This is great! Keep going with this!
Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
61–70 of 126 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#62Neat. My friends and I have a campaign going on roll20.net. I don't suppose there's any way to "import" our current stuff into here? Is this just for new campaigns? Our DM manages everything so I'm not entirely sure what's involved (I think he's purchased some add-ons maybe) or if this is even a sensible question.
Same. My game is using roll20 for maps and D&D Beyond for books and character sheets. There’s a chrome extension that can link them together.
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#63This is great! Keep going with this!
Thanks! Appreciate the kind words
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#64There's a whole genre of these things.[1] There's a true virtual tabletop: Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt Five, where the players wear AR goggles and see a 3D tabletop game world. Players look at a tabletop mat which provides an alignment target and neutral background. One of the more workable AR systems. [1] https://www.laptopmag.com/best-picks/best-virtual-tabletop-s...
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Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#65Wow, it looks very comprehensive. Really nice work.
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#66Very cool. I've seen a lot of these out there for DnD specifically, and am always impressed by how polished they seem, but I've long since wished there was a better way to play WH40k or other wargames online. The closest thing seems to be Tabletop Simulator, which just feels strange as a full 3D simulator. It strikes me as slightly ironic, since games like 40k are traditionally extremely high $ investment hobbies, so…
I agree! I think it’s super doable to annotate a real game with modern image segmentation running on a video feed paired with rock-solid modern TTS as dice are read, turns are declared, etc. From there, it’s just a hop skip and jump to a virtual tabletop, AR set pieces, and (IMO the holy grail) non-local AR games using real pieces. It’s such a procedural, probabilistic, simplified-spatially game; seems perfect for simulation.
I really don’t think games workshop has the corporate culture to catch this wave though, which makes the prospect of a IP lawsuit a big deterrent to even OS work.
Msg me if you want a link to my last pass at it as a react app. Got slowed down figuring out how to offload work onto the server efficiently, and also daunted at the prospect of translating all the simpler unit rules into JSON. Of course, with LLMs, that task just became about 1000x easier :)
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#67I'm kinda curious, how many people play RPGs with map and minatures at the centre? We started with D&D and minatures, but quickly migrated away to more free-form systems and styles. For us it was always about making a story together, and nothing bogs that down faster than technicality. If your game is centered around maps and minatures, is it also centered around combat? Just curious to find out how other people play…
Same here,
As i grew older the "theater sports" of it became infinitely more interesting - to such a degree that the dices are only used for randomness these days.
We sometime play "dogma" scenarios where you are: a geriatric near 1st lvl , a 12 year old 1st lvl thief etc. but i'm getting old so these days its a social happening and not an all out drinking slugfest
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#68This is neat, but so far every thing like this that we've used for our D&D game has been overkill. What we do currently: Take a map from a PDF, load in Paint program (paint.net/photoshop/gimp/whatever), create a layer of BLACK over it. Share the screen. The DM slowly erases BLACK as we move and discover the map. This way, the players cannot see the map. The DM can see the map. The players get to slowly discover the m…
Basically every single tool available can support this, and so much much more. I wouldn’t suggest you change, but to suggest this method is in any way superior to actually learning the tools and how they work is ridiculous. And if a DM can’t spare the hour or so to reach parity with this method, that’s gonna be a long term problem for the table.
The cost, and setup time to use any of these tools has been far greater than loading up a image and sharing it.
We've found no VTT tool that can do basic fog of war _without_ loading in a bunch of other features we simply don't need.
Is it superior? I never said that, I said that the feature set was overkill.
A long term problem? Like I said above, our game has been going for _4_ years.
A big problem with these tools is the assumption that your players won't do something you didn't plan for. Which the system I described deals with well. Our DM has many times spent hours planning our game only for us to spend the entire time slot in one location, or deciding to go somewhere else. When that happens, all he has to do is roll out the setting for us to use our imaginations, or to load up a new image and black layer and share it, 5 - 10 minutes tops.
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#69Neat. My friends and I have a campaign going on roll20.net. I don't suppose there's any way to "import" our current stuff into here? Is this just for new campaigns? Our DM manages everything so I'm not entirely sure what's involved (I think he's purchased some add-ons maybe) or if this is even a sensible question.
Hey yeah, totally sensible question - wish I had a better answer. Unfortunately there isn't a great way to transfer an ongoing campaign. That's one of the main issues with getting folks to try out new virtual tabletops - there's some pretty established platforms already out there and there's a fair amount of lock in. Especially if you consider the assets a lot of DMs have purchased on those platforms, like you mentio…
There is a converter from Roll20 to FoundryVTT. I've used it with great success:
Re: Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons
#70Howdy! This looks awesome, and not to steal your thunder but I've also been working on a similar product. RollTable (https://rolltable.app) and a preview here, https://i.imgur.com/PuVQfnk.png
Our is a live 3D, free, no hassle online D&D VTT with a marketplace of hundreds of free miniatures. You can also play in 2D if you don't like 3D with top down, and isometric view.
You can see all the tokens on our Marketplace here, https://rolltable.app/marketplace