What are the Options for a Virtual Table Top for World of Darkness?

[Dogstar]

Hello folks

I couldn't find a topic on this so forgive me if it's a duplicate but I'm trying to find out what the options are for a Virtual Table Top that supports World of Darkness, particularly the 20th Anniversary editions.

I've had a look at Roll20 and it has a character sheet but seems to have nothing else.

Are there any other choices that have better support?

[zahana]

What are looking for the VTT to do? Traditionally WoD lines use a book, sheets, and dice so a fair amount of the features offered by VTT aren't really used. I can't think of anything I've seen through them (Fantasy Grounds, Astral, Roll 20, Foundry) that can't be done just as easily through discord, google meet, etc. unless you really need to see everyone's dice rolls.

[theoutlander523]

Roll20 for dice + Discord for voice + Interactive Character sheets from Mr Gone

The character sheets used by Roll20 are pretty awful and I've lost more than one character to them to server bugs. Plus I can just type faster than using their silly dice functions and modify a PDF more than a Roll20 sheet.

[Heavy Arms]

Why even bother with Roll20 for dice? Grab a dice-bot for your Discord server and create a rolling channel to avoid cluttering up your play channel.

[baakyocalder]

We are using the Dicemaiden dicebot on Discord for our dice-rolling.

By entering a string, '!roll xd10 ty f1,' where x is the number of dice and y is the difficulty, we can easily roll dice for Mage or other World of Darkness games. Discord lets you share character sheets and other items as attachments within a file size limit and so if you have interactive PDF character sheets such as Mr. Gone's Mage Sheets. Then you'd just need to do something for maps as a whiteboard for synchronous play or you could share your screen in a video chat.

[Heavy Arms]

So, basically, the lack of WoD related support on VTTs is mostly that a lot of WoD gamers just don't bother with enough of the tools to care. WoD games usually default to theater of the mind style play, so you don't need map functions. Setting up macros for all your rolls is really time consuming and doesn't save you a bunch of time if there's variable stats or difficulties do deal with. There aren't a lot of derived stats to have sheets autocalculate. Etc.

[theoutlander523]

Why even bother with Roll20 for dice? Grab a dice-bot for your Discord server and create a rolling channel to avoid cluttering up your play channel.

Dice system for roll20 is way more controllable than what I've seen from bots, allowing me to do some nice dice tricks as necessary and speed up how fast I roll. Just can hit up arrow and change a number to roll again.
Besides that, it has a journal system that's way more organized than just dumping stuff into a google doc or into a Discord chat. Can also use it for putting up a status screen which players can fill in with their current objective, health, power resource, motivations, nature and demeanor, flaws, and such. Really helpful as a GM and a player to see that with a glance. Also can put a city map in and tie it with proper distances and such for traveling, along with plotting out territories and zones of ownership.
Oh and sometimes, I do basic combat maps for fun when the fight is simple. Having an initiative tracker is also nice so everyone knows whose turn it is.
Yeah, you could do all of that without Roll20, but that would require several other places instead of a centralized location.

Not defending Roll20 by any metric, but it's free and simple to use. The moment something comes along that's any bit better and I'm jumping ship. Roll20 has need competition for a long ass time.

[Heavy Arms]

OK, but that means you're using Roll20 for a lot more than just a dice roller, which is what I was responding to. If all you need to add is dice, Discord bots will do you fine.

If you're going to make use a bunch of other feature? Yes, Roll20 gets more appealing. IME, most WoD games don't bother with enough of them to deal with Roll20's less useful aspects.

Now, CofD and Exalted? Those I see more Roll20 use for, but there's reasons for that. Both make heavier use of derived traits so having Roll20 autofill them in is more appealing. Both have a greater number of "dice-tricks," that normal dice-bots can't handle. Having a combat resource tracker in Exalted is something a lot of people do even if they're gaming off-line. Etc.

It's not that Roll20 has nothing to offer, but it has very limited offerings, how easy it is to modify them to your needs is variable towards your experience with its system. As more people are turning to Discord (Skype getting worse, and COVID) there's a lot more development of Discord tools to make it more centralized as people are using it for things other than its original design intentions.

As far as competition goes... Astral's trying but regarding the WoD I'm not sure it's really doing anything that Roll20 isn't. Tabletop Simulator is actually really popular, but not being free hurts. It's cheap, but it has a bigger audience among wargamers that decide to use it for RPGs since they're already paying for it than pure RPG use. Though I'm pretty sure "free" is the only way Roll20 is keeping any of the tactical mini players around.

[Dogstar]

I'm playing a game with a ST who uses TTS and it's really great but the ST has put an awful lot of work into getting character sheets ready, preparing figures, sets (not maps actual theatre-like sets), and all sorts of tracking clickers so it all works really well.

But I'm a lot lazier than that so was looking for something a bit more pre-prepared

[Heavy Arms]

Is your ST friend willing to share? A lot of those things - even if you can't directly import them into your account - are pretty easy to explain how to enter in once someone's figured it out. Art assets would obviously be a bit more on you to find ones that match what you're doing, but once you know how to add them it's not so bad IME.

[Ambrosia]

We are using the Dicemaiden dicebot on Discord for our dice-rolling.
By entering a string, '!roll xd10 ty f1,' where x is the number of dice and y is the difficulty, we can easily roll dice for Mage or other World of Darkness games.

This is exactly the way we go about it with my friend's group. A discord server with multiple channels:

Chronicle - For character sheets, sheet updates, posted maps and written session summaries at the end of each session
Rules F For partial screenshots of Disciplines, rules etc. of the PDFs when a question comes up.
Dicerolls F Which we use said Dicemaiden bot for
Off-Topic - For just posting random non-WoD

It works super well. If you are *not* doing voice, a last channel to add would be 'IC' for in-character text-based RP

For handling maps/whiteboarding, we use aggie.io - it is essentially a collaborative online Photoshop-style whiteboard that also supports layers and importing images, so people can scribble stuff on their own layers and you can have all the maps behind a single link that you post into the 'Chronicle' channel and occasionally nudge down to the bottom if it's gone too far up the list.