Im going to run it in a couple weeks, so i am doing a lot of prep rn. I was looking for some youtube guides, as one does, but didnt like the most of them. found one of your videos and than binge watched the rest of it 😊
@@jeffreyeckert3623 well, my friend, I'm basically making these videos for YOU. I'm so glad you found them too! I'll keep'em coming. Message me if you want anything specific, I can probably shuffle the schedule. Enjoy!
I can't imagine why you are using DnD Beyond, while you have Roll20. Roll20 in itself have all the features you have shown that Beyond has. If I'm mistaken please correct me, but I would never use Beyond while a concurrent product does the same and more (map management). On Roll20 you can build your PCs by hand or with the charactermancer, you have all NPC statblocks that you can pop-up on the tokens. You can even build macros to use for massive number of rolls for summons and you can organise them however you want. The only 2 things that is campaign specific that you have shown are the hexcrawl and the gear room of the end-game dungeon. The auto rotation on the VTT for all 3 gears at the same time is a serious time saving tool, correctly implemented it is worth money. And the hexcrawl in itself is problematic at its design level, which is clearly WotC's responsibility. It is designed for the hexes to be revealed one by one, which means it should have a modern implementation to support ease of play. They instead chose a booklet form, which is understandable, but they didn't do anything for your ease of play, as you have said as it is it's very hard to run it as a booklet and requires huge amounts of extra work to make it viable, because they didn't care to make the product an easily playable one. And on the other hand for a VTT, which they were well aware of while designing the thing, they chose a lot of design patterns that make it harder and less fun to run it on a VTT, since it is designed to be a booklet. The map is fixed, even the locations that should change place and the map is full of pointers which should be on a different level than the map to be easily managed. Simply WotC didn't have a clear implementation goal in mind and they chose the one that requires extra work for everyone. Clearly WotC has failed at ToA's design big time, and what you have shown from the hexcrawl is just the tip of the iceberg, there are larger design flaws in it.
Great points all. I think it came down to when I adopted each platform. I've been using DnD Beyond for years as had my whole group so that was my main "home base" platform. The Roll20 content was useful for the reasons I mentioned but I did not explore much more, again because we were using (and had spent a lot of money buying content) on DnD Beyond. I'll have to look more closely at Roll20's offerings. Thanks for watching and thanks for the comment!
Huh... its almost like people are allowed to have preferences. My guy, it's D&D. Its a shared interest between us all. We're on the same side, dude; everyone is just allowed to use the system that they prefer.
Really helpfull videos. Can't wait for the next 👍Keep it up!
Thanks so much! It's always good to hear compliments from non-family members :-) Have you played or run ToA? Just wondering how you found me. Rock on.
Im going to run it in a couple weeks, so i am doing a lot of prep rn. I was looking for some youtube guides, as one does, but didnt like the most of them. found one of your videos and than binge watched the rest of it 😊
@@jeffreyeckert3623 well, my friend, I'm basically making these videos for YOU. I'm so glad you found them too! I'll keep'em coming. Message me if you want anything specific, I can probably shuffle the schedule. Enjoy!
I can't imagine why you are using DnD Beyond, while you have Roll20. Roll20 in itself have all the features you have shown that Beyond has. If I'm mistaken please correct me, but I would never use Beyond while a concurrent product does the same and more (map management). On Roll20 you can build your PCs by hand or with the charactermancer, you have all NPC statblocks that you can pop-up on the tokens. You can even build macros to use for massive number of rolls for summons and you can organise them however you want.
The only 2 things that is campaign specific that you have shown are the hexcrawl and the gear room of the end-game dungeon. The auto rotation on the VTT for all 3 gears at the same time is a serious time saving tool, correctly implemented it is worth money. And the hexcrawl in itself is problematic at its design level, which is clearly WotC's responsibility. It is designed for the hexes to be revealed one by one, which means it should have a modern implementation to support ease of play. They instead chose a booklet form, which is understandable, but they didn't do anything for your ease of play, as you have said as it is it's very hard to run it as a booklet and requires huge amounts of extra work to make it viable, because they didn't care to make the product an easily playable one. And on the other hand for a VTT, which they were well aware of while designing the thing, they chose a lot of design patterns that make it harder and less fun to run it on a VTT, since it is designed to be a booklet. The map is fixed, even the locations that should change place and the map is full of pointers which should be on a different level than the map to be easily managed. Simply WotC didn't have a clear implementation goal in mind and they chose the one that requires extra work for everyone. Clearly WotC has failed at ToA's design big time, and what you have shown from the hexcrawl is just the tip of the iceberg, there are larger design flaws in it.
Great points all. I think it came down to when I adopted each platform. I've been using DnD Beyond for years as had my whole group so that was my main "home base" platform. The Roll20 content was useful for the reasons I mentioned but I did not explore much more, again because we were using (and had spent a lot of money buying content) on DnD Beyond. I'll have to look more closely at Roll20's offerings. Thanks for watching and thanks for the comment!
Huh... its almost like people are allowed to have preferences.
My guy, it's D&D. Its a shared interest between us all. We're on the same side, dude; everyone is just allowed to use the system that they prefer.