First of all, my apologies for not putting up a new post last week (aside from my usual updates about what I've written for Money Crashers). My excuse is that I had to spend most of the weekend at a conference for the Citizens' Climate Lobby — the organization I joined back in January that's working to get the Energy Innovation and Climate Dividend Act passed. I should add that, in a normal year, I probably wouldn't have gone to this conference at all, since it would have taken place in Washington, DC. Traveling and hanging out in a large crowd of strangers are two of the things I find most stressful, and I certainly wouldn't be willing to sacrifice an entire weekend (including part of Friday), not to mention the dollar cost of the tickets, all for the sake of learning a couple of things that I could just as easily read about online. But this year, on account of COVID, the conference was entirely online, so instead of losing the whole weekend, I lost only Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday afternoon. Plus there was no travel, no crowding, and no rushing around. In short, this conference, which would have been a huge hassle in person, was only a minor hassle in its online format.
I bring this up because it's such a rarity: an activity that was actually easier and more agreeable to take part in online. Sadly, the same cannot be said of any of our normal social activities. We were never really social butterflies, but we had our few regular gatherings: Morris dance practice on Thursdays, the occasional concert at the Troubadour, board game nights every couple of weeks, and of course, our two RPG (role-playing game) campaigns. When the Great Isolation began in March, all these forms of social activity became off-limits, and we've had to either do without altogether or make do with online substitutes that can't really measure up to the real thing.
Still, an inferior substitute is far better than no social activity at all, and so we've muddled through as best we could with what we had available. For instance, we had to set aside all those nifty and inexpensive minis Brian had designed for his Wildemount campaign — along with the Wildemount campaign itself, since the local game store we'd gone out of our way to order the book from shut down when the quarantine started. (It seems to be open again now, but our order apparently got lost in the shuffle, as they never called to notify us about it.) So instead, we ordered a copy of the Eberron campaign guide from big old, mean old, corporate old Barnes & Noble, and Brian began running a new, socially distanced Ebberon campaign.
To make this work, we needed a couple of different technological tools. First, we needed a way to see and hear each other online. We started out using Discord for this purpose, but it proved to be kind of buggy. For many of us, video didn't work at all; the computer would just freeze whenever we tried it, so we ended up with audio only, which wasn't a very satisfying substitute for a social gathering. Eventually, we switched over to Zoom, the new standard for all forms of human interaction, and that worked better — not perfectly, but adequately most of the time. Its biggest downside is that the free version of it kicks you out of your meeting after 40 minutes, but since our group has one corporate user and one academic user who can set up meetings of indefinite length, we got around that problem easily.
Finding a way to visualize battle scenes proved a bit harder. Our first approach was to try out a Google Jamboard, which Brian and I had tried in our other campaign. This is basically just a big online notepad where members of a group can insert text and images. Brian would use the pen feature to hand-draw a map, and we'd use two sets of sticky notes to represent our characters: one to show the initiative order, and one to show our actual locations on the map relative to the monsters and each other. As you can see from the screenshot below, this could get a bit confusing.
We considered moving to a more sophisticated "virtual tabletop" designed specifically for online gaming, such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, which would have made it easier to incorporate maps, monsters, and other artwork from the official Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks. These systems also include other handy features for gaming, such as storing the game rules and character sheets right in the app and doing the math for you automatically whenever you roll dice to swing a sword or sling a spell. But they had two problems: first, they were fairly resource-intensive pieces of software, and given theamount of trouble we'd had using just the Jamboard and Discord at the same time, we feared they would tax our systems too heavily. And second, both of them (at least at the time) charged a monthly subscription fee, which every member of our party would need to pay in order to use it. Given the relative infrequency with which we actually managed to get everyone together for a game session, we didn't think it would be worth the cost. (Since then, both systems have changed their pricing model; Fantasy Grounds gives a choice of a one-time fee or a subscription, and Roll20 lets you sign up for free and instead charges a one-time fee for each game sourcebook you add content from.)
But then I discovered Foundry VTT (for Virtual Table Top). I think it was the Dungeons & Dragons group on Reddit that turned me on to it, but regardless, it was a literal game changer.
For one thing, this system offered maps not merely as good as, but actually better than the fancy, three-dimensional Dwarven Forge battle maps that we routinely salivate over when watching Critical Role. Better how, you ask? Simple: these maps can not only show the terrain in detail, but can show each individual player a different view of it, reflecting exactly what their character would be able to see from their current position. If your view of something is blocked by a wall, you don't have to ask the dungeon master, "Can I see that from where I am?"; you just look at the map, and what you see is what you get. If your character has darkvision, they can see in the dark while other characters are blind; if your character is flying, the software keeps track of how their perspective would change based on how high up they are. Light sources within a room and even background noises, such as a crackling fire or the roar of a tavern crowd, fade in and out as you pass through.
And that's only the beginning of what Foundry VTT can do. It can automatically measure the radius of a spell for you, so you don't have to get out a ruler to see who would and wouldn't be hit by your fireball. It can automatically do the math when you make a roll to hit, to damage, or to use an ability. It can keep track of your character's hit points and spell slots, so you don't have to mark them separately on paper — and it can do the same with the monsters you're fighting. It can track initiative order, so you always know whose turn it is. It can import maps you've drawn in another program, or provide you with tools to create them within the app. It can even provide audio and video connections within the app, so you don't need to keep a separate Zoom window open (though we haven't tried this feature yet for fear it would overtax our systems).
OK, you may be asking, but can't Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds do all this too? Well, yes, they can certainly do at least most of it. What really made Foundry VTT superior for us was its pricing model. Because to use it, you need only one copy of the software, owned by only one person in the group. That person then turns the computer that has the software into their own private server, and everyone else can log in from there. So for a one-time expense of 50 bucks, you can use this software with anyone you want, basically forever.
Now, there may be a few features that aren't quite as easy to use in Foundry VTT as they are in Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. For instance, you can use Foundry VTT with any game system, but the flip side of this is that it doesn't contain a lot of pre-loaded content — maps, characters, rules, monsters — for any one system, such as D&D. There's a small library of pre-loaded monsters and maps available, but if you want to use anything fancier, you have to key it in yourself. But this honestly isn't that hard to do. You can also import your maps from anywhere you like and adjust them to fit a standard grid, after which you can add walls, light sources, or whatever other features you want your terrain to have. So while you don't have as much ready-made stuff to use, you can also add your own stuff in basically any form you like. (Brian has added some maps copied from the sourcebooks, made some — like the airship below — himself, and borrowed some from other players who made them available online.)
Which brings us to this additional technological tool we've been thinking about adding to our lineup: Game Master Engine. I learned about this one from Reddit as well, in a post by its creator on the D&D subreddit. It's a tool for creating 3-D maps of indoor and outdoor terrain, which you can then export as PNG files to any virtual tabletop you use — including Foundry VTT. And when I say maps, I mean really elaborate, beautiful maps with tons of options. You can not only choose all sorts of terrain, you can add animated features like misty waterfalls, crackling campfires, and wind-stirred trees. You can import character and monster minis. You can change the time of day, the weather, and the colors. And that's just in the basic version of the software, which — did I mention? — is completely free.
The only catch, as far as I can tell, is that it only works on Windows machines. But Brian happens to have one of those, so we really have nothing to lose by testing it out. Other Redditors who have tried it say it is just as easy to work with as the video makes it look, but if it turns out not to be all that handy for us, oh well, it didn't cost us anything. And if we try it and find it's very handy, we can shell out a mere 15 bucks extra to upgrade to the "pro" version, which has a bunch of additional assets.
In fact, our new online maps are so handy and full-featured, we might even want to continue using them once (if the gods be pleased) we can actually sit down around a real gaming table again. Admittedly, this would be tricky; first we'd have to find a way to put a screen on the table where everyone, including the dungeon master, could see it, and then we'd have to figure out how to switch back and forth between characters to get the different perspectives on the scene. (We could do it by each logging in separately and looking at our own screens, but sitting around a table with our faces buried in separate screens would kind of take out most of the social element of the game.) It certainly wouldn't be as easy as moving around paper minis on our picture-frame battle map.
But if we can find a way to make it work, it would be one more example of something that actually got better as a result of our time in isolation. And goodness knows we could use more of those.
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