VTT Wish List - Vision Options & Fully Ported Advantages

Here are a few things I wish Foundry VTT with the GURPS Games Aid did:

Limited Vision Option

Vision is 360 by default. It would be lovely - although probably wouldn't make the players happy - if you could only see in the arc you can actually observe based on your disadvantages/advantages. Have Peripheral Vision? Great, you can see a wider area. Have a helmet with No Peripheral Vision? Then you see what your character sees, and probably understand why most people would doff that helmet outside of a direct fight.

Light is also 360 by default. Wearing a light stone on your chest on a strap? It lights up 360 degrees with no blank spots, as it was shining from directly above your head, and went through any and all obstacles. Nothing short of a wall or door obstructs vision. That's too bad, because it means you can't hide small monsters behind big ones, or get a sense of what is hard to see. You get the illusion of total vision yet the GM isn't going to play it that way.

Complete Monster Actors

Monsters are in the VTT, but they aren't wholly there. Advantages don't all port over. Damage Reduction doesn't come into play unless you manually check the box off on each and every hit. Given PCs that hit 2-3 times per PC per turn, this is a slowdown. It also means no monster in the system is to be played with a thorough review of everything they should be able to do, and careful checking to make sure it's implemented correctly on each attack, defense, or damage result. You have to check yourself for weaknesses, follow-up attacks, and so on. It gives the illusion of being good to go but you don't really know if you're doing it right.

Weekly Wrapup 5/23/2025

- Basically no gaming this week. Lots of grappling practice. One of my friends is competing for the first time tomorrow so that's dominated my time.

- I did play a little Battle Brothers. Using some new mods, it's clear that I have a few poorly built brothers and it might be too late to upgrade everyone to survive the fights I need to take at this point. Hmm. I don't want to start over, but I made need to abandon these guys are try again with better knowledge of what to do.

- I had to do a partial rollback of my Felltower update because some of the modules I use won't run with the new version of Foundry. Sigh. We'll see how it holds up in a week.

- Oooh, I love Battletech with minis.

Felltower Update

I did a little work on Felltower today. We'll be beyond the air gate, next time, but still, the dungeon must go on.

- I updated some rumors

- I updated the Felltower main file a bit, to clean up some noise. It's a running record of changes, but some didn't get logged for some reason.

- I backed up the VTT and updated it.

Nothing really exciting - too much non-gaming work to do.

DF Felltower, Foundry, and Foundry Modules

Inspired by the same post for Arden Vul, here is what we run DF Felltower with.

Host: Forge

Pricing is quite reasonable - for a year, they charge less than I can make net in a couple hours of work, and hosting would take more than those hours. Win/win.

Core VTT software:

Foundry VTT version 12

Latest stable version; I upgrade as they come along. With the length of DF Felltower's play I need to keep updating to the current, stable release. It's $50 for the license.

System:

GURPS 4e Game Aid (GGA)

You need this to run GURPS. It's generally a very good package. It's free, but I'd pay for a better version. It just upgraded to 0.17.19.

Modules:

I will admit right out, I run a bunch of these because Vic suggested I do so based on his own use. I'm reluctant to just disable or change them because I don't want to mess up what's actually working, but I'd like to kick out what's not useful or helping anymore. I'll add details as I note what's actually helpful about each one.

About Face

Changelogs & Conflicts

CodeMirror

Covered Token Rescue HUD-GURPS

We need this for close combat, but I'll give Z Scatter a look.

Dungeon Draw

I put this one on to help me draw maps, but I honestly haven't found it sufficient to do the whole job.

Gaming Ballistic's GURPS Quick Reference Character Sheet

Hide GM Rolls

Illandril's Token HUD Scaler

libWrapper

Math.js

Monk's Bloodsplats

Monk's Combat Details

Monk's Combat Marker

Monk's Hotbar Expansion

Monk's Wall Enhancement

Nightmare Fuel Bestiaries

Ownership Viewer

PnP - Pointer and Pings! (BETA)

PopOut!

socketlib

SortableJS

Tidy UI - Game Settings

Token Actiob HUD Classic

Toen Border Supplements

Token Mold

Token Tooltip Alt

Universal Battlemap Importer

Friday Roundup 4/11/2025

What caught my eye this week?

- Tactics in Adventure Gaming. I liked this look at tactical combat and mapless combat.

- My blog is in the top 90 RPG blogs.

- This list of modules for a GURPS-based Foundry VTT game is very helpful for me. I will have to put up my own list - maybe Sunday - and try one of them myself.

- Next game is in May, so expect lots of little housekeeping posts from me and no big summaries. Interesting discussion in my telephone game post, too. I'm still wondering what I can do to improve things.

GURPS VTT module updated

The GURPS module for Foundry was updated.

It seems to have solved the drag-and-drop damage problem . . . I can't be totally sure because we're mid-combat. But that was a big issue in our last session.

Some other bugfixes are in there, as well . . . but I don't know how many will actually affect us.

VTT Gripes & Praises

Comments on the VTT we use - Foundry, hosted on Forge, using the Unofficial GURPS module.

This is all for Session 204.


Praises

- the new GURPS module for Foundry has a die roll confirmation - you can now see the net roll, with your mods, before you roll it. It's very handy. It's an extra step on each roll, but it saves a lot of pre-roll double checking, or post-roll calculation.

- the damage dialog gives calculations for major wounds, shock, knockback . . . and you can roll for the victim and apply prone, stunning, shock, etc. with a button click. Very nice. If we can be sure the calculation is right, I can inflict knockdown and stun on PCs instead of having the dely of waiting for the player to pull up a sheet and roll.

- the numbering at the end of the NPCs was sufficient to differentiate them.

- there is an editable status effect I think we can use for Resistances and such.

- Overall, the experience is getting smoother.

Gripes

- drag-and-drop damage doesn't work well anymore. If there are multiple actors in one hex, the top one is selected for the damage dialog. This was literally just fixed.

- I still can't easily add new combatants to a fight without revealing them. If there is a way to add someone to combat as invisible on the turn tracker by default, I'd love to know. The gnolls weren't a surprise because someone saw them populate the turn order before I could make them invisible until they were within sight.

- Sometimes when I marked someone as fallen, they disappeared from the map for the players. Since bodies are bad footing for our purposes, that is bad. I had to leave everyone up and on the turn tracker, which isn't ideal.

- I still need a way to mark statuses on NPCs without revealing them. The PCs spotted a pair of disabled mechanical knights and no one even remarked on them . . . because they could see the disabled icons on them. They should have had to at least question if they were active for a second, not get the answer from icons I put down.

- Facing is still weird as you move your guy . . . and being able to draw a path and then click to move along it would clear up a lot of questions about how people moved around.

Trying some new VTT settings

I put in some new settings for the VTT for tomorrow:

- auto-popout for the Combat Tracker

- larger font sizes to make it easier to read

- I think I managed to turn off the ability to take yourself out of combat

- turned off the auto-open on the modifier bucket - huge for me, since I use two screens and it's effective in the middle

- maybe made some other tweaks that will affect combat positively . . . but we'll see. Sometimes it's hard to parse out what it is I'm actually causing to happen.

GURPS VTT Module Wish List

Here is a quick list of what I'd like to see in my VTT, especially for the GURPS module. I'll keep the updated as I go or as things change.

drag and drop damage onto the combat tracker. There are times I'd like to be able to drag and drop damage to the combat tracker. Or to an open character sheet, for that matter.

Ability to automatically assign a random 3-digit number after all NPCs. If I drop 10 orcs down on the board, giving them adjectives before their names just causes goofiness from my players. "Sleepy Orc" or "Angry Orc" is going to start a whole derailing series of time-wasting comments and annoy me. "Orc (175)" and "Orc (609)" are easy to tell apart and minimize the commentary.

Undo Damage. Look, sometimes people mess up their roll, or their target, or it gets on the wrong guy. One-click Undo would be awesome.

Assignable Mods. I'd like to be able to, on the fly, add changes to a figure. Give it Homogenous or additional DR or whatever and keep the change on the character.

GM-only visibility on statuses. I'd like to be able to put a status on an NPC that I know about, but that the PCs don't. They shouldn't know if someone is mentally stunned, or can fly (if they haven't flown yet), or have Armor 3 cast on them, or whatever. I'd like to mark it privately but visibly to me.

Year in Gaming 2024

Here we are at the end of 2024. How was it for gaming for me?

Running Dungeon Fantasy

I GMed 13 sessions of DF Felltower this year.

Session 190, Felltower 128 - Exploring Level 1
Session 191, Felltower 129 - Troll Treasure & Orc Holes
Session 192, Felltower 130 - Down, down, down the GFS
Session 193, Felltower 131 - Olympus Gate II, Part I
Session 194, Felltower 131 - Olympus Gate II, Part II
Session 195, Felltower 131 - Olympus Gate II, Part III
Session 196, Felltower 132 - Wells, Pools, and Cultists of the Good God
Session 197, Felltower 133 - Chimera, Stone Bulls, and Baby Mira
Session 198, Brotherhood Complex 6 - Gnolls & Doors
Session 199, Brotherhood Complex 6 - Gnolls & Doors, Part II
Session 200, Brotherhood Complex 7
Session 201, Brotherhood Complex 8 - Raid, Part I
Session 202, Brotherhood Complex 8 - Raid, Part II - War of the Robots

This was good, but far less than the 20 I'd hoped for. In fact, this might be the lowest total we had any year since we started. I think it's because we now have a solid core of players, and instead of playing as often as we can, we play as often 75% of more of the core players can make a session. I'm giving some thought about to deal with this.

We lost a few players this year - well, one, and it's clear some of the others aren't coming back. Kevin left the group due to a difference in play style (I think.) I think I can pinpoint the moment it occured. It's okay - my game isn't for everyone, and I don't let players create problems for themselves (say, by trashing entrances to the dungeon so they're hard to use) and then solve them for them (by handwaving the "hard to use" part.) If that costs me players, it's okay. It's just a bummer because I think he left just before the PCs went off and did something he'd be have been terribly interested in.

I was pleased with a few things in-game this year:

- a return to Olympus. There is one more era left, now, and it's a doozy.
- an attempt to do things with the pools. Mostly wasted, but still, it was actual methodical exploration.
- a successful attempt to re-open ways into Felltower.
- the PCs finally found the domed city at the bottom of Felltower.
- a persistent attempt to wipe out the Brotherhood Complex's inhabitants.

Good stuff overall.

Playing RPGs

None. Not one session.

Other Games & Gaming

I was able to play some other games this year:

Board Games:

Third World War: Persian Gulf - I had a great time playing this one, but the randomized system I used for card selection left the Warsaw Pact (okay, USSR) with very little time to really seize the gulf. They ended up with a substantial, but unsustainable, advantage, before logistical breakdown left them in the lurch. A player-chosen diplomatic approach would have placed far more emphasis on getting forces into Iran early. Oh well.

Revolt on Antares - I didn't get to play but I did finally replace my set. I'll play this year.

Video games:

GTA 3: Vice City
Pathfinder: Kingmaker (Lawful Good Paladin aimed at getting the "best" ending)
Fantasy General (one battle left)
Grand Tactician: The American Civil War - played a short bit, I need to play more.

Not a great year for these games. I did get more done in Pathfinder, but as always I stall out in the complicated and not-terribly-fun phase-state House out of Time.

Writing

Almost none. My work-work got busy . . . I set myself a goal of +50% business for the year and met it. No time for writing with that going on.



Other stuff? No painting, although my readers (glasses) make it possible now. Lots of Felltower work. Some new gaming things I can enjoy to read and play with. But that's about it.

As years go for gaming . . . not bad, but not up to par. Next game is 1/12 and I hope to keep some kind of rhythm.

Final game prep

I had only a little to do today for game, and not a lot of energy to do more. So I:

- ensured the VTT is up to date

- updated the rumors for Felltower

- ensured my manuals, maps, and so on are ready to go.

Nice bit about a persistant dungeon game is that I don't have to do too much.

More VTT questions for Felltower

I've had a little more time, so I've been spending it on learning my VTT of choice more in order to enhance Felltower. I found a good source of tokens, so I'm largely good there. And for terrain, too, but that opens up a whole new set of issues.

I do have some things I need to learn:

- How to put down a tile as a texture on the ground, rather than as a moveable object.

- How to use images as terrain features without making them moveable tokens. Maybe that's the same as what I just noted.

- How to attach light sources to objects without having to make them actors/tokens.

- What the heck Region does.

- How to make light sources visibly working even when you can see without them. Right now, guys with Dark Vision can't tell you there is a torch lighting an area, which is odd.

That's about it for now. I'm working on these.

Forge Packages sale - any recommendations?

There is a sale on The Forge for modules for Foundry.

Any recommendations from there?

Sale Packages

DF Felltower Update

It's been a week since I updated - just a very busy week of non-gaming things.

I had a little time to do some Felltower things today:

- updated the VTT.

- updated some monsters that GCS's import to the VTT messed up.

- started work on some Felltower NPCs.

Not much beyond that . . . but I should get more Felltower work done this week, as the next expected game is 11/17.

VTT Gripes

Foundry & Forge were a problem in our last game session.

We had some of the usual - slowdowns, occasional drops and hangups, etc. The usual network issues. That's typical.

- There has been a change since a few sessions back with dragging and dropping damage onto a token. The bounding boxes seem to be too large - if I drop damage onto a character, the nearby tokens also get put up as options. That's useless but not a problem when it's on, say, Hannari Ironhand, Chop, and Percy. It is when it is on Gnoll, Gnoll, or Gnoll.

In order to do damage to specific tokens with area-effect spells, I had to resort to dragging them one by one out of the fight, applying damage, and then putting them back - and then making sure their facing was correct.

This took a long time. It literally took 10 minutes (12:51 to 1:01 pm) to inflict damage from one explosive spell thrown into a packed field of about 8 foes. With better damage dropping, it could have taken 2 minutes, if not more like 1 (if I typed fast enough.)

- GCS/mook generator issues abound. DR doesn't always import well. Some stats are missing sometimes. I usually ffind out when I need them that, say, DR is 0 on the vitals of a golem. That slows me down because I have to generate a mook, then import it, then check it line by line. It would be vastly easier if I could just do the line by line in the first place because the mook generator imports poorly at best.

- I can't seem to figure out why the icon facing always chooses something inappropriate. You can drag your icon one by one by one along the map, and the facing it chooses will vary according to a pattern we can't discern. It would be much better if you moved hex by hex and had facing change as you faced into it by default, or not move at all by default, and then display the actual move when you click to end the movement.

- We can't have tokens cover more than one hex without just being bigger overall. I've had to essentially make falling prone a one-hex thing, and big monsters into one-hex foes. It's annoying at best - I've had to essentially change the rules so I don't have to deal with it.

Those things really slow us down in play.

Here are a few things I'd really like:

- Ability to put GM-view-only status effects down. I should be able to mark who has a Missile Shield or is poisoned or whatever without my players knowing automatically.

This is especially true with Reeling, which sometimes comes on for monsters that cannot suffer from Reeling. That's annoying. I need to figure out how to turn that off for certain NPCs without turning it off for everyone.

- droppable smoke or other vision-blocking effects.

- Actual item tokens I can put down.

- An actual, official, licenses, SJG-backed VTT package for GURPS. A person can dream, I guess.

No more Hide GM Rolls?

We played our most recent session of Felltower with the latest version of Foundry . . . but unfortunately, the excellent Hide GM Rolls module didn't work.

So we couldn't roll Blind or GM rolls. Everything was visible. I ended up rolling dice on my desk and manually inputting the numbers.

Anyone have a suggested replacement?

Forge Bazaar sale - recommended token or scenery packs?

Anyone have an suggestions?

I'm thinking I'd like to have a token pack for weapons, furniture, and basic dungeon decor without having to take all the pictures and making them into tokens.

A pack of walls and floors I can use to build dungeons might be nice, too.

So if you have any you like, let me know!

Sale

VTT work today

Nothing exciting for game-related things today. Just did some VTT work, putting monsters into the VTT for later use. Nothing I needed now, but ones that the PCs may meet in the not too distant future, if they go new places where they dwell.

The big issue, as always, is putting special attacks into the VTT . . . and the second biggest issue is images for tokens.

Felltower VTT Updating

I spent a few hours today watching some videos I needed to see, while creating and uploading a bunch of tokens for monsters to Forge.

I still have a lot to go, but most of the foes I often use are up there.

I wanted to do maps, actually, but I don't have a scanner and I just can't get a sufficiently good image with my camera. I'll borrow a scanner and see about uploading some scans soon.

I did manage to take a picture of one level . . . but once I got it uploaded I basically locked up Forge. Oops. I may need to break my bigger levels into sections to avoid that.

Year in Gaming 2023

Here we are at the end of 2023. How was it for gaming for me?

Running Dungeon Fantasy

Due to a TPK, this year was pretty odd for me - I actually got to play in a DF Felltower adjacent campaign GMed by one of my regular players, Vic.

So I GMed less sessions overall, but the net amount of DF Felltower-connected play wasn't as low as this seems. 2022 featured only 13 sessions for comparison to me GMing 12 this year - about one every 4 weeks.

Session 178, Brotherhood Complex 2 - Iron Knights
Session 179, Brotherhood Complex 3, Part I
Session 180, Brotherhood Complex 3 - Part II
Session 181, Brotherhood Complex 4, Part I
Session 182, Brotherhood Complex 4, Part II - Demon Grunts & Torturers
Session 183, Brotherhood Complex 5 - Gnolls (Part I)
Session 184, Brotherhood Complex 5 - Gnolls (Part II)
Session 185, Felltower 125 - Return to Felltower
Session 186, Felltower 125 - Return to Felltower Part II - Gnolls & A Level Too Far?
Session 187, Felltower 125 - Fighting the Werewolves
Session 188, Felltower 126 - Werewolf Loot & Crystal Gazing
Session 189, Felltower 127 - Quick Delve

It was great getting back to Felltower.

We added a couple of players, though - Doug and Kevin joined us. We didn't really lose anyone although Galen's player Mike only played in a session or two. Doug and Kevin have been excellent additions and have added a different approach to delving and character generation.

The Forge has been excellent, and Foundry is getting better and better. Still odd sometimes, and still lots of little issues, but overall I feel much more comfortable with it.

Playing RPGs

With our TPK in Session 184, caused by Ye Olde Let's Camp in This Dead End Tactic, we needed to reboot the party again. I didn't want to create yet another starting area, and Felltower isn't a great place for newbies anymore, after endless bottom feeding by high point guys cleaned out anything that wasn't a rat, an ooze, or a gargoyle from the upper levels. So Vic offered to run some games . . . and I suggested we port the characters from there back to Felltower.

We did that. It was a good experience - I'd never co-GMed anything like that before.

I played most of the sessions, missing only one because I didn't want to stay up all night in Japan to game from there.

Felltower Adjacent - Session 1
Felltower Adjacent - Session 2
Felltower Adjacent - Session 3
Felltower Adjacent - Session 5 - Scaring & Murdering Hobgoblins
Felltower Adjacent Session 6 - Traps & Temples of Orcus

There were 6 sessions and I played 5 of them, as you can see above. All in all, then, there were 18 sessions of Felltower-connected games run in 2023, and I played only 17 of them despite it being the campaign I initiated. Heh. Goes with my "our game" idea - Felltower is "mine" and I didn't even play all the sessions.*

AD&D

Another year with no AD&D. I expect this coming one will be the same, although I'm going to try otherwise. I expect the ship has sailed and no one wants to play AD&D anymore. I'm the only one who mentions it.

Other Games & Gaming

I was able to play some other games this year:

Board Games:

Fire in the Lake - simply beautiful, and amazing to play. Every turn feels like a dilemma.
Panzer Blitz - fun, but I'd actually rather play early-war scenarios, like 41-42.

Video games:

GTA 3: Vice City
Borderlands 2 (not so much of it, this year, but I still fired it up a few times)
Pathfinder: Kingmaker (running both my evil monk, and a Lawful Good Paladin aimed at getting the "best" ending)
Planescape: Torment enhanced edition (beautiful, and such a good game)
Fantasy General (almost finished it)
War in the East (played a couple of short scenarios)

I bought, but haven't yet played, Grand Tactician: The American Civil War.

Writing

I started work on a big project with Doug Cole, but SJG ended up putting it on hold for a while. Oh well.

I wrote a few other little things but without Pyramid, they don't have a home, but I like them too much to not try to find a way to turn them into a profit.

Overall, not a bad year in gaming. I'd like to get to 20+ sessions in 2024.





* I still shake my head over the hostile reaction I got in the comments on that one.