A bit of background⌗

I currently am involved in 3 campaigns that each virtually meets 2-3 times a month. Pre pandemic I had one group that met in person but when the pandemic started we transitioned to virtual. This turned out to be a boon for our playing schedule. Getting everyone together in one place was difficult, but getting everyone to log in at the same time is an order of magnitude easier.

During the pandemic, another group of friends wanted to socialize and Sunday night DnD came into being. Most of these people had never played DnD but wanted socialization.

The first iteration⌗

[Roll20](https://www.roll20.net) is where we started, and it’s a solid start for someone getting into virtual role-playing games. Roll20 has a solid marketplace, easy to use, and gets you 75% of the way.

It has problems with combat flow, tooling, and adding some necessary features. In another blog post I will delve into those problems.

I went searching and found Foundry⌗

[Foundry](https://foundryvtt.com/) is a tool for hosting your server and extending the capabilities with an incredible array of plugins.

Foundry brought my game to the next level, and as a DM for games made my life easier. Running combats, token vision, status effects, and making scenes feel cool, are all things that with the usage of the plugin system made foundry amazing.

In roll20 the DM reveals the map by hand, in foundry as users move the system shows what they can see. If a player casts light on themselves I can make the player a light source to move around; I can create colored lights to give a certain ambiance.

All monster’s actions are available by selecting them: saves, attacks, spells. It’s all there a click away. The Player Characters, ac, hp, and perception are a blink away. I can import anything from DnDBeyond, so as the players level up I click import and can see what they have.

For someone with some technical skill, it’s not hard to setup. My setup will likely be a future blog post, but just wanted to get the pump primed for that.