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...

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. 

Additional Roll20 Notes

I've now run two roll20 sessions.  As my mentor and spirit guide, in the Roll20 universe, has been feeding me information and the name of macros he has created I have been taking notes.  This post will contain some of my most useful learning's, commands really.

Adventures in Wildemount

Jon has taken on the somewhat daunting task of running two sets of adventurers in Wildemount based home-brew games as we enter a world of potentially extended stay-at-home orders.  Both games are initially running on Roll20, though one group intends to return to face to face gaming when the virus allows.  This link has links to various resources for the two games.

Impressions: First Roll20 Session as a DM

The Corona Crisis has forced my normal Face-to-Face (F2F) D&D game to either go into hiatus (never a good thing for a long running campaign) or to go online.  We've opted to try online play using Roll20 as our software engine as at least one of our players has fairly deep experience with it as a player and a deep programming background making macros and such an accessible option.

I'm writing this article the morning after my first session.  My intent is to summarize the bumps and some potential actions to smooth out the game moving forward.

Campaign Cartographer Battle Map Creation

Recently I wrote an article about how to start a battlemap in CC3 and upload it into Roll20.  I omitted all of the details about how to create said map.   This article will discuss some of teh challenges I have faced and what I did about them.  Perhaps most importantly, it will have links to other pages that give nitty gritty advice.

Making Maps & Roll20

With the current Corna Virus Panic, we've choosen to cancel regular face to face games.  That has driven a desire to play online with roll20.com seemingly our tool of choice. It's not the same, but it is simialr, even better than F2F in some regards.  It does have a learning curve and for a GM drives a critical need to have VTT maps for every encounter.  This article is going to serve as a repository for things that I learn and links to resources.