We need assets to grow the community and attract new customers! Arr!
Why is no one selling ICRPG stuff on roll20?
Oh, why not?
And if Owlbear Rodeo was to have a shop? Or do you have a personnal shop outside of DTRPG that we donāt know about?
I have looked into doing this and actually applied to become a seller and was accepted. The issue for me personally is that they have a $4.99 minimum cap on sets. I would be forced to bundle the few sets I do have to fulfill that requirement and that seems like too much of a mish-mash to me. I have been working too slowly and with too much attention to detail to produce the amount of tokens required. If I made it a point to work super fast with limited color/painting I might be able to pull it offā¦but would it be the quality I am happy with or the quality that people would actually want to spend $5 on? I feel like I am in a tough spot with that and havenāt figured out what to do with it yet.
Possibly more reason to feel that way now that WotC is teaming up with them. It will be interesting to see how things go with that in the future.
There are a lot of Patreon artists making tokens, though I have not seen any who are doing ICRPG specifically.
Many years before Roll20, there was Fantasy Grounds. It was expensive, had a lot of issues, hard to learn, supported only a few game systems and it had network issues. Your uncle Bob would have a hard time using it, so he didnāt use it.
Roughly at the same time, there was MapTool. It was free and open source (I even contributed code to it), and still is, but being an open source project, it was lacking polish and ease of use in a lot of areas. It had many features but was hard to get into and had similar network issues as Fantasy Grounds. Your uncle Bob would have even a harder time using it, so he didnāt use it.
When Roll20 came out, it was revolutionary. It was the first usable, simple and easy VTT platform, where you could sort of play with your friends over the internet. No setup required, basic tier was free and even your uncle Bob could use it. It was glorious and he did use it.
Roll20 quickly started to eat other guysā lunch.
It then just got stuck there for years and years. Their customizability was low and their management dropped the ball on some occasions. Yet, by having a free tier, they grabbed a huge percentage of the market and became ātheā giant in the VTT space. It was them who made VTTs popular.
If somebody becomes a giant, they usually get ācorruptā and turn their platform into a money making machine. Everything else becomes secondary. Roll20 didnāt add a single feature for years, instead they sold subscriptions and bundles and maps and tokensā¦
It is a similar story with Fantasy Grounds. They hold their (mainly D&D) customers āhostageā with huge sunken costs. I know this evaluation is harsh, but FG is a platform to milk their creators and users as much as they can. Even though their development story is miles better than Roll20ās, their content licensing scheme is atrocious.
I was wanting to create modules for FG, but after seeing their licensing model I didnāt even write a single line and gave up using FG altogether.
Eventually someone said enough is enough and created Foundry. Iām glad they did. Currently it is the best VTT on the market for any game system that is reasonably complex. Its price is very reasonable; you can host it on your own server or host it on servers specifically created for it. It is best of all worlds. It has more features than any competitor, it has more support from the community and you can sell your stuff however you like it, yet it is not a platform to sell stuff. It is a VTT first and believe me, it shows. You can customize it however you want. It is a great platform.
If someday I were to create mods for a platform, it will be Foundry, provided everything stays the same and they donāt do something boneheaded down the road, which is more likely than one would imagine, but I digress.
The thing is, ICRPG is simple and fast enough to run on any platform. Thatās why RunehammerVTT is born. It is lacking some things but it is usable to a degree and easy. While there is RunehammerVTT and some other free and simple alternative VTTs that can do the job (Standard Action, Tableplop, Mythic Table etc.), I canāt really recommend Foundry to anyone here; it would be too big just to play something like ICRPG or EZD6.
I can only recommend Foundry if a gaming group also plays other, more complex systems. Thatās why I went with Foundry because our gaming group is currently playing D&D. Foundry makes it enjoyable, provided you are willing to invest the time in customizing it exactly to your needs.
I have no idea why Iām writing incredible walls of text these daysā¦
Itās fine. My favorite alternative to Runehammer VTT and roll20 is Owlbear Rodeo! Try it when you can!
Oh, I tried it.
Itās very sleek and lovely but v2 doesnāt have dice yet (it is coming in a few weeks/months). v2 is a very good step up from v1, so Iām not inclined to use v1 right now, considering that v1 will be discontinued and v2 will be the canonical version.
v2 It needs dice, a usable charsheet and maybe some macro support for me to use. Iām looking forward to it.
I think I could come up with a Warpshell set at some point. I have a plan to rework and re-org the sets I have already made so I think that in addition to some more sets I could get a large enough collection of tokens together for.
As a side note I have tried the RHVTT and I really think it is a great platform. The main thing that keeps me in Roll20 is the ability to do handouts where information can be shared (I do a lot of modding and having that info readily available in game is essential). I also think it is nice to have character sheets built into the platform so that I can access that info as a GM (I also make pre-gens for drop-in players so to have that in house is good).
@rpgerminator @Khan I see where you both are coming from. Macros would be fun as well as the ability to upload PDF character sheets for easy reading, perhaps? 'cause I donāt want there to be character sheets from the program to avoid fiddling. Thatās why I like Owlbear Rodeo!
As for your assets? Just focus on a setting and provide stuff for it to make a set, Iāll gladly buy a Warp Shell one!
Now, where do we try out this Owlbear Rodeo V2? Iām curious 'cause I would love to check it out!
I think Warpshell is a great setting to focus on, I feel more driven to produce work for that. Fantasy is not as appealing to me because I feel more constrained by needing to create recognizable tropes, plus it is terribly oversaturated.
because its actually easier for users to add stuff from their computer
the roll20 marketplace is terrible for the sellerā¦ clunky as hell.
if youād like a huge bundle off vtt bits from me, just pop an email!
One thing to note about Roll20 in a positive fashion is that now that DriveThru and Roll20 are under the same umbrella, they are working towards easy integration with pdfs purchased from DT. It will make it possible to sell a game system, Vtt assets, and have an official Roll20 character sheet all with one click of a button, allowing folks to purchase once, and start playing in Roll20 asap. Just mentioning this fwiw. I love Foundry, and Iāve come back to it for Mothership just recently because they have a system and sheet available for the WIP 1e rules whereas Roll20 just has the official module for 0e still.
This URL points to v2.
Personally I donāt want PDF character sheets. Just a place put some text info and stats is enough.
Thatās too bad, because the Think Deck doubles as a regular deck. Iām sure a bunch of people would buy it. Tying its name to ICRPG to spread the name of your game on that platform would be great I think!
But Iāll take those bits gladly!
Hey, i get this. I donāt know how long you dont go to FG, but since the update to FGU, theyāve introduced the Forge platform, which is essentially a distribution platform for content creators and publishers. You as a creator can contribute together with a publisher and share royalties and whatnot, or you create your own stuff and upload it there from a created campaign. Iāve done the Rackham Vale conversion there together with Crowbar Creative
Not protecting/defending it by any means, just showing that everyone, Foundry, FGU and many other VTTs are going towards the content creator path.
Iād love to make more conversions from ICRPG modules to FGU and Foundry when it arrives at v10