Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons

Diceright is a virtual tabletop for playing dungeons and dragons with friends on the web. You can watch a quick overview of how it works here: https://tinyurl.com/diceright. And there’s a list of the main features right on the homepage.

It’s a Ruby on Rails site that makes heavy use of action cable for keeping the maps and tokens in sync for all players. On the front end, I’m using HTML canvas for the maps and a js library called fabric.js for interacting with the canvas. Otherwise, just jQuery on the front end. I optimized it all to work on mobile too.

I built this as a side project for fun over of the past couple years. It took a lot longer than expected, but it was also a lot of fun. I did all the design / UX for it too which was a struggle at first but was a great learning experience.

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. Thanks!

Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
diceright.com

Thanks!

Man, so many things. I think maybe the hardest thing was really getting into the weeds of all the class/race features and modeling them all in a way that made sense to the user and would 'just work'.

There are features that add damage, but only under some circumstances. Features that change at different levels. Features where you get to pick between a few options and then they also change at different levels. Just a lot to model out. And a lot of hard decisions about how much to automate and how much to leave on the user.

Also, designing and building it all to work on mobile ended up being more than I expected because when adding new features I often had to go back and make it mobile friendly too.

Oh and doing the dynamic lighting (where you can add walls and lights to a map and 'see' what player tokens would see) was pretty tough because it involved learning some math to do those calculations. But that was also pretty fun.

Hmmm yeah that's a good point. The site does work pretty well on mobile but I didn't make any mobile videos. I'll put that on my todo list. Thanks for the feedback!

And if you do get a chance to check it out on desktop, I'd love to know what you think.

I always thought it was bizarre that there's no serious selfhostable FOSS virtual tabletop software [1]. The overlap between the two communities is very large and passionate. Foundry is selfhostable but it's a clunky proprietary node.js application and there's a ton of janky UI issues. Roll20 is far worse. I presume that this Diceright project is better since it's actually using a canvas. But why doesn't someone just use a proper game engine that can target the web (with wasm/emscripten/etc)? You're making a game after all, and it would mean that people who are happy downloading and running a native application locally for better UX would be able to.

[1] edit: That I was aware of when writing this comment initially.

I "played" D&D once with some people who play quite a bit, and was confused. Maybe I was expecting more clear rules of how to "win"? It seemed like it was more of a "choose you're own adventure" story rather than a game since the dungeon master is able to change the rules as you go and pretty much decide whether or not you are "successful" with whatever goals are established at the beginning. Is that accurate? In the end, it was a little frustrating and I decided I don't get it so I've never tried again.