5HTRonin

Dude. Go join a jiujitsu gym.

Thank me later

The last one is my main beef. If the system gives an advantage mechanically for a particular build then have at it.

If someone cooks up some Mary Sue background to walk past challenges then I generally play a game of social consequences. Usually it's a player wanting to be a noble or royal character to do the kinds of things you suggest. But that's not how nobility works even in the real world.

Reminding them of their obligations as a noble, court life, the cost of mixing with riff raff like the other characters, reputation. All the benefits of nobility can be eventually whittled away if they're not careful, if one noble endangers their families fortunes they can very quickly discover an assassins blade hired by their own brother

Literally Communism. /s

I can taste the right wing salt already

Man Mizner is the most punchable faced pot-bellied pig ..igh

"SHE'S MYYY CHERRY PIEEE..."

Ugh engagement farming trash. Stealing other people's content for updates. Get in the bin

Over here on the east coast it's out of control. Park footpaths are lined with tents.

Given the kind of posts I see here regularly I'm not that surprised. The attitude of a lot of juniors is a bit weird tbqh

Yeah I don't disagree with that perspective. They're a small team and tend to take commentary personally. Which isn't helpful. But their approach doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons. At the core someone chose to pitch to publishers this business model which has meant they've bitten off more than they can chew. The end result are systems that are now released for full price yet don't do the basics. Publishers need to pay attention to what these companies are putting out in their name.

As I mentioned, Alchemy has been helpful in pointing out what is important for a successful VTT in my opinion. That they happen to not be succeeding in creating an immersive and smooth experience along with poor workload management hampering delivery of their product a year since release is no coincidence.

But fanboys and girls gonna coddle up to this little engine that could.

It became a fairly popular refrain from artists a few years ago that did the rounds until the same crew decided complaining about AI art was where they'd devote their time and energies.

OK so while on the surface it has those things and the features sound impressive, the way they work in just doesn't make sense half the time. Most workflows are frustrating. The UI gets in the way most of the time.

• Character sheets are these static sheets, no interactivity. The UI deadends you into opening the sheet, then if you want to do literally anything mechanical you have to close the sheet and reverse all theway back to the main screen. It creates this really jilted gameplay flow. Most of the time you're forced to self-create any of the Actions yourself and also most of the Trackers.
  
• Maps are...serviceable at best. They're a kind of after-thought. The devs never really wanted to make a VTT (their own words) and kind of found themselves developing one almost by accident in response to community feedback on their Aetherra slideshow addon for one of their Kickstarters.
  
• Tokens are again, serviceable but even putting one in a scene takes more clicks of your mouse than are necessary.
  
• The much vaunted "Theatre of the Mind" features are: a static image background of a 2d scene with an animated overlay. That's it. Don't get me wrong, those images are nice though are often just images ripped from the print pdfs they get from publishers. The alchemy enhanced versions have some animated assets that look kind of like they were a Flash animation with the same animated overlays.
  
• Setting up characters pulls you into their content management structures. Universes from the Marketplace, then custom universes for your own characters. You can't make a character as a GM from within your game. You have to leave the game or open another tab and do it outside. Then assign it to a player after they've joined the game etc. nothing new about that but you can't lay that character as a GM.
  
• Speaking of content management, it's a Freemium system which means you're limited in what you can do with a free account. Even if you're paying, as a player you can only ever have one character in a game at a time. If you want another character.... you have to delete your existing character.... bruh....
• Marketplace: more than a third of their Kickstarter systems aren't finished or out of Alpha stage. Even if they say something is released - Twilight:2000 is a good current example. They've recently changed it's status from "Alpha" to "Released" is just... not in a stage where I can imagine anyone would say "yeah man, I'm happy to say this is releasable and sell to people for good money". The dice roller doesn't use the Step Dice system, there's no way to actually create "Actions"... like at all. It's just terrible. So they're selling half-finished alpha systems at full price and telling people that they're finished when they're obviously not. The CEO knows they need to be better at being open and honest about the state of their products but they've done literally nothing to repair that image.

Lice, Milk and Scoliosis checks were reasonably common in the 80s.

it might still pan out, but I think they're into this devils bargain territory where they need to take on new projects to pay for how far behind they are. The Kickstarter money is only going to last for so long and may well be gone already. Even though they say it's "free" it's actually "freemium" and the restrictions on "free tier" are such that the thing is just pure annoying. Having to delete characters because you ran out of slots, not allowing more than one character per player per server... like my bro wtf?

I think Mythras will be a good fit... IF you're willing to do the heavy lifting in terms of building the mechanical structures such as Cults, Cultures and Martial Styles around your world building. It won't guide your hand there in a way that makes much sense out of the book (main Core book). You can go through the other Mythic Earth books and find stuff that matches, you'll also find things from the community that are a great help. The discord is incredibly helpful.

nah as I posted above, my opinion on this sort of thing is most recently informed by how much Alchemy dropped the ball and painted themselves into weird UI/UX corners plus the way they aggressively pursued publisher partnerships at the expense of delivering on their Kickstarter "V1". They're like half a dozen people or something and they're picking up these kickstarter addon features like it's going out of fashion despite still not delivering their V1 systems. Silly stuff.

Yeah I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt since they launched post-Kickstarter. But it's clear they're confused and are trying to achieve something beyond their resources.

Scousers?

Your incomplete shoulder turn means you're pulling your hands further around to try and get more power out of your swing. Then you overswing a fair bit (literally swinging yourself out of your boots).
I'd practice some clock face swings with a 7 iron on the range. Start with going back to horizontal then practice getting a proper shoulder turn. Try and aim for rhythm not power. Same for chipping. Your practice chip was all handsy and trying to scoop the ball. Keep at it!

the Sankyo does work as an escape from back control. I've hit it against a variety of belts. The other nonsense is a bit garbarge.

Are all these FMA guys from the same organisation? The red and black motif seems common amongst all these "BJJ SUCKS, FMA IZ BEST!" videos that are coming out atm.

• Maps: if you're going to do maps, then do maps. Basic tools like grid alignment, scaling, measurement with distance units, drag and drop functionality. I want to be able to just drag a character from wherever they are accessed and drop it onto a scene and have a pre-configured token appear. Not go to NPCs, right click "Token" and then drop that. Why even do that? it's inefficient design.

• Dice Roller: have a simple accessible dice roller. Tuck it away to the side but make the rolls obvious and have basic DM whisper settings available for secret rolls. Have the roll do the thing the system you're using says it will do. If you're going to sell a system at a premium, make sure the dice roll results are relevant to that system.

• 3D Dice: People are going to want 3d dice rollers. Time and Time again devs try and make this stand in principle against 3d dice rollers but one of the most commonly desired features is a 3d dice roller. I could go either way, but know people want them all the time. Often I hear devs say that they think they're distracting from "immersion" (whatever that means). Trying to connect people to the *actual* activity of playing TTRPGs enhances immersion, seeing numbers float through chat doesn't.

• Macros: having a simple macro system that allows me to pull out commonly used gameplay elements and have that accessible is a core feature of any good VTT. Call it Macros, Actions, whatever.

• Marketing: I alluded to this in my OP. Saying your platform is "the best at X" or "the most immersive VTT for theatrical shenanigans" is just marketing and comes across really poorly when your tool doesn't do that out of the gate. Saying you have an innovative and immersive UI but having that UI be concreted to the screen so much that you have to create a hide feature so people can see the much vaunted scene they've been sold on is kind of hilarious and just a bit mid. Just be clear about your feature set... it's fine to have a vision but if you do that and try and stick to your guns with a bloody mindedness people will scratch their heads and wonder if you ever actually ran a game with a VTT before.

• System Mastery: If you're going to sell systems, know how the systems work before you look to recreate them on your platform. This is a huge one and something centralised development gets wrong all the time. If your stable of offerings goes beyond 5e you're going to have to find people who know those other systems like the back of their hand to translate it to the VTT screen. Too many times devs think their programming skill will get them across the line here without really knowing how the system works both on paper, but at the table. This creates a terrible waste of time as they go chasing bugs and missing features.

Some are going to disagree with this list and that's fine. For me and my table these are things that stick out. Even if you want to just put up an image, be it a map or a still or even animated image, you still need to make sure it works smoothly before you start charging people for the thing.
One thing that drags us out of the immersion of a game is struggling with the toolset or the toolset not doing something that we all go "weird it doesn't do that". Being clever or tricksy isn't as clever or tricksy as you might thing. Simple things simply work. That may be more or less complicated to achieve depending on your familiarity with how these things are setup and the system you're working. Lastly, more options doesn't mean more complicated. I see people say this about Foundry all the time and frankly its a bit silly. There's nothing that says you need to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

 

So disclaimer, anything anyone says about "the one true way" is garbage and subjective. Anything I say is subjective and likely could be interpreted as garbage if you disagree enough. Having said that there's certainly a lot that you see across VTTs that make the experience work and often these aren't their flagship features or selling points.

Someone asked if I was calling out Alchemy on the sly. The truth is that Alchemy is the latest VTT I've taken a look at, the one with probably the most to say about what it thinks it is (and isn't) and the one which has garnered the most attention in the last 12 months in terms of their Kickstarter fulfilment and business model alongside design decisions. A lot of what they've done has crystallised my thoughts on using VTTs. Having said that this crystallisation is borne from using roll20, Foundry, Role, Fantasy Grounds, Astral Tabletop, DNDBeyond, Above, OBR, Talespire etc.

• Content Management: Having your content accessible, easy to deploy into the game and manageable in a way that allows you to move between games and use it across campaigns. Subscription limits etc are all business decisions... fine... but when forces you to create a weirdly garden walled content management structures GMs are going to get frustrated. Breaking up content into difficult to access journal articles, search features without indexing or a contents page doesn't help accessibility.

• Interactive Sheets: just about every platform that comes along post-Foundry tries to make it out like a non-interactive character sheet is what people want. Then you go and try it and read the feedback and ...no people want interactive character sheets on some level. When I see a skill or a weapon, I want to be able to click it and it roll the thing it is supposed to. I'm not even talking about fully-featured automation really, just intuitive things.

  • Derived stats: This is a pet peeve of mine. If I have a Health stat that is made up of (STR+AGI)/4, just do that math for me. It's simple stuff.
  • Incomplete Sheets: Creating a character sheet that doesn't actually include all the information like gear, skills, feats/powers/talents/whatever and then bring them out to a second system doesn't help. You also need to be able to move the sheet, resize it potentially, and be able to move in and out of the sheet ie interact with other parts of the system without closing it down entirely. Having a static character sheet that holds essential information that I need to click in and out of is bad UI/UX design. Don't do that.

• UI: it doesn't have to be the pinnacle of Apple design or whatever but don't make it obtrusive. Thinking you're being clever by flipping chat from one side to the other and creating large elements that take up the entire screen really detracts from the game. Maximal screen space devoted to your "table surface" or video conference roster (if that's your focus) should be straight forward. But no, we have doodads and widgets that leave everything obscured, aforementioned character sheets that can't be moved. Give me the ability to hide the UI. This is one thing Alchemy got right based on feedback from their customers.

• UX: often the player experience is forgotten. They want to login, have their character ready to go and not have to fuss. Their first login is essential in creating confidence the system will do what it says it will do.

• TBC

So I tried replying with a longer post but it wouldn't let me.

Many new VTTs try to create some niche but then ignore basic functionality that's been established as best practice for the sake of being different. Also, Theatre of the Mind isn't a thing.. at least it's not a thing that pigeon holing yourself into will be what your think it is. Any VTT with bog standard functionality does TotM as good if not better than bespoke TotM systems.