YakiSauce

Ooof sorry about that load time. I had been monitoring the site for most of the day and it seemed to be holding up pretty well. It was probably under a fair bit of load because of this post. Or maybe it happened to be while I was doing a deployment. Do you recall what page that happened on?

As for a direct comparison to Roll20, that makes sense. Maybe I could make a specific landing page for it, as I do want to keep things very welcoming for first timers too.

Thanks for checking it out and for the feedback! Definitely agreed that map creation would be nice - something I'd like to get to.

Thanks so much to everyone for all the feedback and great comments. It's been really great reading through them all

If anyone's interested in following along as I keep building Diceright, I just set up a discord server: https://discord.gg/UpNn7yz6. I'll keep my roadmap updated there and would love to continue chatting with anyone who's interested

For us, we'd definitely prefer to play in person if we could. But like you mentioned, geography can be a real restriction. The times we have managed to play in person have been great.

Thanks! Appreciate that

Wow, great feedback. Thanks! Someone else suggested something similar about the main menu and the right sidebar. I can't quite picture what that would look like but I'll definitely experiment with it. And on merging the left and right sidebars, I have considered that but couldn't really figure out a way to make it work - I don't want people to ever miss the action thats happening the left sidebar. Everything else makes total sense to me - agreed on all of them. Thanks again for checking it out!

Interesting ideas. I'll take a look at how those would feel. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks! Appreciate the kind words

Thanks for taking a look!

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.

Thats a really interesting question. When I first started playing DnD the thing I loved the most was the combat. Loved the mechanics and loved that it was basically a big complex board game.

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.

Yeah, you make a good point. Definitely something I've thought about. When I started working on Diceright, DnD Beyond hadn't even been acquired by Wizards yet, so a lot has changed in relatively short time. That being said, they recently released an alpha of their 2d tabletop and there really wasn't much there. I assume it will get a lot better though. Still, it was a tough call on what to focus on as DnD really is a huge player in roleplaying games. A smaller slice of DnD users still might be larger than a bigger slice of another game. In the end, DnD is the game I know the most and the one I love. So I decided to do what I thought would be the most fun.

Totally makes sense - different groups are different and whatever works for your group, works.

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.

Yeah, DnD is a weird one and it's hard to describe because it's really not like much else. I like to say it's one part shared storytelling and one part complex board game, but I do think you're right that in the end it's really more like playing a big game of choose your own adventure.

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.

Great question. So far, I've just been doing this myself as a side project so I haven't spent much time thinking through how I would or could monetize it (open to suggestions on that). That being said, I think eventually, it would probably have to be some kind of subscription, if there's any real interest in it. It's not really built to be self hosted right now unfortunately.

Hey yeah, totally sensible question - wish I had a better answer. Unfortunately there isn't a great way to transfer an ongoing campaign. That's one of the main issues with getting folks to try out new virtual tabletops - there's some pretty established platforms already out there and there's a fair amount of lock in. Especially if you consider the assets a lot of DMs have purchased on those platforms, like you mentioned.

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!

Hmmm yeah that's a good point. The site does work pretty well on mobile but I didn't make any mobile videos. I'll put that on my todo list. Thanks for the feedback!

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

Thanks!

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.

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In defense of Cucumber, I've been a rails developer for more than 2 years and I still find it easier to read English than Ruby. I think the extra layer of abstraction is well worth the effort when reading over other people's tests.

"In Defense of Food" - Just finished.

"Long Walk to Freedom" - Currently reading.

"Good to Great" - Up next.

Make username on log in not case-sensitive. I just spent a while trying to log in because I didnt realize I needed to capitalize my username. I don't think its possible to create two usernames that differ only in capitalization, so Im not sure why case is considered while logging in.