Community

Jul 9, 2012 -- 9:35PM, Bremc_Aus wrote:

I don't mind wizards not doing a VT - at is what Roll20 is for.

And let's face it, they can't even do forums that work well in all browsers, their VT by definition would be atrocious. 

Actually, the beta of the VT is really functional. Easy to use, does everything I have been able to think of for it to do, etc.

This is kind of a bummer.

It was also nice to have a central program that is already hooked up to the CB, MB and Compendium.

Very dissapointed.

Jul 10, 2012 -- 2:07AM, edwin_su wrote:

I think they tried to much.

all you basicly need is :
voice chat
dice roler
optional battle grid.
optional calculator
a way to show pictures to other players ( character sheet)

they bit of more then needed with also trying to automate saves at end of turn initiative and the like.
if they stuck with just the 5 basics listed above thay would have a good to go system for any edition of DnD
but they bit off more then they could chew

Just to clear things up, the VT never automated saves at the end of initiative.

What the VT had
1) Masterset tiles; Dungeon, Wilderness, City
2) The ability to import PCs and Monsters directly from CB/AT
3) Dice Rollers.  Basic "click what you want to roll and roll" types, and "/roll Xdyy" chat entry rollers.
4) Dice Macro pages, where you can enter whatever text you want, and the dice, like "Saving Throw 1d20"
5) Voice Chat
6) Calculator.  Not a popup one, but you could easily use the roller for addition/subtraction "/roll 24+194-17"
7) Cloud Storage. We could save so many PCs, Monsters, Maps, and Adventures on the Cloud.  (This was one of the sore points, since the cloud limited us, and we would much rather have been able to save these things to our Hard Drives.  Saving to our HDs limited us only by our own space.  We had the ability, they took it away and gave us limitations, severe limitations in some cases, with the cloud

8) Drawing Tools.  They were basic, they were memory hogs, but we had them.  We would have liked better
9) Campaign Manager.  a Place where people could see a list of games they were a part of, the start times/dates, etc.  The CM was also a sore point, since as soon as a game would fill up, it would disappear from the CM (unless you were a part of it), and people would log in, see a blank CM, and think the VT was inactive.  We pushed and pushed for them to make it so that people could see a list of all of the full, and currently happening games, which would have presented an accurate view of just how busy the VT was to people.  Also, people could have browsed full games, and sent Private Messages to the DMs, requesting to be put on a standby list in case someone didn't show up, or maybe to spectate so that they could get the hang of the VT.

10) Forums.  The Forums were the best place to post about upcoming games, and to find upcoming games.  It let DMs post any allowances/restrictions, and if people made the effort to post character ideas, then they probably actually wanted to play.  Relying on the CM to fill games typically left a DM with no players, because people (who had no intention of every playing) would join and full up the slots, dropping that game off the CM.

11) Community Chat.  Okay, this sucked.  It kicked you out if you inactive longer than 20-30 seconds.  People would log in to an empty room, ask questions, then get kicked out.  Luckily, someone set up an IRC Chat, which we linked to in the forums.  Many VT members have been logged into the IRC chat through most hours of the day, 7 days a week.  We were there, and when people found their way into the IRC chat, we were there to answer questions, help people, provide community service.. to replace the customer service wotc was neglecting with such a shoddy chat system.

12) Dice Automation.  Within individual powers, you had "attack" lines, "Damage" lines, and "other" lines.  Click an "Attack" line, and then you could click your targets and roll, and it would compare your roll vs the defense and show whether it was a hit or miss.  Do this vs multiple targets for bursts/AOES.  Then, click Damage, and there was 1 button that would apply damage to all "HIT" targets, and not vs "MISSED" targets.  You could also select each enemy to mark Half damage, in case of weakened, or 1/2 on a miss, or even Max Damage for Crits, etc (though most of us had Crit damage lines"


So that is what we had.  With the exception of the character/monster sheet formats, I think they could have publicized the heck out of the VT for 5e playtest.  Someone could have made a custom map for the caves of chaos module, and loaded it into the pre-made module/event sections.  They could have promoted VT and Playtest from the beginning, instead of explicitly saying "no D&Dnext playtest on the VT!"  Our community is able to use the "notes" section of the character sheet to type in all the details from the 5e character sheets.. or heck, whoever set up the adventure could have pre-generated some chartacter sheets with eerything already copy/pasted.  All Playtesters who were not DDI members could have been given access to the VT for playtesting, even if it was only limited/temporary access.  the VT could have had it's format tweaked slightly (there has always been an edition selector) so that one could "select" 5e, and have the character/monster sheets formatted for 5e, and the VT could have been directly linked with 5e, and moving side by side into the future of the next edition together.

Jul 12, 2012 -- 1:33AM, Wathys wrote:

Jul 12, 2012 -- 1:12AM, DoctorBadWolf wrote:

Jul 9, 2012 -- 9:35PM, Bremc_Aus wrote:

I don't mind wizards not doing a VT - at is what Roll20 is for.

And let's face it, they can't even do forums that work well in all browsers, their VT by definition would be atrocious. 

Actually, the beta of the VT is really functional. Easy to use, does everything I have been able to think of for it to do, etc.

This is kind of a bummer.

It was also nice to have a central program that is already hooked up to the CB, MB and Compendium.

Very dissapointed.

There is a 3rd party created parser available for inputting DDI conent to a format Fantasy Grounds understands (check the post before yours to see what FG is). This way you can use and parse whatever content you own and content from DDI to use in your games in FG.

Yay, I can use a third party program to interact with another third party program to do the most useful thing (for me) that the VT did automatically, with no fuss whatsoever....

I don't mean to snark, but, the fact is that the VT was functional, and had advantages over third party products, and it sucks that it's getting ditched.