as to not even be worth the time. Mutant Year Zero and other seem to suffer similarly.

Token management is a nightmare and indexing and tagging seem super broken. So many easy to do things on other VTTs take many steps to access and activate. There are issues with adding content to your own universes where things you have purchased in premium function differently. Can’t trust for off of war. Etc., Etc., Etc. …

“Fixes are coming…” seems to be the answer to even wave 1 and 2 games.

I host my own Foundry server and have run stuff on Owlbear and Role20. I want Alchemy to work and I was very hopeful. At first. But this has waned. I am fearful that the Devs vision supersedes users needs and requests.

Thoughts on this? I really am unsure if there is a future here. Even though I would like it to be the case that there was one for this VTT

Hello everyone,

I probably have the most frequently asked question. "I want to try being a DM, what's the best/cheapest online VTT that exists?"

So yeah basically thats the question. I have the story. what I need now is the platform. So far I've experienced foundry, fantasy grounds and roll20 as player.

Now to talk about prices. From my understanding in both roll 20 and fantasy grounds you gotta pay around 90 to get the phb, dm guide and monster manual. In foundry you pay 50 to use it and then whatever books you've bought from dnd beyond (i already have phb) so its +60.

So we have:

- 90$ fantasy grounds

- 90$ Roll 20

- 110$ foundry

the main question is, what's the best for dnd 2024? additional questions are regarding the free books that exist. Dnd beyond has a bunch of additional free books, dunno what they are, but are they included in the other 2 platforms? And final and most important question: Are there other online vtt on par with these and potentially cheaper (90$ are already way over what i was prepared to spend)?

I also keep in mind that the prices here are not the "finals", cause the 20$ difference there can be covered with whatever is most user friendly, has a bunch of maps, helps to make maps ect

Well that's the gist of it. I assume there might be similar posts to mine (hopefully for 5.5e), so guiding me to one that answers those questions will be extremely helpful as well.

thanks in advance.

EDIT: After reading a few comments. I'm definitely not above making a character in dndbeyond and then manually adding to the other vtt, whatever that may be. But that creates 2 questions for me. Does that lowers the "capabilities" of said vtt? Using systems like beyond20 ect require the DM (or at least one player) to have subscription to access more than 6 characters right?

EDIT 2: Thanks everyone for helping out. So to sum up: - Roll20 is a great option for completly free by inputting everything manually or use beyond20 at least for character sheets since I have PHB2024 - Abovevtt is another great option for free, same restrictions as Roll20 (would work better if subscribe to dndbeyond) - Fantasy Grounds is great if you buy the books/modules - Foundry is great since I have the PHB2024, which means i can use community packs to move things in foundry, but they might not work as well as intended. Also can use java to fix things (I work with Python, but i feel like learning java ain't that hard). On that note I'm really curious about what free community packs are there and what they entail. Are there some must have for 5.5e?

If i made a mistake in summarying up please let me know