How do you like it? I was hoping a community as sufficiently nerdy as the ttrpg community would have made an open source alternative by now but it looks like selfhosting proprietary software with a modding platform is as close as we can get.
How do you like it? I was hoping a community as sufficiently nerdy as the ttrpg community would have made an open source alternative by now but it looks like selfhosting proprietary software with a modding platform is as close as we can get.
Started on actual tabletops with a map drawn on paper, then moved online and through a few VTTs once the pandemic kicked off: Foundry is the GOAT. It’s beyond GOAT. Foundry solves problems you didn’t even realise existed.
The biggest issue it has is setup - installing and running it on a home computer is not particularly difficult, but it does require a decent amount of computing power and internet upload speed, so if you’re lacking either you’re probably gonna need to pay for hosting on something like Forge. It also requires more setup of a world just to bring players in, so you can’t just throw some tokens on a blank background and start playing like in Roll20. You can waste a lot of time installing endless modules to customise things just how you want, too.
After that though, you’re genuinely golden in a way you will never be on something like Roll20. Setting up a character really is as simple as dragging and dropping from the compendium. Drop a weapon in your inventory and it’ll make the macros for attack and damage. Drag an effect or condition onto a character’s token and it’ll apply the bonuses or maluses automatically. Background music and SFX are easy to set up and play, or you can have them automatically play when you load a specific map, or even confine them so they can only be heard when the character’s tokens are in a specific room.
Someone else already mentioned PF2e, but I’ll reiterate it here: While Foundry is already great, PF2e is where it shines brightest. It’ll run pretty much any other system at least as well as its competitors (which means you’ll have to do your own work automating some parts, or do them “by hand”), but the volunteers behind the PF2e system do absolutely immaculate work implementing every possible aspect of the game, sometimes within a few days of the content releasing. Being able to choose any action and just drag it into your character sheet, then click a button to have the computer do the maths, not only makes playing a breeze but helps highlight how even though there are a lot of rules, the mechanical similarities make them very intuitive to use and learn. Add in one of the official premade Adventure Paths or Modules (which can look pricey, but generally come out to £5-£10 each when spread among a group) and you can literally run the entire thing without any preparation beyond importing the module and setting up characters - for the Beginners Box adventure, you probably wouldn’t even need to read the PF2e’s rules beforehand.
I’m glad to hear all the up front effort and tackling the learning curve is worth the time.
I’m curious what your experience with this is like. I’m renting a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and only a single core and I haven’t had an issue so far. But then again my world is tiny so far and I’m only playing with 2 “players” at once, one for the GM and one for the map screen.
Thinking about it, my perspective on power requirements is probably quite skewed atm - I started using it about 4 editions ago, when there were some particularly bad problems with loading times, but it has gotten noticably faster a several times over the past few years. Loading times when I was on a broadband connection could stretch into a couple of minutes for some players, but now I’m on fibre it’s just the one guy with shitty internet that suffers that. With just a GM and map display I can’t really imagine you’ll be doing enough to cause problems.
If you do need to speed things up, small worlds help a lot, along with limited extra modules. A world is mostly made up of scenes (maps), actors (PCs, NPCs) and items (nearly everything else) - smaller, lower resolution maps help a lot, but so does regularly clearing out unused actors and items. If you need to go back to them intermittently, compendia will let you store all 3 on your hard drive, so the game won’t try to immediately load it all, but you can still access it and load it in quickly if you need to.