Being unable to find an all-in-one VTT that handles games the way I run them, I'm looking at using multiple services. One upside of it is that we don't have to pay for any of these services.
Discord for chat (text, video, voice)
Miro for shared whiteboard/tabletop
Watch2Gether for atmosphere/music
Having not been able to find a die roller that's transparent enough, dice will be handled by everyone rolling their own dice. Crazy, right?
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yeah, Miro lets me scrawl notes and leave them where everyone can see them, which is much more important to me than a battlemap with fog-of-war that calculates flanking bonuses or whatever.
One suave thing that I figured out is leaving a little radio on the Miro desktop, so the players can click it and listen to the music that I've already got playing on my YouTube playlist via Watch2Gether - and control their own volume and such, unlike some of the Discord music-bots.
The only real limitation (that I've found) on the unpaid tier for Miro is capping at three boards. If you need more that that, I envy you, but you could probably get the other players to create boards.
Optimally you would have one board so everyone would be watching the same board. I haven't used Miro much and never for gaming so I may be missing something. Watch2Gether has a webcam option so you could display a map with that and use Miro for writing stuff.
Oh, yeah. The only real reason I could see needing more than one board is if you're running more than one game - so if you need more than three? I envy your problems.
yeah, you should be able to drag-and-drop from your desktop to the whiteboard.
There's a few nuanced things like drawing an area for each player to reference (since you can't put it in front of them), as well as "stacking" elements to handle as a single unit.
oh, there are a handful of dice bots - but they have a tendency of not really getting out of the way of the game - at least the way I want it to run.
It may be a bit system specific, but I like to have a bit of back-and-forth conversation, while dice are being drawn and replaced, until it's time to roll everything.
Most online rollers use a standardized format of /r 2d6+1. Simple, intuitive. But it slows me down, gets in the way just enough that I'd really rather just roll physical dice.
I'd like to see something where I can basically click a die in the UI to add it to my hand before casting them collectively. In multiple colors, with multiple die types.... Yeah, might be picky about it, but real physical dice do the job. Rolegate actually gets the closest to what I want, but they're not really set up for real-time play.
I really do like the tactile element of rolling dice myself.
One suave thing that I figured out is leaving a little radio on the Miro desktop, so the players can click it and listen to the music that I've already got playing on my YouTube playlist via Watch2Gether - and control their own volume and such, unlike some of the Discord music-bots.
There's a few nuanced things like drawing an area for each player to reference (since you can't put it in front of them), as well as "stacking" elements to handle as a single unit.
It may be a bit system specific, but I like to have a bit of back-and-forth conversation, while dice are being drawn and replaced, until it's time to roll everything.
Most online rollers use a standardized format of /r 2d6+1. Simple, intuitive. But it slows me down, gets in the way just enough that I'd really rather just roll physical dice.
I'd like to see something where I can basically click a die in the UI to add it to my hand before casting them collectively. In multiple colors, with multiple die types.... Yeah, might be picky about it, but real physical dice do the job. Rolegate actually gets the closest to what I want, but they're not really set up for real-time play.
I really do like the tactile element of rolling dice myself.