D&D 5E: Druid Shape Shift and FoundryVTT

My games seem to always include at least one player as a Druid, who inevitably love their Wild Shape ability.  As we are now playing on FoundryVTT, understanding how wild shape can be made to work in this VTT is essential. 

The rules for this ability are available on DnDBeyond, Wild Shape, I'll save some bits and not reiterate them here.  There are also multiple guides out there on how to use wild shape, I'll link to one on D&DBeyond here: Druid 101: Wild Shape Guide.  

The challenge I am looking at is how I want to make the ability operate in my games.  That's what I will be diving into in this post. 

Occultist's Coven Familiar Bond in a Barovia FoundryVTT Game

 One of my players in my Curse of Strahd campaign just started a character based on KibblesTasty's homebrew Occultist v1.1.  We've moved it from Wisdom-based to Intelligence as the group has zero intelligence-centered characters and it feels right for someone to be smart in a group trying to survive in Barovia, and as a largely arcane caster it seems appropriate for the character to push intelligence. 

A more challenging portion of the character has been the Familiar Bond options available to the three coven's defined in the post of the class. Specifically, how to implement one of them in a FoundryVTT based campaign without making them annoying.  

In this post, I'm going to briefly consider each of the three and then dive deeper into what seems like the best-fit ability. 

Implementing Party Loot in FoundryVTT

 

Group loot has been a thing since the first days of D&D.  Back then, a single player might be charged with keeping a paper tally of the groups transactions and occasionally paying for items or making distributionsto the party.  Of course, that player would occasionally lose the paper record causing the DM to loose hair (again) and generally upsetting any semblance of an economy in the game.

With advancing technology, that paper list has typically moved to digital form.  My most recent implementation has been with a shared googles sheets file.  That eliminates the lost paper problem, but leaves the inventory disjoint from the game, especially when using a VTT such as Foundry.  

Implementing Vampiric Bite and Regeneration

I am in the midst of trying to migrate my Curse of Strahd game from Roll20 to Foundry. I am using Midi QOL to automate damage applications so that I don't lose function from what Roll20 did for me. A bunch of things has gone very smoothly, but I am a bit stuck on two of the vampiric abilities:

Vampiric Bite -- On hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage plus 7 (2d6) necrotic damage. The target's hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken, and the vampire regains hit points equal to that amount. The reduction lasts until the target finishes a long rest -- I'd like to automate the self-heal component and maybe even the mac hit point reduction, though, I'm totally ready to accept just the self-heal portion.  

Regeneration -- The vampire regains 10 hit points at the start of its turn if it has at least 1 hit point and isn't in sunlight or running water. If the vampire takes radiant damage or damage from holy water, this trait doesn't function at the start of the vampire's next turn -- The conditions seem a bit convoluted for automation, so my current goal is just to create a simple action that does self-healing. 

Foundry Macros - Writing My First (with some understanding)

I've been fiddling with macros and javascript relative to Foundry VTT for a few days now.  It seems a good time to write my own.  By that I mean go through the steps following closely in spacemandev's footsteps in his YouTube video, FoundryVTT Macros 101.

 I'll try to note the interesting bits as I go through the process. 

Foundry Macros -- Getting a Start

The task I've taken on, migrating an existing Curse of Strahd campaign that has been running in Roll20 for about a year with a lot of amazing automation that Jon engineered for us places a fairly high bar.  

I need Foundry to pretty much be as good as our Roll20 environment across the board.  Foundry Macros appear to be much more powerful and robust than those offered in Roll20...but we have a couple of years of patching over warts and automating our game system.  

This posting focuses on my learning the Foundry macro ropes, largely indexing resources that I expect will make my journey easier. 

Installing and Initial Learnings with Foundry VTT

I received Foundry VTT for my birthday.  So, of course, I just have to mess with it.  I am in the process of installing it on my Mac and will be taking notes into this posting of things that I encounter that peak my interest.  No overarching organization, just things as I learn them.

Before getting into the process, I'll take a stab at why I am looking at transitioning from Roll20 to a different VTT.  Following are my major issues that I hope Foundry will alleviate without introducing a new set of issues:

• Speed - Roll20 is not fast, changing maps is a significant delay.
• Search - The ability to search inside the journal is just bizarre.  It helpfully most of the tabs that don't contain matches, leaving me with a bunch of folders that may or may not contain hits.  This results in exploration of the file tree by the Colombus method (blindly clicking things until I happen upon something)
• UI Consistency - The click an ability displays it to the player while clicking a spell displays in chat (or maybe the other way around).  This and similar features make learning Roll20 difficult.
• Text Formatting - OMG there are multiple ways to do this, with location of the text changing the method.  Making it all worse, the formatting tools work sometimes and rarely in the way that I would predict.
• Monthly subscription - I don't like paying a sub fee for this service
• Speed - Did I mention that the game can be slooooooow?

Ok, so on with the show...

Battlemap Cobblestoning (Campaign Cartographer)

The first set of my Vallaki maps had grey streets, suggesting a paved surface that just didn't work.  They were quite bright and made the town feel too modern I think.  I changed that to a more appropriate brown aiming at a dirt (mud since, you know Barovia) surface.  That's the form I published the whole set with, dirt or mud streets and paths.

Then Reddit user PrideComprehensive37 asked about an alternate rendering with cobblestone main streets.  I hadn't tried that, so I took a stab at it.  I like the result, so I am redoing the whole set with cobblestone roads as well as adding mist and generally gloomifying things. 

This post outlines the steps I'm going through to cobble the roads. 

Original Image

Cobblestoned Image

Battle Map Gloomification (CC3+)

The most common complaint about my series of Barovian maps is that they are too bright, almost cheerful looking, which is really wrong for the setting.   I made the maps with the Dungeons of Schley (SS5) using the sheet effects pretty close to standard.  That makes for bright, easy-to-read maps that are, in fact, rather out of character for Barovia. 

Above: Original "Bright" Image

My first attempt at fixing this was to use Photoshop as a post-processor where I reduced saturation and darkened mid-range and dark colors to make it what I called Gloomy.  While that worked, at least after a fashion, adding a post-processing step is something to be avoided.  I just don't want to add extra steps to what is already a time-intensive task. 

My current approach is to set some global effects inside of CC3+ to achieve pretty much the same thing without the baggage of a trip through PhotoShop. 

This post shares the settings and shows the results in the two snips of the Mourning Gate area in this article. 

Adding Mist to a Campaign Cartographer Map

 Recently, I have been drawing a lot of Barovian maps.  That land is heavily misted, it's a major story element that really could use more presence on the maps I have drawn.  

Initially, I ignored this element as the mists are going to change dramatically over time and not showing any, maximizes visibility for the battle map at the cost of flavor.

I decided I had to have mists in the bathhouse that I located on one of the maps so I muddled through and developed a technique that works for me. Allowing a quite misty appearance without necessarily obscuring all of the details.  

At the request of a fellow CoS DM, I have taken on the task of updating the maps to have cobblestone major roads.  While I am at it, I have opted to add some misty areas to the maps.  This post highlights how I am going about that.

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Undead Fortitude (Roll20 Implementation)

 Undead Fortitude is one of those niche abilities that can occur never or often in a game.  As I have been running Curse of Strahd, I've had it occurring a lot.  The math is easy, but I'm lazy and want as few button clicks as possible.  Well, my laziness has been rewarded thanks to a thread I discovered on app.roll20.net.

A user by the name of keithcurtis posted a macro that enables a 1 click, 1 data entry path to displaying the actual DC and the relevant saving throw.  Pretty nifty!

Swarms of Medium or Small Creatures

Work in Progress...

D&D 5e has plenty of swarms most of which are medium (1 space) swarms of tiny creatures like: Rot Grubs, Ravens, Insects (Wasps), Rats, Bats, and quite a few more.  

The only non-tiny creature, medium swarm I have found is the Skeletal Swarm, which is a Large (4 space) swarm of medium sized creatures, which sticks closely to the pattern of the other swarms.  

As a DM, I  have bumped into situations where I have a large group of relatively low powered small or medium sized creatures creatures that are more powerful than the typically nearly trivial individual member of a swarm.  These groups could be productively lumped into a swarm to speed play.  I want to explore how I might do this in my games in this posting -- essentially, how to make something like a mob of villagers a single swarm instead of a bunch of individuals to manage.