Sunday was our first session with Foundry VTT with combat. Naturally, we christened it with a fight between seven PCs, one Ally NPC, and four skeletons against possibly as many as 33 foes. So, 40-45 combatants in one fray, in a large room, with buff spells galore.
What did we think?
Overall, it went well. There were a lot of teething pains for players and GM alike, but overall it went well. We got faster and faster with turns as we went.
- Turn tracking does speed-based. We do round-the-table initiative. So I actually have to work to make that happen.
- I love that it does the damage for me. I insisted on everyone putting their equipment into either GCS or GCA or both. It really needs to be GCA, since I use GCA and the official character sheets are in GCA. But several players keep shadow sheets in GCS as well. But the upside was that when someone hit in combat, I could drag the damage over to the target and let it do the math. It did so accurately. Very helpful. I didn't have sheets of scrap paper tracking dozens of foes and their lost HP . . . Foundry does it for me. Making it quiet, not open, by default would be nice.
- You can tag a token with lying down, or sitting, or whatever, but it doesn't change their posture on the character sheet. I'm not sure why.
- It's a pain to keep the turn tracker open, see the map, and have a character sheet open. I can pop it out, but I have to minimize it to use it on my 15" laptop. So there is a lot of clicking from one thing to another to another.
- Penalty buckets aren't persistant. When a PC attacks an NPC four times with identical modifiers, and I need to make four Dodge rolls, it sucks to have to apply all of the modifiers each time. I ended up doing it once, and then rolling unmodified and manually deciding if it worked or not.
- One player, especially - Wyatt's - insisted that people do things themselves. This was very good - we lost some time because of people fumbling to end their turn, or move their guy, or whatever - but it meant people learned how to do it and sped up as they went.
- I have no idea how to set it up to do slams . . . especially DFRPG style. Maybe I need to add it in as a weapon, but then I need to find a way to add in a damage bonus that will change based on current move.
- we need to figure out an easy way to put in changes to ST, DX, and defenses as buffs are very common.
- it's hard, with identical foes, to find which guy to mark as dead in the turn order. It would be handy if I could do that off the counter.
- there is no "crippled limb" marker. I put something on a draug with a crippled arm just to remind me he lost his arm.
- there needs to be a way to make a token into two hexes for lying down.
I'm sure we'll notice more things. Overall, I was very impressed, and even my most critical players were positively impressed. We just need to get smoother, and figure out what tools we need to use and how.
One thing you can do for bonus/penalty that you expec to reoccur frequently, it get it in the modifier bucket and the drag that to the macro bar. (I learned that today.)
ReplyDeleteFor the combat order, if the GM double clicks, they can arbitrarily change the number and thus set turn order by fiat
For tracking buff (this is something I did for the first time last night) you can add an item in GCS or GCA which makes the relevant changes. This is easier in GCS as the GGA can directly import from the saved GCS character.
“ One thing you can do for bonus/penalty that you expec to reoccur frequently, it get it in the modifier bucket and the drag that to the macro bar.” DAAAAMN that’s awesome news to go try that right now.
Delete"there needs to be a way to make a token into two hexes for lying down."
ReplyDeleteCan you hot swap tokens? If so, while annoying, this might also solve a few other issues like "Posture Notification" (not sure what you're issues was with that, if is was remembering they were Crouched, etc, or if it was for auto-applying penalties)...