Getting Nerdy(er) with RPG Virtual Tabletops
Since the Pandemic started there has been a lot of developer energy thrown into creating virtual table tops for role playing games. There are some excellent choices out there, both free and paid. Roll20 is probably the best known, but Fantasy Grounds is a close second. For those that don’t know, these platforms provide tools to the GM and players that try to solve some challenges that online play presents. You don’t need a “VTT” to play, of course, but with them you can have online maps instead of paper ones, digital tokens instead of miniatures, all manner of sound and visual helpers, dice rollers, and a lot more.
My VTTs of choice have been Foundry VTT and Encounter+. Both have a relatively steep learning curve, fairly nerdy fanbases, and sets of pros and cons. Encounter+ is the smaller app, built by a smaller team (of one), and as the name implies, it tends to focus on the RPG Encounter: battle maps, tokens, initiative tracker, easy damage tracking. It’s generally much simpler in practice, and its growth is slower. But the biggest benefit of using Encounter+ is the fact that you can use it with either Mac or iPadOS. You can actually run games using an iPad, while you can’t actually run Foundry in a mobile browser at this point.
FoundryVTT is huge, very developer-driven. It also has a small team building it, but its code allows for plugins to be built for it, and these “modules” extend Foundry’s core abilities a great deal. If you can think of a functionality you’d like to see in Foundry, you can probably find a module that will provide that function, but in doing so you’re opening up your game to the quality of code that the plugin writer provides. In this way, FoundryVTT is like Wordpress, maybe, while Encounter+ is Webflow—less extensible but much less likely to have issues with incompatable code.
The modules for FoundryVTT that rise to the top of the heap are incredible, however. Worthy additions to the platform, and when you find a few that really improve your quality of life it’s difficult to go back to “Vanilla Foundry”.
Encounter+ doesn’t have a plugin system yet, but it does have a very active Discord channel with some superstars that make working with the game a ton better. There is an importer from dndbeyond.com to Encounter+ called EncounterLog, and the same developer has an importer to convert adventures in FoundryVTT to the Encounter+ format. Another dev build a beautiful markdown exporter for VS Code that will take a folder full of .md and .yaml files and export them to a module that can be imported into Encounter+, greatly reducing the time it takes to build encounters and other notes. It also produces a decent .pdf, too. I made a video about how to get started with this, here
I really wish that FoundryVTT had something like this Module Packer; the idea of having a folder of markdown files that could be sent to either Foundry or E+ at any given moment is a dream.
FoundryVTT’s onboarding needs a ton of work. There are a lot of methods to use the VTT: locally on your computer, as a node.js app online, and there are a few paid hosting options. But it’s certainly not Roll20, where all you need is a login. And nothing is as easy as downloading the Encounter+ apps from the Mac and iOS stores, unless you’re a Windows or Linux user, of course.
I tend to jump back and forth between the two, but at the time that I’m writing this my general feeling is that FoundryVTT is the superior tool for virtual games, while Encounter+, with its simplicity and ability to broadcast locally to external monitors and iPads, is better suited for in-person games. Foundry’s view for Players is far superior, at this point; easier to access and with tons of tools with the player in mind.
I haven’t actually played D&D live yet, but that will change this summer! so perhaps I’ll revise this opinion in a few months.