As I’ve said for the last couple of years, I’ve been searching for a VTT to meet the needs of my group. My friend Quinn Murphy linked me to Tableplop, which is looking very promising. While many of the games I run are covered by Playingcards.io (they added polyhedral dice too!), when it comes to combat grid games I need a little more, but Roll20 just has so many pain points. (Yes, I’m aware of many of the other options, they don’t fit for a variety of reasons – I check 2-3 times a year on many of them).
So Tableplop, what’s good with it? First, it’s fast. Super fast. Uploading maps and tokens takes just a few seconds, is very easy to navigate. The UI is very clean and it’s easy to minimize/open menus and declutter the space. The dice roller is intuitive, accessible and quick. A lot of the things in Roll20 that are unnecessarily buried under 2-3 steps of submenus are just there and easy to get to in Tableplop.
The free account gives you 100mb of storage, which is not too bad when you realize how quick and easy it is to upload stuff; you can just swap menu/tokens that aren’t being reused. There’s a nice little tracker so you know how much space you’re using at any time, which can help if you’re using big image files for your maps or tokens and need to budget the space. Upgrading on the Patreon to $3.50 bumps you to 600 mb and at $7/mo you’ve got 4 GB, so it’s pretty comparable to Roll20 in that regard.
Currently it’s limited in terms of coded character sheets, so if you’re looking for that, this might not be a good fit for your games. If you’re not depending on automated character sheets, but do need to do stuff with grid/hex map play, this might be a great choice.
Right now I’m having all my players poke at it and confirm it’s running good on their machines (which, unfortunately is why Foundry wasn’t a viable option for me). My Errant game is probably going to migrate in the next few weeks, and I’m looking forward to it.
I like to do semi-regular reviews of how my gaming has been going, for a little bit of course correction. The last year has been pretty tough in terms of mental capacity vs. life stress. Probably one of the better things I’ve started doing is “prep as if a much more tired, distracted, and stupid version of yourself is going to run the game” and you’ll probably be right.
Anyway, it’s an aspirational goal. What usually happens is I make a lot of tools that would be perfect for me when I’m at 100% and are too much when I’m actually running the game, so I end up scaling back and refining them.
The mental model for reviewing how the game is working for me
Anyway, I really just have two axis I’m using: Fun vs. Not Fun, Easy vs. Hard. In a magical idealized world a game is 100% Fun and Easy in every part. In actuality different parts of a game fit different sections, and the point is to change your prep, set up some tools, change a bit of structure, to move stuff closer to the easy & fun section.
The easiest parts to understand are Fun & Easy, and Hard & Unfun. The pitfalls are the other two quadrants.
Hard & Fun
The Hard & Fun part is something a lot of RPG culture inures us to; “Good roleplaying is hard” “Good GMing requires EXPERTISE” etc. You have fun, so it feels worth it, but the question is whether a) it gets easier over time, and b) if this becomes the only way fun is happening in a session. It’s how you end up with burnout and slow building resentment about the game itself. Also understand what seems “hard but not too hard” might grind you down over time, and slide into the “hard & not fun” part.
When you find parts of a game hit this quadrant, the answer is to find tools or advice, or build some workarounds to make it easy. Or, if none of that will work, minimize how often you have to use this part in the game, or cut it out completely. It might be fun and hard, but if you can take the energy you would have put into it for more of the fun and easy, it’s a better use of time.
Unfun & Easy
This is what I call the “invisible ho-hum” background of play. I’ve been in a lot of games where this becomes the majority of play; the players show up, every trope happens in the way everyone expects it to, at a slow, grinding pace. (Back in Forge days, this got called Zilch Play when it was the primary focus for campaigns).
A lot of not-particularly important dice rolls get made along the way. It’s a common problem of games that focus on moment to moment task resolution without any particularly guiding structure to play – you find yourself making rolls to get past each locked door, to cook a meal, etc. but nothing seems to ever… go somewhere from this. A few times it’s comedic failure, a few times it’s surprising and quirky critical success.
It’s easy, just assign a difficulty number, roll for a task. It’s that easiness without payoff that makes it a trap for a campaign. Eventually, people lose interest – the boat just spins in circles, going nowhere. Or, rather, the classic “20 minutes of fun in 4 hours of play” sinks it.
This is the harder part to fix. In “soft advice” this is where the old advice around “scene framing” and “skip to the fun part” kicks in. Generally games with good structure don’t suffer this as much as games without, and you’re being forced to make up the biggest work the game designer should have done instead of passing it along to the consumer.
Sometimes you can find or create a house rule that will support it, but again, it usually requires a good understanding of the structure of play to install something to fix it.
Hard & Unfun
You’d think with this being the worst part of play, it’d be the hardest to fix. It sort of is and sort of isn’t. It’s so obvious to you that it’s a pain point, that you’re probably already seeing it needs a fix. There might be small parts that you just endure (“ok character creation is a pain in the ass but you only have to do it once”) but if it’s a regular experience in play, you really need to look for workarounds and solutions.
When it’s common, nearly always the answer is just find a different game.
How it looks
I’m normally trying to review my games every 3-4 months. Last year was a lot so it’s been more than half a year. The big point of check in for me is Errant; we’ve been having a lot of fun, but there’s definitely been several points where I’ve hit Hard & Fun, and I know that’s not sustainable.
Breakout parts
Errant has a bunch of different time scales; Combat, Exploration, Travel, Downtime. Those actually work fine as initial sections, I’ll throw on Worldbuilding/Tracking and NPCs as my two extra bits.
Combat – Fun & Easy
Exploration – Fun & Easy
Travel – Drifts towards Hard & Fun or Easy & Unfun (A lot more random stuff happens during travel so it’s more creative work in the moment to come up with what is happening)
Downtime – Goes across the board.
When we had a faction war break out, it started sliding towards Hard & Unfun. Recently reviewing the rules for downtime, I saw the problem I was projecting the Apocalypse World understanding of Moves onto the game; in AW, the Moves lead towards the structure, but in Errant, the Downtime Turn Structure and moving away from scene to scene is what I SHOULD be doing. So 100% my bad reading.
I also produced a crib sheet for my players of their downtime options; I think the problem for the players is that there’s so MANY options, that they need it put out like a menu list to remind them what they can do.
Worldbuilding/Tracking – Gotta figure out what the magic set up is that’s easiest for (tired, distracted me) to navigate during play. I set up a new system for both towns, locations, NPCs and dungeon keys… we’ll see how this goes.
NPCs – I come up with NPCs in the moment, I’m terrible about remembering who they are after a session or two of their absence. Gonna try to throw a lot more shorthand notes when I make the NPC and hope that makes up the difference?
Anyway, as you can see, the point is not to make a chart for the sake of charting, the point is to identify what kind of places you have things that could be easier, or more fun, or both, and play with actions to adjust play accordingly.
You don’t need to run perfect sessions, but you can make it easier for your most imperfect self to run a good session, and that’s what counts.
My standard method of prepping a drama focused game is to start with a central conflict, a situation where there’s lots of ways to go at it and your players build their player characters on that, and you build your NPCs on that as well. (Flag Framing: setting up a campaign)
This video is a very condensed, simple version of that:
I can’t remember who it was years ago on the Forge, but someone explained to me they simply took the basic structure of the original Star Trek plot: they encounter a problem, Bones has one view, Spock has another, and they create a tension and then Kirk either talks down a superhuman being or ground roll punches some folks along the way as the middle ground.
That became the basis for my idea of conflict webs; central problem, start designing NPCs and factions that have goals in relation to that problem, and then start building out other NPCs/factions that oppose some of those groups for secondary or tertiary reasons, have the players latch on to that mess (either aligned with one, or across the conflict web) and then you play that out. (You can get labyrinthine if you want players to have multiple characters or you expect a year+ long campaign by making 3 tiered conflict webs )
Anyway, the above is useful video and one that if you are running a drama focused game, can be something you can share to get your players up to speed quickly with what they’re doing in creating characters for such a game, especially if they’re new to a game that does this, or the system you’re using doesn’t explicitly help create such play.
Deeper in the Game 