PlanarAlly is a pretty cool self-hosted VTT.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I mostly play Vampire, Mage, Paranoia or Monster of the week, so I don't need a full VTT, just some dice rolling and some sheet/NPC management that can integrate well with something like Discord. So I wrote my own, which then turned into a snowball of adding features, making it more generic, etc... It's still an ongoing project, but with Foundry and others out there I don't think anyone outside me will useine so I've put a lid on that and only fiddle with it when I need something for a game I'm playing.
Foundry does it all including a character wizard for 5e
$50 for a perpetual license seems pretty damn reasonable.
Yeah, buying software one time and owning it forever. What an awesome idea, I really hope it catches on.
Yeah, Foundry and Dungeondraft are everything I need.
I'm about to start building my own home server and foundry is at the top of my list of stuff to do with it. Do you have any tips for getting it setup or must have addons?
Ultimately I think a table with a large screen for a perpetual map is the goal for me.
Docker is the easiest way to go.
There's a ton of guides for must have plugins. I'm not home right now so I don't have a list off the top of my head as to what I use.
Quick search is a must have. Get that one immediately.
If you're doing a table you need something that allows you to control focus and move stuff. There's a few plugins for that. The simplest is just pulling focus of the camera (can't remember the name).
I'm a huge fan of dungeon draw add on, it lets you create simple maps like you would a battle map.
Assuming your running 5E and you want to keep your players off their computers you might look at the dnd beyond integrations. That way they can manage their char on dnd beyond and you can sync the changes to foundry with a plug-in.
Although there may be an phone plug-in that allows just a char sheet when used on mobile.
If you do have a bunch of dnd beyond content there's another plug-in that will scrape everything and put it into a module in foundry, kind of like a local dnd beyond so all your players can have access.
There's another plug-in that lets you print your characters as pdfs with an actual WotC sheet.
You can also upload your source books to foundry, and use another plug-in to hot link page positions. Then skills on the sheet can be set to auto open the page of the pdf.
I'll try to dm you my plug-in list later this week. But there's so much stuff, just dream it and it's probably there.
Foundry doesn’t have a great player character creation flow. There’s plutonium, which works, but if I have multiple games going on foundry (which I normally do, for my multiple tables) then I can only keep one running at a time, making players of the other games are out of luck or I need to constantly be taking down and spinning up the right game. Ideally they would be a dedicated web app just for character sheets and character building.
Yea I'd agree with that. My strategy has been to make folders for each campaign and use one world for multiple campaigns.
The 5E creation wizard module works pretty well but you still need to track changes with the book because it's not perfect. It does levels pretty good too.
Since I'm using docker, I am considering using a second instance for another license. That way I can have two worlds always up, and with NFS mounting I can share art assets between both of them.
That being said, if you find a character manager please reply to this post. I'm always interested in that stuff. But I don't have much hope since WotC is a bag of dicks (someday my campaign will go to pathfinder).
I have Foundry through Docker, but that's pretty much the extent of the self host. Everything else comes through D&D Beyond. I'd love to get away from wizards, but it's pretty damn slick.
Https://5e.tools/ has a plugin for Foundry that lets you pull basically everything from every source into Foundry. Oh and you can host your own 5eTools instance just in case the site gets nuked from orbit by Wizards
Thank you, I will look into this!
Not really the topic, but why do you want to run owlbear alongside foundry? It seems like a slimmer alternative rather than something to use in conjunction.
To actually answer the title post I just run foundryvtt and I have a bunch of RPG manuals backed up in Nextcloud so I guess that too
Two reasons: Foundry has been feeling more and more bloated and still doesn’t work well on tablets or mobile, while Owlbear does; and Foundry doesn’t like to play nicely with cloudflare tunnels, and owlbear does from what I understand.
That's fair. I can't say it feels more bloated to me, but the tablet/mobile issue is definitely a big one if relevant for your players.
Do you run Foundry in Docker? Where does Foundry not play nice?
I've run Foundry + CloudFlared in Docker with 0 issues for some time.
Not hosted in the traditional sense but Obsidian.md makes a near perfect companion if you don't want to put all of your content in Foundry. Check out Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials https://obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/
Oh huge fan of obsidian my ttrpg graph has like 10k notes. If it was FOSS and natively self hostable it would be perfect.