Further questions, as I have just this year transitioned to online only play in response to The Covid, who among us uses Foundry? How do you best use D&D Beyond and Foundry respectively? If you don't use Foundry, how do you play? Just discord and D&D Beyond directly with the beta dice rolling feature? I am trying to become more efficient/keep my games high quality, and while I have many years in running games, I am fairly new to the virtual space in doing so, and thought people might share some of their thoughts/methods etc.
I use Foundry for nearly everything. I have found it superior to every other system, definitely including DDB, for just about everything.
My players do use DDB for their character sheets, but I use a mod that imports their sheets directly into Foundry. They can do the imports themselves (I have just found out -- I used to do it for them) as long as you have linked their Foundry character sheet with their DDB URL. There are instructions on how to do this in the mod.
Other than importing data from here (or the books) into Foundry, everything else is easily doable in Foundry and I find the system easy to use. You can make maps in Dungeondraft and direct import them (I think from Dungeon Fog as well but I haven't tried that one). Or you can import maps from anywhere you want as jpegs. The DD importer (and probably other importers) will automatically add the line-of-site features for walls and doors... if it is a jpg you will have to do that manually.
There are a ton of great mods (I use about 30 of them) to make the playing experience more enjoyable. I love Foundry and will be using it for the foreseeable future.
Feel free to post specific questions here and I or others can help you.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I recently switched from using theatre-of-the-mind, using D&D Beyond for dice rolling to a Foundry instance I host through AWS (using Discord to handle voice/text chat for both). Basically, some of my players were finding it more difficult to keep track of the more complex combats and wanted to switch to using a VTT. Foundry is absolutely a great system and I'm enjoying using it, but there are definitely pros and cons to it.
It is really flexible, more so than Roll20 (which I didn't get on with), and it is very simple to define new homebrew items or modify ones defined in the SRD. Each instance of an item (say, 2 longswords belonging to different characters) can also be modified without changing the "master". You can end up doing some quite complex things with the right set of extensions and/or a little JavaScript knowledge - especially automating or greatly simplifying some of the busywork of being a DM. It also offers all the play benefits of any of the VTTs out there, moving tokens around a map etc., so if any of your players (or you!) are very visually oriented, they will enjoy that.
However! Although self-hosting is listed as an option, in reality most ISPs won't permit the sort of port forwarding required - so you will need acquire a server somewhere. As I said, I'm using AWS, but other options are available. If you have set up/run servers before, you likely won't encounter any issues as the actual install of Foundry was easy - but if you aren't familiar with at least the basics of website management and linux you might find the process difficult and/or frustrating, as I still had to do a bit of troubleshooting above and beyond what was listed in any of the community guides.
In terms of the actual gameplay, and how the actual session is run - I haven't had to change all that much. Players still maintain master copies of their characters on D&D Beyond, the only real gameplay differences are that all the dice rolling happens inside Foundry, and players can see the exact location of everyone in the scene.
The main difference has actually been in the production pipeline - because there is a bit of work that the DM needs to do there. Maps need to be either created in a 3rd party program or imported from a sourcebook/the internet. Once you have a scene created in Foundry with your map, you need to create walls to restrict player movement and line of sight, and light the scene appropriately. This isn't at all difficult, but it does take a little bit of time. Also, because Foundry is not an officially licenced D&D product only the classes, abilities, races, spells, monsters etc. from the SRD appear. Meaning you may have to spend a bit of time creating, or finding someone else who has created, any content you are using from supplementary books (for instance XGTE).
On the whole though, I am finding that Foundry works well for me and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask.
I use Foundry for nearly everything. I have found it superior to every other system, definitely including DDB, for just about everything.
My players do use DDB for their character sheets, but I use a mod that imports their sheets directly into Foundry. They can do the imports themselves (I have just found out -- I used to do it for them) as long as you have linked their Foundry character sheet with their DDB URL. There are instructions on how to do this in the mod.
Other than importing data from here (or the books) into Foundry, everything else is easily doable in Foundry and I find the system easy to use. You can make maps in Dungeondraft and direct import them (I think from Dungeon Fog as well but I haven't tried that one). Or you can import maps from anywhere you want as jpegs. The DD importer (and probably other importers) will automatically add the line-of-site features for walls and doors... if it is a jpg you will have to do that manually.
There are a ton of great mods (I use about 30 of them) to make the playing experience more enjoyable. I love Foundry and will be using it for the foreseeable future.
Feel free to post specific questions here and I or others can help you.
Sure! I dunno what to ask specifically, though. I know about character importing, I have made maps using DD, and used the importing mod to bring them in. You haven't mentioned it, but some map makers have also started making mods that are ready made, so you don't even have to do that. How do you import the "books" into Foundry? Anyway, this basically what got me to move from Roll20 which I was heavily invested into, to come to foundry, and then get into the D&D Beyond ecosystem.
I recently switched from using theatre-of-the-mind, using D&D Beyond for dice rolling to a Foundry instance I host through AWS (using Discord to handle voice/text chat for both). Basically, some of my players were finding it more difficult to keep track of the more complex combats and wanted to switch to using a VTT. Foundry is absolutely a great system and I'm enjoying using it, but there are definitely pros and cons to it.
It is really flexible, more so than Roll20 (which I didn't get on with), and it is very simple to define new homebrew items or modify ones defined in the SRD. Each instance of an item (say, 2 longswords belonging to different characters) can also be modified without changing the "master". You can end up doing some quite complex things with the right set of extensions and/or a little JavaScript knowledge - especially automating or greatly simplifying some of the busywork of being a DM. It also offers all the play benefits of any of the VTTs out there, moving tokens around a map etc., so if any of your players (or you!) are very visually oriented, they will enjoy that.
However! Although self-hosting is listed as an option, in reality most ISPs won't permit the sort of port forwarding required - so you will need acquire a server somewhere. As I said, I'm using AWS, but other options are available. If you have set up/run servers before, you likely won't encounter any issues as the actual install of Foundry was easy - but if you aren't familiar with at least the basics of website management and linux you might find the process difficult and/or frustrating, as I still had to do a bit of troubleshooting above and beyond what was listed in any of the community guides.
In terms of the actual gameplay, and how the actual session is run - I haven't had to change all that much. Players still maintain master copies of their characters on D&D Beyond, the only real gameplay differences are that all the dice rolling happens inside Foundry, and players can see the exact location of everyone in the scene.
The main difference has actually been in the production pipeline - because there is a bit of work that the DM needs to do there. Maps need to be either created in a 3rd party program or imported from a sourcebook/the internet. Once you have a scene created in Foundry with your map, you need to create walls to restrict player movement and line of sight, and light the scene appropriately. This isn't at all difficult, but it does take a little bit of time. Also, because Foundry is not an officially licenced D&D product only the classes, abilities, races, spells, monsters etc. from the SRD appear. Meaning you may have to spend a bit of time creating, or finding someone else who has created, any content you are using from supplementary books (for instance XGTE).
On the whole though, I am finding that Foundry works well for me and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask.
That is interesting, as I haven't had any issues with self hosting. That is one of the reasons I have moved into investing into D&D Beyond, for the easy access to the materials. While I have bought just about everything in hard copy, it makes it hard to use having moved to online.
There are some hosting options that don't require you to run everything yourself... my understanding is that they are reasonably plug-and-play. The Forge is the main one, I think.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There are some hosting options that don't require you to run everything yourself... my understanding is that they are reasonably plug-and-play. The Forge is the main one, I think.
Yes! I completely forgot about them - I'm fairly comfortable with the server management stuff so I never looked into them in too much detail, but that sort of service would work great if you don't want to go to the bother of setting up your own.
That is interesting, as I haven't had any issues with self hosting. That is one of the reasons I have moved into investing into D&D Beyond, for the easy access to the materials. While I have bought just about everything in hard copy, it makes it hard to use having moved to online.
The self hosting thing being a problem seems to be standard in the UK, but we are also notorious in the UK for having a terrible internet infrastructure, especially as I don't live in the south-east of England. If you are elsewhere in the world that might not be a common problem.
Absolutely agree about D&D beyond being great for easy access to materials - I typically have my phone on me, less likely to be carrying around like 5 books haha. Foundry isn't so useful as a quick reference, but when it comes to actually running the game being able to internally hyperlink to abilities/spells/features etc. from basically anywhere is great. Especially as you can drag and drop a hyperlink onto a character sheet to give them said item.
My U.S. based ISP does not cause any issues with self-hosting. And since it is Spectrum cable, if there were a way to be jerks about it, they would find a way to be. So I suspect if Spectrum allows it, everyone in the US probably does.
All I have to do is open up a port on my home router and I am good to go. I leave the port open exactly 4 hours every 2 weeks -- the nights when we play. So although it is slightly risky to do, the odds I'm going to get hit on THAT port during THOSE hours are vanishingly small.
Hi! One consideration in my case is the existence of pre-generated content being available on the VTT. Real life (work, family etc) keeps me too busy to create very many maps or go into a VTT and create every monster that might come up, download tokens and token art work, import characters, download additional maps or other resources like handouts etc. (I don't know if Foundry has access to official content conversions).
As a result, I have purchased adventure content on Roll20 that is ready to run which keeps prep time to a minimum. I can read the modules/adventures offline when I get some time and then just sit down and run the game on the VTT with very little additional prep time. Currently, I have Curse of Strahd, Tales from the Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh running this way. I also previously ran Dragon of Ice Spire Peak. I have also purchased the basic books (PHB, XGtE, MM) so that character creation and monsters require limited work. I've only had a couple of characters using other sources which need to be customized and that is a one time effort.
Overall, Roll20 isn't perfect. I think the base VTT could use more development and more features specifically to support 5e and other game systems. It can be significantly enhanced if you have the time and can write java script. There are quite a few mods available to automate a number of aspects of the game but these require higher subscription levels.
The subscription model used in Roll20 is likely one of the cons to the system. Access to the full feature set requires a monthly fee. However, it is still quite usable for the basic table top features using the free mode. In addition, most of the players in my games don't pay for Roll20 since they don't need the features - they use them in my games since I am paying for the sub for myself. The only folks I know who are paying for it are also DMs.
Finally, from what I have read of other systems - Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, Tabletop Simulator, and a few others - each has their pros and cons but none are really ideal though I keep an open mind and will try them out when free trials are available. (I tested out using Roll20 for quite a while).
Roll20 has some decent integration (or so I have heard) with DDB through the Beyond20 plug in that lets you use your DDB characters in Roll20 and even make dice rolls from the DDB interface rather than in Roll20. I haven't used it personally since I don't yet own content on DDB to make it worthwhile. From the posts above, it sounds like Foundry might have some sort of similar integration (if Beyond20 uses some sort of DDB API to implement its features then it should be possible to build something similar for any VTT that allows for similar external interface access).
As it's three months later, hopefully you'll see this question...
I am really interested in the Amazon Web Services solution you are running. Can you point me to some article or source to start my learning curve on how to pull this off? The idea of having a major internet backbone and high powered servers, instead of my local ISP and laptop, is REALLY appealing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I imagine by others besides just me.
I have swapped over to being hosted by Forge, which is like $5/month, and it is super-easy to do and I will never go back to self hosting. Forge offers many advantages -- lots of automation, slick interface, etc. They also have a 2 week trial so you can test drive it if you want and see if you like it. But if you have no experience with AWS, and can afford $50 a year or so, IMO, it is well worth letting KakaRoto and the other awesome folks at Forge do all that work for you.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There is a fairly detailed tutorial on the Foundry wiki, you'll want to do this first to set up the virtual machine & storage bucket, then this to install Foundry to a Ubuntu VM, configure a process manager & sort the web frontend. Other tutorials are available for different hosting options & operating systems, these are just the ones I'm most familiar with.
A t2.micro instance is more than capable of running Foundry, so it also lets you take advantage of a free year on AWS, which is also handy if you want to play about with it but decide to go a different way in the end. Just remember to shut down your instance if you decide not to use it!
Finally, I will say that configuring for self-hosting is reasonably technical, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you have experience with at least the basics of server & website management. Decent knowledge of the operating system your VM is running is important too, as I had to do a bit of troubleshooting to get process manager playing nice. I haven't used it myself, but Forge looks like a good solution for people who don't want to get into self-hosting, and depending on how cheap I can get an AWS instance once I actually have to pay for it I might switch to Forge anyway.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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Hello!
Further questions, as I have just this year transitioned to online only play in response to The Covid, who among us uses Foundry? How do you best use D&D Beyond and Foundry respectively? If you don't use Foundry, how do you play? Just discord and D&D Beyond directly with the beta dice rolling feature? I am trying to become more efficient/keep my games high quality, and while I have many years in running games, I am fairly new to the virtual space in doing so, and thought people might share some of their thoughts/methods etc.
Thank you!
I use Foundry for nearly everything. I have found it superior to every other system, definitely including DDB, for just about everything.
My players do use DDB for their character sheets, but I use a mod that imports their sheets directly into Foundry. They can do the imports themselves (I have just found out -- I used to do it for them) as long as you have linked their Foundry character sheet with their DDB URL. There are instructions on how to do this in the mod.
Other than importing data from here (or the books) into Foundry, everything else is easily doable in Foundry and I find the system easy to use. You can make maps in Dungeondraft and direct import them (I think from Dungeon Fog as well but I haven't tried that one). Or you can import maps from anywhere you want as jpegs. The DD importer (and probably other importers) will automatically add the line-of-site features for walls and doors... if it is a jpg you will have to do that manually.
There are a ton of great mods (I use about 30 of them) to make the playing experience more enjoyable. I love Foundry and will be using it for the foreseeable future.
Feel free to post specific questions here and I or others can help you.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I recently switched from using theatre-of-the-mind, using D&D Beyond for dice rolling to a Foundry instance I host through AWS (using Discord to handle voice/text chat for both). Basically, some of my players were finding it more difficult to keep track of the more complex combats and wanted to switch to using a VTT. Foundry is absolutely a great system and I'm enjoying using it, but there are definitely pros and cons to it.
It is really flexible, more so than Roll20 (which I didn't get on with), and it is very simple to define new homebrew items or modify ones defined in the SRD. Each instance of an item (say, 2 longswords belonging to different characters) can also be modified without changing the "master". You can end up doing some quite complex things with the right set of extensions and/or a little JavaScript knowledge - especially automating or greatly simplifying some of the busywork of being a DM. It also offers all the play benefits of any of the VTTs out there, moving tokens around a map etc., so if any of your players (or you!) are very visually oriented, they will enjoy that.
However! Although self-hosting is listed as an option, in reality most ISPs won't permit the sort of port forwarding required - so you will need acquire a server somewhere. As I said, I'm using AWS, but other options are available. If you have set up/run servers before, you likely won't encounter any issues as the actual install of Foundry was easy - but if you aren't familiar with at least the basics of website management and linux you might find the process difficult and/or frustrating, as I still had to do a bit of troubleshooting above and beyond what was listed in any of the community guides.
In terms of the actual gameplay, and how the actual session is run - I haven't had to change all that much. Players still maintain master copies of their characters on D&D Beyond, the only real gameplay differences are that all the dice rolling happens inside Foundry, and players can see the exact location of everyone in the scene.
The main difference has actually been in the production pipeline - because there is a bit of work that the DM needs to do there. Maps need to be either created in a 3rd party program or imported from a sourcebook/the internet. Once you have a scene created in Foundry with your map, you need to create walls to restrict player movement and line of sight, and light the scene appropriately. This isn't at all difficult, but it does take a little bit of time. Also, because Foundry is not an officially licenced D&D product only the classes, abilities, races, spells, monsters etc. from the SRD appear. Meaning you may have to spend a bit of time creating, or finding someone else who has created, any content you are using from supplementary books (for instance XGTE).
On the whole though, I am finding that Foundry works well for me and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask.
Sure! I dunno what to ask specifically, though. I know about character importing, I have made maps using DD, and used the importing mod to bring them in. You haven't mentioned it, but some map makers have also started making mods that are ready made, so you don't even have to do that. How do you import the "books" into Foundry? Anyway, this basically what got me to move from Roll20 which I was heavily invested into, to come to foundry, and then get into the D&D Beyond ecosystem.
That is interesting, as I haven't had any issues with self hosting. That is one of the reasons I have moved into investing into D&D Beyond, for the easy access to the materials. While I have bought just about everything in hard copy, it makes it hard to use having moved to online.
There are some hosting options that don't require you to run everything yourself... my understanding is that they are reasonably plug-and-play. The Forge is the main one, I think.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Yes! I completely forgot about them - I'm fairly comfortable with the server management stuff so I never looked into them in too much detail, but that sort of service would work great if you don't want to go to the bother of setting up your own.
The self hosting thing being a problem seems to be standard in the UK, but we are also notorious in the UK for having a terrible internet infrastructure, especially as I don't live in the south-east of England. If you are elsewhere in the world that might not be a common problem.
Absolutely agree about D&D beyond being great for easy access to materials - I typically have my phone on me, less likely to be carrying around like 5 books haha. Foundry isn't so useful as a quick reference, but when it comes to actually running the game being able to internally hyperlink to abilities/spells/features etc. from basically anywhere is great. Especially as you can drag and drop a hyperlink onto a character sheet to give them said item.
My U.S. based ISP does not cause any issues with self-hosting. And since it is Spectrum cable, if there were a way to be jerks about it, they would find a way to be. So I suspect if Spectrum allows it, everyone in the US probably does.
All I have to do is open up a port on my home router and I am good to go. I leave the port open exactly 4 hours every 2 weeks -- the nights when we play. So although it is slightly risky to do, the odds I'm going to get hit on THAT port during THOSE hours are vanishingly small.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Hi! One consideration in my case is the existence of pre-generated content being available on the VTT. Real life (work, family etc) keeps me too busy to create very many maps or go into a VTT and create every monster that might come up, download tokens and token art work, import characters, download additional maps or other resources like handouts etc. (I don't know if Foundry has access to official content conversions).
As a result, I have purchased adventure content on Roll20 that is ready to run which keeps prep time to a minimum. I can read the modules/adventures offline when I get some time and then just sit down and run the game on the VTT with very little additional prep time. Currently, I have Curse of Strahd, Tales from the Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh running this way. I also previously ran Dragon of Ice Spire Peak. I have also purchased the basic books (PHB, XGtE, MM) so that character creation and monsters require limited work. I've only had a couple of characters using other sources which need to be customized and that is a one time effort.
Overall, Roll20 isn't perfect. I think the base VTT could use more development and more features specifically to support 5e and other game systems. It can be significantly enhanced if you have the time and can write java script. There are quite a few mods available to automate a number of aspects of the game but these require higher subscription levels.
The subscription model used in Roll20 is likely one of the cons to the system. Access to the full feature set requires a monthly fee. However, it is still quite usable for the basic table top features using the free mode. In addition, most of the players in my games don't pay for Roll20 since they don't need the features - they use them in my games since I am paying for the sub for myself. The only folks I know who are paying for it are also DMs.
Finally, from what I have read of other systems - Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, Tabletop Simulator, and a few others - each has their pros and cons but none are really ideal though I keep an open mind and will try them out when free trials are available. (I tested out using Roll20 for quite a while).
Roll20 has some decent integration (or so I have heard) with DDB through the Beyond20 plug in that lets you use your DDB characters in Roll20 and even make dice rolls from the DDB interface rather than in Roll20. I haven't used it personally since I don't yet own content on DDB to make it worthwhile. From the posts above, it sounds like Foundry might have some sort of similar integration (if Beyond20 uses some sort of DDB API to implement its features then it should be possible to build something similar for any VTT that allows for similar external interface access).
As it's three months later, hopefully you'll see this question...
I am really interested in the Amazon Web Services solution you are running. Can you point me to some article or source to start my learning curve on how to pull this off? The idea of having a major internet backbone and high powered servers, instead of my local ISP and laptop, is REALLY appealing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I imagine by others besides just me.
Thanks!
Can't help you with AWS. I have not used it.
I have swapped over to being hosted by Forge, which is like $5/month, and it is super-easy to do and I will never go back to self hosting. Forge offers many advantages -- lots of automation, slick interface, etc. They also have a 2 week trial so you can test drive it if you want and see if you like it. But if you have no experience with AWS, and can afford $50 a year or so, IMO, it is well worth letting KakaRoto and the other awesome folks at Forge do all that work for you.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There is a fairly detailed tutorial on the Foundry wiki, you'll want to do this first to set up the virtual machine & storage bucket, then this to install Foundry to a Ubuntu VM, configure a process manager & sort the web frontend. Other tutorials are available for different hosting options & operating systems, these are just the ones I'm most familiar with.
A t2.micro instance is more than capable of running Foundry, so it also lets you take advantage of a free year on AWS, which is also handy if you want to play about with it but decide to go a different way in the end. Just remember to shut down your instance if you decide not to use it!
Finally, I will say that configuring for self-hosting is reasonably technical, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you have experience with at least the basics of server & website management. Decent knowledge of the operating system your VM is running is important too, as I had to do a bit of troubleshooting to get process manager playing nice. I haven't used it myself, but Forge looks like a good solution for people who don't want to get into self-hosting, and depending on how cheap I can get an AWS instance once I actually have to pay for it I might switch to Forge anyway.