After we pointed out Fantasy Grounds Unity adding Linux support a while ago, some readers pointed out another virtual tabletop experience for fans of making and playing tabletop RPGs with Foundry VTT.
Foundry VTT (Foundry Virtual Tabletop), is a self-hosted solution making it quite brilliant actually. Only the "game master" needs to buy it, and they then host it for players to be able to join. There's no special tiers or editions, just one single purchase to gain access to the entire setup. Buy it, set it up and get users to join in the browser - it couldn't get easier. It has wide support for various features like character sheets, rolling dice, exploring battlemaps, moving heroic tokens and the list just goes on to include rich dynamic lighting, fog of war, audio playlists, video chat using webcams and so on. It really is huge.
Check out their release trailer:
Direct Link
The developer of Foundry said they stick to a few guiding principles when developing it:
- Offer one-time purchase software for GMs where players can connect for free.
- Relentlessly innovate using powerful and modern web technologies.
- Empower community developers with a best-in-class API and modding tools.
- You own your own content; no dependency on external services and no feature gating.
- Provide a powerful system agnostic framework that can be extended for homebrew.
- Incorporate direct integrations to other helpful game-mastering tools.
It's proven to be popular too. Not only can you buy a copy of it but you can also support the developer on Patreon, where they currently get over £6,500 per month from supporters - so it's clearly found its place amongst digital tabletop fans.
Popular with rights holders too, as they're bringing over some official games to it too like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay from Cubicle 7 which arrived on Foundry earlier this month.
You can buy Foundry VTT from the official site.
Update: As an added note, the developer mentioned to us on Twitter that it's Linux-first, "Foundry was built for Linux first - and then I invested in making sure it could work for other OS".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: FoHThe trick is using cut and paste on the token, Ctrl+X Ctrl+V
This removes them from the combat tracker, since the token gets destroyed and recreated anew.
Quoting: FoHIf one wanted to create automatic warp points, there is the Multilevel tokens module.
The individual warp points need to be set up before they can be used, they're not ad-hoc like, say, a Dimension Door spell. (They might also remove the token from the combat tracker, but I haven't checked.)
These are both not the correct solution for the problem at hand.
QuoteThese are both not the correct solution for the problem at hand.
You didn't mention combat, which totally throws a wrench in that workflow, yes.
For those who got the impression that this was not something you could do otherwise, they are now a bit more enlightened 👍
Quoting: FoHHaha, our gamemaster once used dynamic lighting on roll20. We all hated it. Mostly because it was somewhat buggy and decreased usability, but also because we hurt ourselves in a bigger brawl.Quoting: PendragonThat looks really dope -- I wonder if it actually cuts down on prep-time for DM's or if it's just a different set of things you need to prepare?
If using features such as dynamic lighting, your prep time can certainly increase 😄
Last edited by const on 22 November 2020 at 9:07 am UTC
Projectile Vomit Nov 22, 2020
The whole list of currently officially (*) support game systems is here: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/systems .
(*) "Officially", really. Foundry itself doesn't support any game systems, those are system modules maintained by other people than the main Foundry development teams. The exception is D&D 5e, because the main Foundry developer uses Foundry for D&D 5e, so he also develops the D&D 5e system module, from what I understand.
Usually, the system modules are FLOSS, too, and take patches, feature requests, etc. One of my players has submitted some bug reports and patches for the Pathfinder 1e system and its German translation.
Quoting: The_LuxCan you tell me, if it's possible to create my own systems from PnPs that aren't supported and if this is possible, how to do this? Do I need HTML, PHP and Javascript? Or do they use another language?HTML+CSS, Javascript, Json is all you need. Many VTTs claim to have system agnostic core and that they're fully extendable but Foundry was by far the easiest to grok, the data layout / manipulation is straightforward and logical but it's also one of the most malleable. One of the modules adds 3D dice to the game which didn't have the support for them in the first place.. That's how much control you have over the rendering.
Quoting: PendragonThat looks really dope -- I wonder if it actually cuts down on prep-time for DM's or if it's just a different set of things you need to prepare?
I guess it depends on the prep you do.. I've started to do my prep work straight in Foundry and I'm more organized and at least it feels easier than before. It took several hours to input all the data I wanted from the books but now it's pretty smooth sailing. And on that point I must mention that the data is stored in json -based database so I'm quite confident that if anything replaces Foundry I'll be able to programmatically transfer all the data over.. it's not held hostage on some server somewhere or in a proprietary data format, that's a definite plus for me.
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