Are there FOSS alternatives to Roll20?
I did a little googling and spotted Foundry Virtual Tabletop, but I haven’t been able to explore many alternatives yet. Which ones are good?
Foundry is outstanding. My groups moved to it after being frustrated with Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. Only parts of it are open-source, but I don’t mind in this case. It can be self-hosted, only one copy is needed, the price is reasonable, and the money goes to a small team of independent developers rather than a big corp.
(My one notable criticism of Foundry is that their official support community is on Discord, which I won’t use. This hasn’t kept me from using the software, though. There are plenty of other users out there, so it’s pretty easy to find information when I need it.)
We use Mumble for voice chat. Open-source, lightweight, cross-platform, low latency, good noise filtering (RNNoise), great sound quality. You can self-host, or pay for a super-cheap hosted server.
For the sake of completeness, here’s a VTT Wiki:
http://rpgvirtualtabletop.wikidot.com/the-vts
A few random virtual tabletops that I bookmarked during peak pandemic:
Don’t forget owlbear rodeo.
I remember Owlbear Rodeo being mentioned from time to time a few years ago, but I didn’t keep track of it. Wasn’t it originally free? Did it go commercial?
I can vouch for Foundry VTT being really nice to use, overall.
It’s not free though, so I’m not sure it falls under the FOSS label.
It’s not free though, so I’m not sure it falls under the FOSS label.
Parts of it are MIT-licensed, and therefore qualify as FOSS. (The “free” in FOSS is not about price.) Example: https://github.com/foundryvtt/dnd5e
Oh I did think the F in FOSS was about the price. Good to know!
@mox
Thank you. This was very thorough, and very helpful.
@Shkshkshk @dnd Foundry is great, the feats are marvellous but the learning curve is steep in the beginning (loads of youtube videos explaining how to get ready if you are curious). Bright side is you only pay once and all the updates are included
It’s also self-hosted, which is great. You’re not beholden to yet another cloud service. The other players of your group just connect to your server with their web browsers, so no extra licensing required for them.
If you don’t want to, or can’t self-host, there is The Forge, which offers a hosted Foundry service, but I don’t know what the costs are as I’ve never used it.
IIRC the forge is like $15/month or something, which makes sense since I pay around that for my server on AWS, and I turn it off when it’s not in use.
@Shkshkshk @dnd Foundry is good, i like it and use it, but it’s not FOSS at all.
it’s not FOSS at all.
Foundry’s core is not, but other parts of it are FOSS.
For example: https://github.com/foundryvtt/dnd5e
The old version of Owlbear Rodeo is open source now https://github.com/owlbear-rodeo/owlbear-rodeo-legacy but no longer supported.
PlanarAlly has been fantastic for my group so far!
I can’t comment much as to quality.
I’m aware of http://fari.app which is FOSS. That’s the one I’ve had my eye on to try.
I’ve also used a much much older and also free MapTool from http://rptools.net ; the quality there is perfectly fine on the functional end but lower on the aesthetics.
