This Is The BEST VTT (And Its Not Even Close) 

Bro I imagine you have some information about format choice and scene management that makes all that run well? Do you self host or use a service? I've been trying to go webm/webp when I can.

@@Numberi i self host, and most of my stuff is automation, macros, ui, stuff that isn't too hefty, so far my players have no complaints other than the occasional slow down if I have a particularly large encounter or map. I also have a beast PC which likely helps.

I wanna preface this by saying that if you prefer Fantasy Grounds, then don't let anyone force you into using a VTT you don't like. While many people like Foundry, it doesn't mean that it's for everyone. 🔨 I think that the reason many people like the Foundry UI is because it feels more modern and (in my opinion) is easier to navigate than other VTTs that offer the same features that Foundry does in the way of customization, modding, automation, and organization. Plus, from what my players have told me, it feels a lot more neat and they appreciate that you can customize the UI with mods. And from a gamemaster's standpoint, I really appreciate how easy it is to manage my worlds, game systems, and mods. Plus, there are tons of settings and features that you can easily tweak in a world to customize your mods, game system, and rules however you would like. I'm not sure what you mean by "monster manual" but I assume you mean like a monster NPC sheet, compendium, or something like that. 🤔 In my experience i haven't had any issues making monsters or organizing them, but if you're having problems then I'd recommend popping into the Foundry discord server and asking for some assistance because they're extremely friendly over there and are more than willing to help you if you're experiencing some issues with mods, compatibility, hosting, etc. 😁 Regarding using newer versions of FVTT and mods, sadly with Foundry's current policy of not sharing new/in-progress builds with modders, it makes things tricky. The way things currently are, you shouldn't upgrade to the newest version of Foundry as soon as it's released AND expect to keep mod compatibility. This is because Foundry versions normally come with a lot of new code, features, and changes, and it's unrealistic to expect modders to release a new version of their mod the day of or week when a new version of Foundry comes out. ☹️ When a new version of Foundry is released, it normally takes the modders anywhere from a week to a month to get things sorted out because many of them are not being paid to maintain their mods, so they work on them in their free time (and sometimes they do it without any help). So as a general rule of thumb, the modding community advises that if you want to continue using mods in your worlds, you should wait for a stable build of a Foundry version to be released, then check every now and then to see if your favorite mods have been updated to work with the new version of Foundry. And sadly, not all modders work on a set schedule or are very vocal about when they plan to release a new version of their mod that's compatible with the new version of Foundry. I know it's a bit annoying, but that's the give and take of using mods on Foundry as it currently is. I hope this was useful in explaining things or clearing things up. Happy gaming! 🧙‍♂️

Just don't update your foundry after you have it set up how you want it set up. There is no reason to update your mods or OS if everything is working for you. I don't know FGU, but I'm willing to bet that foundry could be set up to operate just like it, while offering other options, should you want them. I have a theater of the mind campaign, a tactical shooter, and a traditional VTT style game running on foundry. If you didn't know better, you would think they were entirely different VTTs, due to how drastically different they operate. I had my first game up and running 2 days after I downloaded Foundry, and it was my first VTT. Maybe it's not as intuitive as some others, I don't know, but it's definitely intuitive enough.

Not sure what game system you're working in. But if you are referring to the character sheets for monsters in d&d, I can understand your frustration. I would very much recommend tidy 5e sheet which will give you a much better sheet for NPCs and frankly players. While the new player sheet looks nice, it still has a bit to go before it is holy featured. With regards to foundry V12 , I don't believe that is even unstable yet. Foundry does make it quite clear that you should not upgrade major versions until they are stable. And as the video author mentioned, most mods are not going to be updated on day one. I will push back on him saying that foundry doesn't give module developers early builds. They definitely do. The issue. Is that the builds change rapidly. The big modules that have large patreon support bases can be updated on lunch day or within a few days. But, the smaller mod developers who either don't actively follow the updates to the core software or get around to it once it's completely released due in fact, take a little bit of time.

As a player, I was shocked at how fast battles are in Fantasy Grounds Unity. 5x faster.... easy. My very first session my DM kept throwing Zombies at us, one per PC every round until we figured out how to stop them.... so, many, zombies. It was super fun, but only took about 30 minutes. The same battle in Roll 20 or Foundry would have taken 2 and a half hours. Heck, a simple fight on Roll 20 or Foundry can take an hour. Rolling down the well is a simple function that all VTTs can do, but FGU just does right... another great separator IMO.

@@nattertot re: Monster Manual - I have a library module in FGU that has every 5E D&D creature published, with tokens and pictures. If I want to build an encounter on the fly, I just open the module, search for what I want (by name, cr, type, abilities, etc) and then close the module when I'm done. Or I can just drop it right into the combat tracker and everything is ready to go. Token on the map is linked to the entry, all modifiers, effects, everything is set up. I've tinkered around with Foundry quite a bit still just trying to find what the allure is, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "people who haven't used FGU". The "ease of interface" thing is especially headscratching because nothing about the interface was intuitive. Customizable UI? FGU has that too. Anyway, I just wanted to explain what I meant by MM.

I completely agree. Roll20 is great for beginners and even moreso in Owlbear Rodeo's case since it's free and fairly intuitive.

That is an interesting point. Fantasy Grounds seems really really awesome to me, as it can do so much work for you if you want to, but has the flexiblity to easily ignore that automation. (Also the classic edition really will run on a potato PC just fine). But having been a FG user for a very long time now (as it was the only particularly good business model VTT and just about the only VTT that worked with many rulesets and the coreRPG engine lets you play any other rules), so that learning curve is so far in the past for me, and its pretty easy to teach your players any bit that isn't immediately apparent to them. Foundry looks good, actually is pretty similar really, but it definitely falls short of FG in some areas as well. So if I was starting out now I'd be at least a little torn.

Welcome aboard! Happy to hear you enjoyed the vid! 😁

I haven't used owlbear, but I'm willing to bet that foundry could become a clone of it, if you set it up properly.

​@@abettermind I could spend time setting up Foundry to mimic Owlbear, or I can just use Owlbear :P Yes, You can do everything you can do in Owlbear with Foundry and much more. It's not about having the fanciest tool, it's about having a tool that does what you want it to and that I can use with swiftness and ease. That's the appeal of Owlbear, it's simplicity; It's so quick and easy to use.

Hahaha 😆 well I'm happy to hear you got a kick out of it!

Carousel Combat Tracker by theripper93. 🧙‍♂️

@nattertot Thanks, this module is super cool upon testing, and hopefully keeps a good indicator for my players now.

That's for if you want to self host, which is worth it imo if you don't want to pay for a third party to host your server. However if you do want it to be hosted, most of the third party hosting services that I know of offer hosting for fairly cheap.

I'll have to check it out! Sounds interesting. 😁

There is a RU-vid widget premium mod, and I think there's a browser widget mod, so probably! 😆

How hard is it to find a group on it?

@@Iridescence93 How hard is it to find one on Fantasy Grounds or your home play table? Why are you using a VTT to find a group? This isn't a MMO group finder.

@@christopherg2347 I don't have people where I live that are into TT RPGs so I don't have much choice. Roll 20 is probably the worst site as a VTT but it has the most people playing on it so that is a consideration for me.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I'd definitely still use the Levels and Wall Height mods because they work a lot better than the non-mod method detailed below. 👇 You can combine foreground and background images for a scene to achieve a multilevel effect, and then if you add in some tiles for things like wooden guard towers, tree tops, building roofs, and stuff like that, you can place a token on top of it if you change the tokens elevation. But, things get a little wonky with walls and vision, which is why the creator of the Wall Height and Levels mod expanded on this basic feature and made it so much better. From what I understand the FVTT team want to eventually make these features a part of the base software, but with great mods like Levels and Wall Height existing, it's probably not on their priority list. Hope this helps! 🧙‍♂️

No joke, I considered adding a counter to the video when I was editing it. Towards the end of editing I just started hearing vee-tea-tea. 😂

Only one person (the GM/person who wants to host) needs to purchase a foundry license. foundryvtt.com/article/faq/#:~:text=Each%20license%20allows%20for%20hosting,need%20to%20purchase%20the%20software).

@@nattertot thank you so much

It's actually completely optional to update Foundry and mods when a new version for either of them comes out. 😁 Like right now, the latest version of Foundry was just released, (version 12) but I'm purposely staying on version 11.315 because a lot of my mods haven't released a V 12 version yet. But once they all do, all I have to do is click "Update All" and then all of the mods update themselves to version 12 (which is really convenient!). And in the case where some of them are still a little buggy, or maybe I just don't like the new version of Foundry, I can just revert back to a previous version if I want to (as long as I backed up my data at least once).

Yeah it is definitely lacking in that aspect. There have been votes to to better integrate mobile support but they never win. I must confess I never vote for it just because I don't use it and none of my players do either. All are late millennial or early gen z so they aren't nearly as touch screen dependent.

I love using 3D VTTs as well. The scenes you can create on a VTT like Tailspire will always be more immersive than a 2D scene/map, but they also take a lot longer to make (or at least in my experience).

​@@nattertotThey definitely can take a lot longer. Thankfully RPG Stories and Talespire both have the option to share & download community creations. RPG Stories also has a quick room builder option if you just need something simple, and is adding AI generation in their upcoming expansion so you won't have to worry about extra prep time.

​​@@Oniphire I've been meaning to check out RPG Stories since they're one of the newer ones, but I haven't gotten around to it quite yet. I might need to make a video about it and Talespire sometime soon. 👀 I need to give the 3D VTT community some love and appreciation.

You can combine foreground and background images for a scene to achieve a multilevel effect, and then if you add in some tiles for things like wooden guard towers, tree tops, building roofs, and stuff like that, you can place a token on top of it if you change the tokens elevation. OR, if you want to get a little more complicated for the sake of making super intricate multilevel maps, you can download the "Levels" and "Wall Height" mods. I'd heavily recommend looking into them. 😁

@@nattertot I used those mods to set up a 5 story Wizard Tower, home made maps and everything, it took a while yes, but damn did the players love it. =)

"The best" will always be dependent upon needs and perspective. But with regard to hosting, there are services out there that will host your games for relatively cheap (I pay $4.50/mo for The Forge).

​@@this_epic_nameAbsolutely, but this rather undermines the review's emphasis on "only one thing to buy, ever!" stance.

You can also use radmin/hamachi or any apps that simulates network to do it so. I prefer the self hosting because my pc and internet can handle it but it's too much for you or you don't feel safe, try the ones I mentioned (or go to the cloud configuration where you can get a free cloud server to host foundry, you fan find on the wiki ai think)

I would still recommend giving it a try if you're still unsure, but I definitely get being intimidated by all the talk of mods surrounding Foundry, and it's easy to get carried away with mods (especially since they're so easy to download and one of the biggest selling points for FVTT) but you can still utilize the base features of foundry, have maybe 3 or 4 mods for 3D dice + additional skins and maybe some quality of life improvements, and not be overwhelmed. And you don't even have to download any mods if you don't want to, and it's still a great VTT imo. But if you're looking for simplistic VTTs that aren't very complicated, then Roll20 or Owlbear Rodeo are great ones to check out as well. Hope this helps, and happy gaming! 🎲🧝‍♂️

@@nattertot Thanks. I used to be into Fantasy Grounds but switched to roll 20 since all my friends preferred that. I do see the limits of roll 20 especially with some rpgs that I would like to play but are only available on Foundry. I guess at some point I will have to try it out....

My issue with tailspire is that it has been in beta forever and the features are not coming in in any reasonable sort of time. Also, at this time they don't really have much plans for rules implementation for any game systems. Everything is rather manual.

No rules built in but they are going to add ways to build rules yourself. Personally, that's one reason why I love TaleSpire so much. I don't want to play a CRPG. Foundry is awesome but it's not really a virtual tabletop. By that I mean it does not simply replicate the experience of sitting at a table with a battle map and/or terrain and miniatures. TaleSpire is exactly that. Foundry with all its bells and whistles is moving the game closer and closer to CRPG territory. That's fine if it's what you want to play, but that's not me. My players and I use TaleSpire only as a way to represent tactical situations IN 3D. People playing Foundry and Roll20 and other 2D VTTs (for lack of a better name) really miss out on the immersion and tactical difference that having the vertical element presents. Yes, TaleSpire is still in Early Access and the big features of the game come slowly, but it's being developed by a very small, passionate, dedicated, and responsive team. Their community engagement on their Discord channel is awesome. I was working on setting up a Roll20 campaign when TaleSpire came out and as GM I found I spent all my time in Roll20 programming macros and filling out monster and NPC character sheets. Foundry is, or can be, just as labor intensive for the GM if you want to put in all the special stuff. Personally, I don't need character sheets and rulebooks and macros to roll dice. Old school, baby. Pen & paper all the way. But, of course, YMMV!