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

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.

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

But I'm hoping eventually Diceright will have enough 'killer features' that people will give it a shot anyway. Would be great if you guys would consider it once you finish your current campaign. Thanks!

Foundry's upside is that it's extensible (modules), which increases traction and nurtures a community.

Most of the FOSS attempts will probably die if they won't take that approach (extensibility that is).

They recently released a more feature-rich cloud-based V2, but simultaneously released the source and self-hostable images for their V1.

Edit: I meant to add this initially but just forgot: https://blog.owlbear.rodeo/owlbear-rodeo-legacy-edition/

Edit: See https://foundryvtt.wiki/en/development/guides/pixi

Edit2: For an example of why gamedev toolkits don't necessarily produce performant, highly usable software, check out Dungeondraft (https://dungeondraft.net/). It's built with Godot and gets the job done, but as an application it's a total mess. I'm working on an alternative but (surprise!) it's a challenge.

> Foundry is selfhostable but it's a clunky proprietary node.js application and there's a ton of janky UI issues.

I don't think it's that bizarre when a genuinely good product gets this kinda reception. It's a thankless job

Think of Lord of the Rings (both because it's a good example to make my point, and because it's the source of a lot of the inspiration for D&D). All the fellowship are independently given a vague mission to go to Rivendell. They then decide, in Rivendell, to embark on a quest to take the ring to Mordor. Consequences split them up on separate missions along the way; in a D&D game, splitting the party is poor etiquette, but it's a good example of how your immediate next steps can change in unpredictable ways. The overall journey of any given character is decided by that character based on their circumstances and personal values.

Every group has their own style. The DM might be very strict or loose with his reading of the rules. Players could be more or less into the role playing aspect (do you have to do voices and talk in character or not). Ultimately, your character can do whatever the DM allows them to do. That might seem “unfair” but the DM is not your opponent trying to beat you, they’re telling a story with you.

There’s not really a win condition. Some groups play campaign modules which are pre-written stories the DM interprets for your group. Some make it up on the fly like an improv comedy group or nerd jazz.

I don’t really remember specific combat we remember the fun and stories we told, even if they’re pretty lame compared to just reading a book. But they’re our unique story.

And if I put a ton of time into D&D that looks like “3D printing terrain” or “painting miniatures” (which are cool little statues so have some inherent aesthetic value) which are also fun hobbies (in my opinion) vs “accruing lots of thin pieces of cardboard” or “number goes up on screen”.

^1: Your DM can define an end goal/win condition for your campaign, though.

It's not exactly accurate that the DM can change the rules as you go. The DM will sometimes say you can't do x or y, but a good DM doesn't do that capriciously. When I DM, I sometimes tell players flat-out "you can't do that", but it's because they've tried to do something which isn't possible in the fictional world (like if someone says they want to jump so high they land on the moon or whatever). Most of the time, when a player says they want to do something, they should either succeed outright (because it's not actually challenging for the character to do), or the rules of the game will give a clear way to determine success/failure. It sounds like you maybe didn't have a very good DM.

The most straightforward adventures that typically have a "win condition" are one shots/self-contained adventures from either WoTC or 3rd Party Publishers, like Curse of Strahd, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, etc.

However, a lot of D&D groups I've played with might have characters die, but will rarely have a group "lose". However, because every group runs things a bit differently, a different group can drastically change how the game feels.

One thing to consider is that the DM you have can make a massive impact on your enjoyment of the game. I'd definitely encourage you to give it another shot, maybe with a different DM that more fits what you're looking for. But then again, it's also definitely not for everyone. We've had plenty of friend come into our group and just decide it wasn't for them.

rule breaking is a kind of error handling, to get the game on track, sometimes as a plotline, such as chaotic magic zones, it shouldnt be the rule to break the rules.

some groups have house rules, and long game history. if you were sat down in midst of a campaign thats confusing.

some people really struggle with being a dungeon master [DM], but each DM has to play to the group and keep it provocative for everyone.

Now, whether as DM or player, I enjoy it not as a game to win, but as a story to explore. Like an interactive movie. Even when I am the author of the plot as DM, I can't predict what my players will do, and it becomes an enjoyable discovery as they force plot twists from their end.

I suppose it make a difference that we are playing Rappan Attuk and not a mainline D&D campaign. There's a lot less dungeon crawling in today's D&D, but Rappan Attuk makes up for all of it with about 600 pages of one dungeon.

With Diceright (and Im sure with other VTTs), my goal was to help streamline certain aspects of the game so players can focus on the fun stuff. Mostly around combat and tracking all your character details. So for combat, on Diceright, you can target enemies when you attack and then when you damage them, the player gets an alert with a CTA to apply the damage - so players aren't always asking, wait who did you attack? How much was the damage again?

And on the character sheet side, with a standard character sheet, I've often found myself looking at my AC or one of my stats and not totally remembering how I got to that number. Diceright keeps track of all your bonuses for you and shows you how your stats were calculated.

Those are definitely all things you can do on your own, but it can be nice to have a computer automate them for you.

Again, totally agree that the system you've got works. Just sharing some of my considerations when I went into building this.

same idea starting black and slow reveal, laptop,and 2nd display, with players around the table.

the enviro sounds came later.

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.

So do you just play online with strangers? Or do you also play in person?

Ah, that were great times back then...

The other option is to make it game agnostic and focus only on the map part.

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 :)

Over time, I have started moving more towards the shared storytelling aspects of the game. Currently in our game, we do a light combat mix, where we only really enter combat once every 3 or 4 sessions.

Generally, it's nice that there are so many different RPG systems out there now so people can really find the ones that fit what they like.

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

So one of my goals with Diceright was to make it as welcoming as possible to new players (not really an easy task given how complex DnD is). To that end, I wanted to make it easy to sign on and get started, right away. And I wanted to make it easy to use on your phone. Foundry has a ton going for it, but it does require initial work to get set up and it can be a bit clunky for someone who's never used it.

Similarly, I wanted to make character creation as seamless as possible. On Diceright you just pick your classes and all the features get added automatically and rolled up to your overall character sheet (and of course you can modify anything you'd like). It's easy to make characters quickly and at the same time, you never lose track of where features or stat bonuses come from.

All that being said, Foundry as a ton of stuff that Diceright doesn't have yet, so I'm not trying to say it can go toe to toe on features. More just giving how I think my overall approach differed.

You can just do your own Show HN.