As I go through the development process and interact with the community on G+ it’s very interesting to see the wide breadth of opinions on what a virtual tabletop (VTT) should include. Comparisons to Maptools, Fantasy Grounds, and other VTTs in development like Roll20 are to be expected and I welcome them. However, I wanted to try and describe the direction and vision that I have with Tabletop Forge (TTF) so people know what to expect.
- First and foremost, I want TTF to be a tool that enables people to game together online. I want to utilize the social community of Google+ to let groups split apart by distance as well people totally new to the hobby to experience a roleplaying session online. The reason I built it upon the Google+ Hangout platform is because of no need for any kind of port configuration/local installs (beside the Hangout plugin itself) and because of the awesome RPG community that I see playing pick-up games all the time.
- I want to the application to thread a careful line between simplicity and advanced configuration of features. This is a very hard line to walk and one that is important to me. Other VTTs out there have all kinds of nifty features but are cumbersome to use and setup. However, I do want to support advanced map features that I feel are helpful (like revealing a map a piece at a time) but want to avoid things that I think automate too much of the online VTT experience (like vision layer blocking and light sources that auto-reveal maps).
- I want to support as many constructs of the indie RPGs as possible. While this may be through optional die roller syntax I want things like card decks, widgets for tokens (bennies, blood tokens, whatever), and things like customizable “index” cards.
- I want to be system agnostic but support as many systems as possible. While this seems contradictory I want the core of the app to be simply a place people can have the video/audio/text chat as well as roll some dice and some relatively basic map functionality. However, I am more than happy to add in support for off-the-wall die systems and other things that are “optional” for people to use. I am not going to integrate 5 foot squares for instance right into the app. I will put a generic grid in (if you want to turn it on) and just let you define how big a square is.
- Tabletop Forge will always be free. I want the experience for the app to be open to everyone. I may consider crowdsourced funding to raise some initial funds to cover server costs and also allow me to bring in some graphics professionals but I will never charge for the app itself nor am I planning any sort of subscriptions or premium tiers. I may in the future have a market built-in to the app that would allow people to list map packs, token packs, and even adventures that they own the rights too but these would be optional things and nothing would restrict you from adding your own resources.
I welcome any feedback and as always value the opinions of the community and have made adjustments before but these broad concepts are how I generally try and figure out what I should work on and how I should do it.
I think these are good design goals. I especially like that you’re main ideal is supporting the varied rules system mechanics vs frills.
Any thought on 3rd party “plugins” so people can develop their own addons and widgets? Is this not practical with the way the app works?
Mark I am looking into it long term. Besides the obvious security aspects I want to make sure that the process for adding any plugins is not so terribly difficult that it wouldn’t be used by anyone either.
This is a very admirable vision statement. Once you open up a donations tab for support you can count me in.
Love the app man. I have an odd die setup I’m looking for and was wondering about it’s possible integration.
It is for a d10 system the die “explodes” on 1′s and 10′s all explosions are subtracted by 5. On a 10 if the explosion -5 is 0 or less it stays at the previous roll. On 1 if the roll is 0 or higher the total stay put. If this is possible to integrate you have the thanks of me and many unisystem gm’s around the world.
I may be able to add that soon but actually working on a more robust system that you could declare your own possible outvalue for a die type.
Really interesting application, I tried it with some other people and it shows great promise, keep the good work, will try to offer sugestions as we play with it.
First of all its a GREAT app.
I small feature that i as harcore DnD player missed when you create die macros is that i couldnt get a konstant a +1, +3 designated as fire or magic.
It sems posible to make a die designated but not a konstant, if i didnt miss something.
For example 1d20+3(ref)
/Martin
That is a good idea and I will add it to the list.
This project looks very cool. I am really looking forward to using it. Here are some small ideas for the UI
I would prefer if the chat window wasn’t able to cover the div with the map. Perhaps the map and the chat could be placed side by side. This way I could scroll back and forth on the map without ever having to move the chat window
Perhaps the div containing tabs “scene1″ and “scene2″ could be made smaller so that it takes up less space. Would it be possible to make something like the upper right corner of http://maps.google.com/ ?
It would be supercool if the div with the webcam images could contain less whitespace. Perhaps they could be placed in a column at the left of the screen, but I don’t know how much you can control from inside an app.
I am looking forward to watch this project in the future.
Is there any way to launch TTF from one of our pages? I have a page dedicated to an RPG I’m designing, and it would be great if I could launch it from my game’s page instead of from my personal G+ page. I understand that TTF is still in beta, so I’m just wondering if it’s even possible at this point, and if not, if it’s something that will be possible in the future?
I just want to say that I am very excited about this app and I am going to use it as much as possible and provide as much feedback as possible!
James,
You sure can add a button to your page that would call up the app.
See this article: https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/button and the TTF app id is 248408684568.
These are all great goals. Especially relevant to your goal of creating this to allow people to game together is not requiring any installation, so kudos for that. I know that for my group, requiring installs and working through associated server setups, technical issues, etc. just kills interest in gaming.
This app is pretty much everything I need right now, though no doubt you can make it better. I notice you have fog of war on your roadmap, which is probably the biggest nice-to-have for me. Another thing I would love to see is if the grid overlay scaled and stayed with the image when you zoom in or out (meaning when you zoom in, the grid gets bigger and any tokens stay put on the map). That’s probably a non-trivial task, but it would be great to have.
I’m impressed with this so far as I have looked at other VTTs and find most out of reach of others I know as well as difficult to set up in some cases. Not having to download, install, and go through the hassle again with each new player is awesome! Being freely available sends it over the top.
I have played around with TTF once so far and have to say that I agree with Bob above about perhaps having the Chat window not cover the map/image area. Would it be possible to allow docking the chat to the side or bottom of this space as an option?
One other thing I noticed is that when I went to place tokens on the map or draw I had no pointer showing me where my cursor was located. Right clicking showed the cursor after placement however. Not sure if that was a bug or built in.
I am looking forward to using this app since I have no local player group for my games. Keep it up!
A HUGE plus would be the ability to pop out any of the windows from the Hang Out window. Then I could put the map window on one monitor while I have my chat, video, and other windows on the other monitor.
This is a very cool app and I look forward to trying it out with some friends soon!
Hi!
I’m what you call a VTT junkie. I’ve followed the boom in choices over the last 5 years and have either bought or used most if not all options out there.
One pet peeve I have with most is the lack of “virtual dice” to roll. Having run many games on different VTT the biggest hurdle in my experience is the ability (or lack thereof) of being able to “roll dice”.
Gamers are a finicky bunch. They rolling them dice. I’ve lost count how many either flatly refuse trying an online game or become disinterested after trying it if this option is not available. Most just do not like typing to roll dice. Even hotkeys for common ones do not cut it.
Accordingly, this is why Fantasy Grounds has become my VTT of choice. Its great features aside, the ability to virtually grab dice and see them roll across the screen is an experience that has sold many a player on the online VTT’s.
Oddly, its a feature for whatever reason has fallen by the wayside in most offerings I have evaluated.
So I ask, is Tabletop Forge considering this? If not, why not?
Thanks for the opportunity to voice our thoughts and questions!
Peter
Peter,
It is definitely something we are considering but 3D dice like in Fantasy Grounds are hard to do in a web based platform. At some point in the future we will be experimenting with some WebGL to make aa stab at it but only a few browsers support that at the moment. In the meantime we are planning on clickable dice that put them into a dice cup that can be rolled. However, these will all be animations and not true 3D physic simulations.
Fair enough. Hopefully technology will catch up and permit this in the not too distant future. Thanks for the reply!
I would like to be able to make dice explode on more than just the max. A fairly common swedish RPG rolls D10′s that can explode all the way down to 5+. Allowing for {x, y, z} and {x-y} explodes would be awesome.
Also some import/export features would be awesome.
And perhaps a forum so the community can share tips and resources?
We do have plans for exploding on specific numbers, its in the works! You can import/export macros/tables and map/token layout right now manually with a /save or /localsave Macros, Tables, etc. It’s in the documentation and a little clunky but we will be wrapping a UI around it soon.
No forum yet but the G+ page is every active.