What kind of support does your table need from online dice-roller / VTT?

#1

Screenshot from 2020-12-30 23-01-21
I just spent the day working on Togetherness Table and with the new year upon us I thought I would ask this question again to a wide audience.

I’m working on an Open Source dice-roller / Virtual Tabletop, with the intent to make something really easy to hack. I don’t think I want to get into video chat (Jitsi, Zoom, etc will always do it better), and so far I haven’t done much in the way in terms of battle maps (I just don’t tend to play those kinds of games). I was thinking dynamic character sheets might be useful - not just text-form-filling, but a dynamic sheet that has dice rolls built into it, or when you get 2-6 in Dungeon World, it automatically adds an XP.

But I think y’all might have even better ideas than that. Hit me up with all your creativity, please!

Or just say hi, take a look at the tool and lemme know what you think.

(This project has been discussed earlier here )

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#2

I’d love to have slightly bigger tokens or a way of adjusting image size, or simply square tokens so that I can use game-icons.net jewels without extra manipulation. * edit oh, wait : I can do that as an image. ** Oh no, the width is flickering uncontrollably, it works with width 50 anyway
And I’d like to be able to save to a local folder different states of the same game with an automatic time stamp, just like this : Save, OK this name, and it’s done. So that I can quickly browse the history of a session.

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#3

DeReel, thanks, I’m trying to reproduce your bug. Is this what you meant by game-icons.net jewels?

I do see some flickering locally. I’ll try to pin this down ASAP.

By “save to a local folder”, do you mean save files on your computer or phone’s permanent storage? Like a “Download” button?

#4

Flickering should be fixed. Care to give it another spin?

#5

This is getting better and better, and I’m as excited as ever about the project!

I think some simple and intuitive way of building “macros” could be really useful for this tool (although the dynamic sheets are already pretty good for this!), as well as a tool to predefine “areas” of the sheet to create dice/tokens/whatever - it would be great if one player rolls dice in the left corner, and another in the right, that kind of thing.

I noticed that flipping cards and unticking clocks doesn’t seem to work.

I would also prefer a less “heavy” background (instead of dark green with hexes), but that’s something that you’ve left the option for the user to do. Nice!

Another potential issue a lot of dice rollers have is that when you “reroll” a die and it comes up with the same result, it can be easy to think that you haven’t rolled it at all. Some visual way of representing that (or a roll result tracker) could be useful here.

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#6

No more flicker for Width : thank you, you did it !

Yes, a download button. Character sheets are super easy to do with Gd*c, an art form in itself.
(All of Game-icons.net are jewels to me, whatever their tags reads. :wink: )

Unticking works if you click outside the clock once between tick and untick which is a normal behaviour. It’s a problem only if you want to test tick/untick, or if you want to correct a tick too many.

Where new items are generated is a question : something fast and practical in various situations would be “dealing” them to the active dynamic paper (“tray” or “mat” is a term I like better, because who deals cards or rolls dice on a bit of paper) be it a player’s or a shared pool. </Rant mode on> - just not squeezed in the corner and that I don’t need to re-select as a group because that’s 100% of the time what I do anyway. <\Rant mode off.>

I don’t use token counting now, btw : it’s easy counting them anyway as they never add to big values.

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#7

I like “dynamic tray”; that seems to describe what they do quite well!

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#8

FYI, your comment has now transformed into an official Mozilla Firefox bug. Thanks for contributing to open source software, this is how communal technology is built!

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#9

DeReel, have a look at the Download SVG button under the Save menu on the beta site:

https://www.1kfa.com/table_beta/

Is that pretty much the feature?

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#10

Well done ! That’s exactly it.
I now have all that I need. Thank you !

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#11

I actually have functionality that I need to playtest a game that I have in the works, to be able to build and adjust custom decks out of a regular deck of playing cards, if that makes sense.

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#12

Thanks, Paul_T!

I worked on some of your requests tonight, and pushed the changes to table_beta

“Tray” is a way better name.
Try out flipping and ticking/unticking now. I think I’ve fixed the UX bug.
The background is now a “wiggly desert”. Less in-your-face I think?
I’m giving your other suggestions some thought. I’m thinking what’s called for is a “player marker” that you could place anywhere and all added objects would be added at it.
I am also thinking of how to record rolls and flips and put them in some kind of tracker.

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#13

Richard, that sounds cool! By “regular deck of playing cards”, are we talking a poker deck of 52 cards?

What kind of “adjustment” do you do?

#14

My guess is that it would be to take a deck or regular playing cards, and then remove some of the cards, playing with the remaining cards. Not a bad idea!

(Although I find it more practical at an actual table than for virtual gaming, where it’s easy enough to convert your rules to a die roll. Still, it could be important in a system where counting cards is an important part of the game - e.g. a game where you play normally until a certain card comes up, and then the game changes.)

#15

My game uses a form of deck building as character creation, so the functionality I need is to have a standard deck of poker cards, and to be able to select individual cards to shift into another deck, which you draw your hand from. I can usually do this fairly easily in other systems by deleting out the cards I don’t need but the problem is advancement works by adding other cards into the deck, which I have had trouble doing easily, so it has been hard to playtest that part of the game while we’re in lockdown

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#16

@Paul_T @DeReel, please check out the “player marker” feature I implemented on the beta site.

https://www.1kfa.com/table_beta/

If you double-click anywhere on the table itself, you should see a little triangle get added there. That’s the “player marker”. Once it’s visible, you can add any kind of object, and it will show up underneath (or nearby) the player marker.

I’m still thinking about how new objects can be automatically added to a selected Dynamic Tray. I see the value in that feature, because, as you say, a user might have to take that extra step of adding it to a tray any time they add a new die.

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#17

This looks really lovely, and I like the background!

Everything seems to be working well.

Two things that might be helpful:

  1. As always, the “active area” of the table doesn’t fit the screen. I’m guessing you’ve already messed around with this… but it still jumps out at me.

  2. Changing dice colours is a bit tricky. You have to update your “player profile” with a new colour, hit “update”, and then also the “add the last type of die you used” doesn’t update the colour. It’s also almost impossible to get back to the original colour (unless you know the code, I suppose).

Would it be too difficult to add a colour changing menu to each die (“Reroll, delete, turn up, change colour”)?

EDIT: Now I see the “clone selected object” option. That’s brilliant! And resolves many of these issues. Very nice! That’s probably even better than what I’m suggesting.

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#18

How experimental is the multiplayer right now? We’re starting up another game, is it in worse shape than the roller in general? (Which we used for our previous game, but then one player did all the rolling and just screen-shared their screen.)

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#19

It’s in pretty good shape on table_beta. I’ve been thinking I should push table_beta to the main branch today, because I feel like it’s pretty solid

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#20

Want to do a quick test session to try out the multiplayer? I’m online now

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