With the recent update, could you perhaps talk a bit about the new VTT you're finding more useful and why you prefer it? Also, what is the campaign converter that's available to your Patreon supporters? That is, what does it export or convert (from what and to what)?
@Minpwer : haha, yes, that would be the problem :) I figured it out as soon as you said "sent twice, not double rolls". Just click the Beyond20 icon in the toolbar of one of your Roll20 windows and select "Send to this specific tab only" :) It's useful specifically for this scenario :)
@AbessiaMalktho: Well, I'm switching to Foundry VTT because I grew tired of Roll20. Every week was a lot of frustration and anger at how sluggish and slow it all was, or having to deal with various problems it caused. There are simple one-liner bugs that I reported that haven't been fixed almost a year later, and just in general, Roll20 has been a great experience at first, but a very frustrating one on the long term. then I discovered Foundry VTT which is still in Beta and it's so much better overall in terms of functionality and usability and most importantly, performance. I decided to give it a try and while it's not yet feature-complete (it is a beta), it's pretty usable and we did our last game on it without any issues. You can check it out here : http://foundryvtt.com/ and there's a demo link where you can try it out and see how it works.
So, for me to move to FVTT, I wanted my hours of campaign planning to be ported over so I wrote a script to export the entirety of a Roll20 campaign (with all its assets, maps, drawings, tokens, music) into a zip file and a second script to convert the Roll20 campaign into a FVTT campaign. Basically allowing me to make the move from R20 to FVTT with just a couple of clicks and get everything just as it was (pages, maps, tokens, handouts, playlists/music, etc..). And by "couple of clicks" I mean "it took me over 2 weeks of working on it non-stop".
Highlights of why I prefer FVTT :
- It's not sluggish like Roll20, much nicer experience overall.
- From a user perspective, the difference might not be big, but from the DM side, it's got a lot more functionality and ease of use
- I like that you can drop handouts on the map as books/items that the players can see and pick up/click on it to open the handout.
- I love that I can setup doors (that the users can open/close) or windows (block passage but allow vision through), or terrain walls (you can see the top of a house but not the other side of it), or ethereal walls (you can pass through but it blocks vision) or one-way walls, etc...
- I can set ambient sound triggers on the map so my players would hear the sounds of the tavern or the blacksmith or the waterfall as they approach it on the map, for example.
- It's customizable so I can write custom modules to enhance it (or use the many other modules people have written)
- It's self hosted, so I can run it from my own PC and not rely on the service not being down or anything
- I control all of my data, it's not dependent on whether the service remains available
- A better pricing system (technically would be a one time purchase for 30-50$ (developer hasn't decided yet) and you get full software forever, no feature-gating, no subscription based), although as a beta, I am subscribed to his Patreon so it's 5$ per month to get access/updates to the software.
So yeah, that's pretty much it :) I was actually waiting for FVTT to be feature-complete and released before I made the jump but my last R20 session ended with the entire group waiting for over 20 minutes before the map showed up and then it would freeze for 5 minutes any time someone clicked on a token or anywhere on the map. It was absolutely ridiculous and impossible to manage, so I had no choice but to jump ship early and I was convinced by others who told me that FVTT is totally usable and not buggy even though it's in beta, and I'm glad I listened :)
As for my patreon, I'm just giving it a try, I wasn't sure if anyone would subscribe, but some people suggested it to me so I created it and decided to make the R20Exporter/converter be exclusive to patreons (so they get stuff others don't). I'll probably release it at some point in the future for everyone, but for now it's patreon-only.
Wow, what an absolutely amazing program! Just discovered this but will be playing around a lot. Saves me a lot of uploading stuff into Roll20, awesome!
I just found this and installed it, and so far I love it. Basically my group uses DnD beyond for character creation then we have to import everything into roll20 which is a bit of a hassle at times. We also alternate between face to face and online sessions so we have to constantly keep two character sheets updated. This pretty much removes the need to keep anything updated in Roll20 from what I can tell. What a relief!
That's awesome! I may switch over. I have 2 GB of stuff on roll20 and, since I run my games on there, I use it for my worldbuilding just so that everything is in the journal there (so I can one-click store it on the VTT). Trying to switch over to another VTT has often sounded appealing for exactly the reasons you list (mostly performance based). So it has dynamic lighting. That's handy. I'll take a look at it and see if it's what I want.
Does it have an easy way to import .pdf or texts from .pdf? I spend a fair amount of time typing in / adapting materials from dmsguild into roll20 to amplify my campaigns, and the data entry alone is such a pain.
@AbessiaMalktho: Yeah, it is pretty awesome. It's beta software so it's continuously evolving. I don't think there's any way to import from pdf but considering that it has a good public API, it should be fairly easy to create a PDFImporter module for it. The things I liked in Roll20 that are missing, I just added some of them as modules, and anything that requires changes to the server, the developer has been good at responding and accepting suggestions.
Oh another cool thing it has though I haven't made use of it yet, is that you can place sounds on the map, so the players get a fade-in/fade-out of the tavern/blacksmith sounds as they move around the map, so you can set your ambiance music right on the map instead with jukebox playlists. I can't wait to play around with that feature :)
I took a look at it and it looks VERY promising, but (to a non-techy, humanities-focused person like me) seems a bit not-user-friendly in terms of set up. I've been spoiled by services that black box all the networking stuff for me. What, if any, are the features you most miss from roll20?
But basically, you have 2 modes : self-hosted or on a dedicated server.
I do have a dedicated server but I'm just running it from my local computer because it's easier. Basically download the software, and click the FoundryVTT.exe file, and it starts and that's it. Now you can just click the "invitation link" button which will give you the URL to share with the other players. IF they can't connect to you due to having a router blocking the connection, then you'd need to setup port forwarding (which is usually a one time thing) and there are plenty of guides out of there for your router model, for example : https://portforward.com/router.htm
It basically boils down to :
* Open http://192.168.1.1 (usually, the IP address will depend on your router model)
* Go to "Admin" or "Setup" or something like that (you might have to login to the router and if you haven't configured your own password on it yet, most of the time, the password is 'admin')
* click on "Port forwarding"
* Enter the IP address of the computer you're running FVTT on, and port 30000, then click "save"
That's it.. now anyone trying to connect to your IP will be able to access the FVTT app. It should be possible for the app itself to do the port forwarding for you automatically, and maybe it already does, I just didn't check and I did it manually, but I'll ask the dev to see if it does (if it doesn't, then I'll suggest it as a feature for the next release)
Sure, it's not as simple as going to a website and clicking 'register' but it's not that complicated either.
As for what I'm missing from Roll20. I'd say not much. I didn't like that I couldn't sort/change the order of journal entries, but I wrote a FVTT module for that and now I can do it (and anyone else who installs my module), I also missed the ability to see which journal entries are shared with which players at a glance (the colored dots on the side) but I wrote another module for that and I got it :p I'd say the biggest thing missing is drawing tools, so you can't just draw something on an empty map, though that's planned for release, it's not yet available, but I don't miss it personally since I didn't use it myself, though my players liked to doodle while I play. I thought of maybe helping out the developer by trying to implement it myself as a module so it would be less work for him to add the feature of half of it is already written.
So I guess my biggest issues or thing that I miss is that if I move a token, I can't press spacebar to see the distance moved, I have to drop it back to the original position then use Ctrl (or the measurement tool) while dragging so it measures it, then press Spacebar for the token to execute the move. It's a different workflow and I'm just not yet used to it, but I prefered the way Roll20 had it. Other pet peeve is that while using the measurement tool, I can't pan around the map. You usually pan with right-click, but right-click cancels the measurement being taken, so for measurement big distances on a huge map, it's impossible without zooming out entirely.
I can't really think of anything else particularly bothering me with FVTT at this time.
Having just tried out and setup Foundry on Friday, the hardest part is port forwarding on your router. If you don't know how, myself or the appropriately named PortForward.com can probably figure it out. As KaKaRoToDM posts, it should be as simple as clicking onto a webpage and filling out a couple fields (port to forward, to what PC)
Other than that, setup is just "install a program, unzip to a directory, send a command." I am more than happy to help with any of those steps if you need it.
Other than what KaKaRoToDM mentions, the other feature that I miss / is different is selecting the game session and user management. The way it is right now works, its just not as easy to use, since you can have multiple worlds (games) on a server, but only one can be active at a time. And the users are per world, not per server, at least as far as I know.
The ability to import text can also be limited by how the PDF is formatted. Some aren't actually text, but instead a giant image of the text, which you couldn't import from.
@rrpearcy: Yes I am, whenever I add a feature, it will be for both platforms (and other platforms if/when others get added). The recent update was more focused on FVTT because there was a lot more to do there to get it up to par with the Roll20 support that was already there.
First, I want to say that I LOVE this addon! It's fantastic and I can't wait to use it.
I have a couple questions/suggestions.
- Is there going to be a way for DMs to get information from all characters in a DnDBeyond campaign inside of roll20? (Group passive perception, group passive insight, DM based secret group skill checks, languages, etc).
- Are you going to stick to the "other templates" format or do you plan to add support for the community contributed 5e character sheet?
Again, I absolutely love the work you've done. Thank you so much.
- That's one issue I'm not sure how to handle. Beyond20 only works with what's displayed on the page itself (that's why you need to click on the Feats tab first for Beyond20 to know what feats you have), so having that for DM would be incredibly tricky since there is no "summary" other than the campaign page and it only give you the level and name of each character. So I don't think that's something that I can or would do.
- Yes. I had plans on adding support for other templates, but I probably won't at this time. Maybe the shaped sheet later since I heard some good about it and it seems popular, but it's super low priority for me personally. I'm actually hoping someone would contribute that implementation, since Beyond20 is open source, anyone could do it and contribute back support for other sheets.
With the recent update, could you perhaps talk a bit about the new VTT you're finding more useful and why you prefer it? Also, what is the campaign converter that's available to your Patreon supporters? That is, what does it export or convert (from what and to what)?
@Minpwer : haha, yes, that would be the problem :) I figured it out as soon as you said "sent twice, not double rolls". Just click the Beyond20 icon in the toolbar of one of your Roll20 windows and select "Send to this specific tab only" :) It's useful specifically for this scenario :)
@AbessiaMalktho: Well, I'm switching to Foundry VTT because I grew tired of Roll20. Every week was a lot of frustration and anger at how sluggish and slow it all was, or having to deal with various problems it caused. There are simple one-liner bugs that I reported that haven't been fixed almost a year later, and just in general, Roll20 has been a great experience at first, but a very frustrating one on the long term. then I discovered Foundry VTT which is still in Beta and it's so much better overall in terms of functionality and usability and most importantly, performance. I decided to give it a try and while it's not yet feature-complete (it is a beta), it's pretty usable and we did our last game on it without any issues. You can check it out here : http://foundryvtt.com/ and there's a demo link where you can try it out and see how it works.
So, for me to move to FVTT, I wanted my hours of campaign planning to be ported over so I wrote a script to export the entirety of a Roll20 campaign (with all its assets, maps, drawings, tokens, music) into a zip file and a second script to convert the Roll20 campaign into a FVTT campaign. Basically allowing me to make the move from R20 to FVTT with just a couple of clicks and get everything just as it was (pages, maps, tokens, handouts, playlists/music, etc..). And by "couple of clicks" I mean "it took me over 2 weeks of working on it non-stop".
Highlights of why I prefer FVTT :
- It's not sluggish like Roll20, much nicer experience overall.
- From a user perspective, the difference might not be big, but from the DM side, it's got a lot more functionality and ease of use
- I like that you can drop handouts on the map as books/items that the players can see and pick up/click on it to open the handout.
- I love that I can setup doors (that the users can open/close) or windows (block passage but allow vision through), or terrain walls (you can see the top of a house but not the other side of it), or ethereal walls (you can pass through but it blocks vision) or one-way walls, etc...
- I can set ambient sound triggers on the map so my players would hear the sounds of the tavern or the blacksmith or the waterfall as they approach it on the map, for example.
- It's customizable so I can write custom modules to enhance it (or use the many other modules people have written)
- It's self hosted, so I can run it from my own PC and not rely on the service not being down or anything
- I control all of my data, it's not dependent on whether the service remains available
- A better pricing system (technically would be a one time purchase for 30-50$ (developer hasn't decided yet) and you get full software forever, no feature-gating, no subscription based), although as a beta, I am subscribed to his Patreon so it's 5$ per month to get access/updates to the software.
So yeah, that's pretty much it :) I was actually waiting for FVTT to be feature-complete and released before I made the jump but my last R20 session ended with the entire group waiting for over 20 minutes before the map showed up and then it would freeze for 5 minutes any time someone clicked on a token or anywhere on the map. It was absolutely ridiculous and impossible to manage, so I had no choice but to jump ship early and I was convinced by others who told me that FVTT is totally usable and not buggy even though it's in beta, and I'm glad I listened :)
As for my patreon, I'm just giving it a try, I wasn't sure if anyone would subscribe, but some people suggested it to me so I created it and decided to make the R20Exporter/converter be exclusive to patreons (so they get stuff others don't). I'll probably release it at some point in the future for everyone, but for now it's patreon-only.
Thanks for asking!
Wow, what an absolutely amazing program!
Just discovered this but will be playing around a lot. Saves me a lot of uploading stuff into Roll20, awesome!
I read that Sharpshoot is in there, how do I get that to work?
I just found this and installed it, and so far I love it. Basically my group uses DnD beyond for character creation then we have to import everything into roll20 which is a bit of a hassle at times. We also alternate between face to face and online sessions so we have to constantly keep two character sheets updated. This pretty much removes the need to keep anything updated in Roll20 from what I can tell. What a relief!
@SANSd20 : For Sharpshooter, read the FAQ here :
https://beyond20.here-for-more.info/faq#i-have-a-class-featurefeat-that-the-features-page-says-is-supported-sharpshooter-feat-for-example-but-i-dont-see-the-option-to-use-it
To enable it, just click the Beyond20 icon in the toolbar and enable it (will only apply to the next ranged weapon shot).
That's awesome! I may switch over. I have 2 GB of stuff on roll20 and, since I run my games on there, I use it for my worldbuilding just so that everything is in the journal there (so I can one-click store it on the VTT). Trying to switch over to another VTT has often sounded appealing for exactly the reasons you list (mostly performance based). So it has dynamic lighting. That's handy. I'll take a look at it and see if it's what I want.
Does it have an easy way to import .pdf or texts from .pdf? I spend a fair amount of time typing in / adapting materials from dmsguild into roll20 to amplify my campaigns, and the data entry alone is such a pain.
@AbessiaMalktho: Yeah, it is pretty awesome. It's beta software so it's continuously evolving. I don't think there's any way to import from pdf but considering that it has a good public API, it should be fairly easy to create a PDFImporter module for it. The things I liked in Roll20 that are missing, I just added some of them as modules, and anything that requires changes to the server, the developer has been good at responding and accepting suggestions.
Oh another cool thing it has though I haven't made use of it yet, is that you can place sounds on the map, so the players get a fade-in/fade-out of the tavern/blacksmith sounds as they move around the map, so you can set your ambiance music right on the map instead with jukebox playlists. I can't wait to play around with that feature :)
I took a look at it and it looks VERY promising, but (to a non-techy, humanities-focused person like me) seems a bit not-user-friendly in terms of set up. I've been spoiled by services that black box all the networking stuff for me. What, if any, are the features you most miss from roll20?
Setup isn't so bad, though I know that I am tech savvy. I had tried Fantasy Ground once and this is a lot easier to setup for example.
It explains how to set it up here : http://foundryvtt.com/pages/hosting.html
But basically, you have 2 modes : self-hosted or on a dedicated server.
I do have a dedicated server but I'm just running it from my local computer because it's easier. Basically download the software, and click the FoundryVTT.exe file, and it starts and that's it. Now you can just click the "invitation link" button which will give you the URL to share with the other players. IF they can't connect to you due to having a router blocking the connection, then you'd need to setup port forwarding (which is usually a one time thing) and there are plenty of guides out of there for your router model, for example : https://portforward.com/router.htm
It basically boils down to :
* Open http://192.168.1.1 (usually, the IP address will depend on your router model)
* Go to "Admin" or "Setup" or something like that (you might have to login to the router and if you haven't configured your own password on it yet, most of the time, the password is 'admin')
* click on "Port forwarding"
* Enter the IP address of the computer you're running FVTT on, and port 30000, then click "save"
That's it.. now anyone trying to connect to your IP will be able to access the FVTT app. It should be possible for the app itself to do the port forwarding for you automatically, and maybe it already does, I just didn't check and I did it manually, but I'll ask the dev to see if it does (if it doesn't, then I'll suggest it as a feature for the next release)
Sure, it's not as simple as going to a website and clicking 'register' but it's not that complicated either.
As for what I'm missing from Roll20. I'd say not much. I didn't like that I couldn't sort/change the order of journal entries, but I wrote a FVTT module for that and now I can do it (and anyone else who installs my module), I also missed the ability to see which journal entries are shared with which players at a glance (the colored dots on the side) but I wrote another module for that and I got it :p I'd say the biggest thing missing is drawing tools, so you can't just draw something on an empty map, though that's planned for release, it's not yet available, but I don't miss it personally since I didn't use it myself, though my players liked to doodle while I play. I thought of maybe helping out the developer by trying to implement it myself as a module so it would be less work for him to add the feature of half of it is already written.
So I guess my biggest issues or thing that I miss is that if I move a token, I can't press spacebar to see the distance moved, I have to drop it back to the original position then use Ctrl (or the measurement tool) while dragging so it measures it, then press Spacebar for the token to execute the move. It's a different workflow and I'm just not yet used to it, but I prefered the way Roll20 had it. Other pet peeve is that while using the measurement tool, I can't pan around the map. You usually pan with right-click, but right-click cancels the measurement being taken, so for measurement big distances on a huge map, it's impossible without zooming out entirely.
I can't really think of anything else particularly bothering me with FVTT at this time.
Having just tried out and setup Foundry on Friday, the hardest part is port forwarding on your router. If you don't know how, myself or the appropriately named PortForward.com can probably figure it out. As KaKaRoToDM posts, it should be as simple as clicking onto a webpage and filling out a couple fields (port to forward, to what PC)
Other than that, setup is just "install a program, unzip to a directory, send a command." I am more than happy to help with any of those steps if you need it.
Other than what KaKaRoToDM mentions, the other feature that I miss / is different is selecting the game session and user management. The way it is right now works, its just not as easy to use, since you can have multiple worlds (games) on a server, but only one can be active at a time. And the users are per world, not per server, at least as far as I know.
Site Info: Wizard's ToS | Fan Content Policy | Forum Rules | Physical Books | Content Not Working | Contact Support
How To: Homebrew Rules | Create Homebrew | Snippet Codes | Tool Tips (Custom) | Rollables (Generator)
My Homebrew: Races | Subclasses | Backgrounds | Feats | Spells | Magic Items
Other: Beyond20 | Page References | Other Guides | Entitlements | Dice Randomization | Images Fix | FAQ
Where can I find these modules? They sound very helpful.
Site Info: Wizard's ToS | Fan Content Policy | Forum Rules | Physical Books | Content Not Working | Contact Support
How To: Homebrew Rules | Create Homebrew | Snippet Codes | Tool Tips (Custom) | Rollables (Generator)
My Homebrew: Races | Subclasses | Backgrounds | Feats | Spells | Magic Items
Other: Beyond20 | Page References | Other Guides | Entitlements | Dice Randomization | Images Fix | FAQ
The ability to import text can also be limited by how the PDF is formatted. Some aren't actually text, but instead a giant image of the text, which you couldn't import from.
Site Info: Wizard's ToS | Fan Content Policy | Forum Rules | Physical Books | Content Not Working | Contact Support
How To: Homebrew Rules | Create Homebrew | Snippet Codes | Tool Tips (Custom) | Rollables (Generator)
My Homebrew: Races | Subclasses | Backgrounds | Feats | Spells | Magic Items
Other: Beyond20 | Page References | Other Guides | Entitlements | Dice Randomization | Images Fix | FAQ
The modules I wrote :
https://github.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-entityorder
https://github.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-permission-viewer
You can also see a full list of all community modules for FVTT in this document (not sure who exactly maintains it but it seems to be up to date) : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZCJgR5AaxxKVAserurnLeZhfPX0xq41nfxyW3pDLlXw/edit
If you join the FVTT discord, there's a great community there, plenty of helpful people.
Are you going to be maintaining support for roll20 as far as this extension goes?
@rrpearcy: Yes I am, whenever I add a feature, it will be for both platforms (and other platforms if/when others get added). The recent update was more focused on FVTT because there was a lot more to do there to get it up to par with the Roll20 support that was already there.
Glad to hear. I just found it and helped the game I'm dm'ing immensely. After reading your talk of FVTT, I was a bit worried. :)
Thanks for a great extension. It really is pretty awesome. Keep up the good work.
First, I want to say that I LOVE this addon! It's fantastic and I can't wait to use it.
I have a couple questions/suggestions.
- Is there going to be a way for DMs to get information from all characters in a DnDBeyond campaign inside of roll20? (Group passive perception, group passive insight, DM based secret group skill checks, languages, etc).
- Are you going to stick to the "other templates" format or do you plan to add support for the community contributed 5e character sheet?
Again, I absolutely love the work you've done. Thank you so much.
Hey RaigeMage, thanks for the love! :)
- That's one issue I'm not sure how to handle. Beyond20 only works with what's displayed on the page itself (that's why you need to click on the Feats tab first for Beyond20 to know what feats you have), so having that for DM would be incredibly tricky since there is no "summary" other than the campaign page and it only give you the level and name of each character. So I don't think that's something that I can or would do.
- Yes. I had plans on adding support for other templates, but I probably won't at this time. Maybe the shaped sheet later since I heard some good about it and it seems popular, but it's super low priority for me personally. I'm actually hoping someone would contribute that implementation, since Beyond20 is open source, anyone could do it and contribute back support for other sheets.
My guess is you'll be able to add that "collect all the info" functionality once dndbeyond adds their customize-able DM screen.