TaleSpire is a beautiful way to play pen and paper RPGs online
talespire.comI have looked at this extensively and other VTTs for an internet campaign, and while it is very impressive, there are a few things preventing me from using this myself.
1. No fog of war. You can create zones that have toggling visibility, but its cumbersome and not automatic.
2. No cyberpunk/modern assets. They did make their stretch goal so this will be arriving eventually.
3. No custom audio streaming. I believe you can play music and sounds but only what came with it.
4. Expensive for players at $35aud. I don't mind spending money for resources as a DM, but there should be a player-only version that's much cheaper/free. I would rather pay $120aud if it meant my players didn't have to.
Currently as it stands for me, the best option for a VTT is Foundry[1]. It has everything I mentioned prior and more. Pair that with Dungeondraft[2] and the mountains of free content packs at Cartography Assets[3], you have everything you could ever need for running an internet campaign. None of these require a subscription and are imo the best bang for buck you can get for a VTT setup.
When Talespire addresses my current pet peeves, I will likely switch, but for now it's just not viable for me.
[3] https://cartographyassets.com/asset-category/specific-assets...
edit: formatting
Hello! One Dev here.
1) This is an area that needs a whole lot iteration. The current Hide Volume approach has been more of a patch while we figure things out. This is certainly one area 3D has complicated things significantly. Looking forward to diving back into it.
2) As you mentioned, this is certainly on the horizon, we've already started dipping our toes into this area and hope to have an ETA by the end of the year.
3) Audio streaming is also something we're looking into.
4) The pricing model has been in discussion a lot. We're trying to avoid maintaining two different builds, so a player only version isn't something we'd like to do. We have been discussing potential pricing models, but, this is likely a conversation which will resume once the full release is imminent. (Post Early-Access)
Foundry and Dungeondraft are both excellent. They pair great together. Our goal with TaleSpire has been one of immersion into the board. Making the interaction with the board feel tactile and fun. And of course being able to both build and play together. Nothing out there quite scratched that itch for us. I now selfishly get this from playing TaleSpire. We still have a good ways to go however.
Thank you very much for your feedback. I would love to see you join us in TaleSpire sometime in the future once these things have been addressed.
Hello!,
I'm from Brazil and have been playing RPG here for 20 years now. I don't know about other regions, but most tabletop RPG players here are not luxurious at all: playing rpg is VERY CHEAP and that's one of the reasons it attracts people. My group has people of different ages and backgrounds, but the chance of them each buying a R$49 (current price at Steam) game to play is zero - we are currently using roll20 and while it's not a perfect software, it's perfectly sufficient for us. Even if TaleSpire looks and feels awesome, by being a paid product I think it will have a really difficult time penetrating this market. Only chance would be some kind of model utilizing free, like freemium - and when there's a payment to be made, it has to be only 1 player in the group. Take note I'm not defending or saying the rationals behind this behavior pattern is good, I'm just telling you it's real and very hard to change. That said, perhaps the target for TaleSpire is rpg players in Europe and US, which maybe have different spending behavior. Good luck!
Thank you for taking the time to respond! I totally understand your concerns about maintaining two builds. When I was considering using Talespire for my campaign I resolved to just buy a copy for all of my players. Another thing to consider which might not be as important, is that my group would also play IRL and that if I base my maps entirely in Talespire it's very hard to go offline with that. I'd love to see a solution for printouts but understand that might not be an express goal. Part of why I like Foundry is that it's very easy to go offline with pen and paper.
Your #4 is in the FAQ:
Q: Why is there no player only version?
A: In our humble opinion far too many things treat people just as consumers. We'd rather the game was really cheap than remove the chance for someone to discover that they like creating.
You never know, one week a session will be canceled last minute and one of your players might start noodling around in build mode and discover there is a story inside them they want to tell. This is worth so much more to us than splitting the product could ever bring.
Your 1 and 3 are as well: https://talespire.com/faq
Website marketing-speak isn't even worth consideration. For example, the dev's actual answer in the HN thread bore zero resemblance to the FAQ answer. QED.
Okay I just spent 10 minutes on Foundry's site and I can't tell which operating system(s) it runs on. Almost all of the links just go back to the front-page....
it runs in your favorite browser..
I meant for hosting the server. After searching around I found the wiki which shows how to install on linux.
The project is still in its infancy, so yeah they're missing a couple of things. I've been building stuff in it for a while and currently running my first campaign in it.
1. I agree with you, but hidden zones are good enough for now.
3. discord...
4. Meh... I think it's the kind of thing that people complain, but will still pay for.
You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.
> You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.
Really, you can't compare Foundry which has rules support and rulesets for lots of games with TaleSpire where any rule support is off in the distance. Its like comparing a plane to a half-scale wind-tunnel mockup without engines or controls. Most tabletop gridded rules systems are 2d, so a 2d display covers the parts that aren't theater of the mind quite well; it's the rules support that makes or breaks a VTT.
> It's like comparing a car to a plane.
Planes can be impressively fast, but the vast majority of my commute/transportation needs are better served by a car.
These are both VTT software. I don't see a reason why one should be above reproach just because its 3d.
I get it, 3d makes everything harder, but tbh it also makes playing the games harder. I can use random jpegs and hand drawn maps and direct translations of existing tabletop content in Foundry. What are my options for making my own content in TaleSpire? Recreate every map object by object?
I can buy a PDF of The Shady Dragon Inn (published 1983) and copy-paste all of the maps over into Foundry in minutes, or spend as much time making pretty maps as I want. Lets not even get into the incredible modding support
Lookup talestavern and talesbazaar those are fan-made websites that host a ton of 3d maps that were built in Talespire and the game is not even popular yet.
People will be able to build their own minis, tiles and props very soon.
Building homebrew maps in foundry might be fast, it still looks like crap. We're in 2021.
I don't think Dungeondraft maps look bad by any means. I have both Foundry and Talespire, and while I agree that Talespire is very pretty, a 2D map in Foundry is more than acceptable.
The problem Talespire faces is that it does so much less than Foundry. It's like comparing MS Paint to Photoshop. A visually gorgeous MS Paint, don't get me wrong, but one with only a bare minimum of tooling.
I also get the impression that Talespire's future scope is mostly limited to visualisation. It's not aiming to provide character sheets for a hundred different systems, or automate hit and damage rolls, or provide shop and inventory interfaces, or visual-novel style character popups, or drag-and-drop NPC design, or any of the other thousand things you can get a Foundry module for.
>Building homebrew maps in foundry might be fast, it still looks like crap. We're in 2021.
Your attitude towards your competitors is pretty gauche. You dismiss features and the pricing model they have, etc., while they have been incredibly successful.
I'm always looking for interesting advancements in VTT, particularly because I've got a box with a 55" TV mounted in it I can put on top of my table for using them even when playing with friends in person, but as a potential customer, the dismissive attitude you've displayed towards your competitors has turned me off pretty significantly.
TaleSpire dev here. jfabre is not a Bouncyrock employee and does not work on TaleSpire. I'm sorry if you've run into people bashing our competitors. It sucks as there is plenty of room for different approaches in this space (see TTS and battlemapp for two ace alternative 3d vtts). You setup sounds awesome. We've not got any plans for supporting the tv tables so far, but arkenforge and foundry both seem awesome at it.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I misread one of his comments - 'I've been working in it' as 'I've been working on it', totally on me!
I'm just a fan... I do not work for them. I was just expressing my opinion about how I saw the whole space. I've been playing for more than 2 years on Tabletop Simulator and I consider Talespire a very big upgrade that's all.
Gotcha! I misread a comment of yours and took it as you saying you worked on the product, not worked in it for your campaign.
I'm a PC in two games right now but DMing zero (and maybe too busy to start), so I've only built a few maps with TaleSpire so far. But I'm very excited about it, and especially the sites where you can share assets.
There are multiple maps built for Waterdeep Dragon Heist, for instance. The modern, web-augmented experience of playing D&D is a huge change from the game's past, and it makes modules and campaign books a lot more useful, since the community can share so many more specifics than ever before. TaleSpire takes that a step further, since you can also now share buildings and outdoor spaces.
In 5 to 10 years, this space is going to be just absolutely incredible. It's going to converge with machinima. It's already begun converging with independent theater.
I'm super excited about this, but I do a lot of front-end work, so I've always hated Roll20. It reminds me of a terrible app I built with Backbone.js, with all kinds of event bubbling problems. Plus, before TaleSpire existed, I was building experimental maps in Cinema 4D to see if I could enable online games with gravity magic. (TaleSpire does not support alternate gravity directions, but it's still way better for this use case than C4D.) So I may just be the ideal target customer or whatever.
> You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.
I personally love the modding ability, which allowed creating a nice nostalgic middle ground, an Isometric view which works with 2d rule measurements, and brings back memories of old school RPGs
https://v.redd.it/iz4tui9ykou61/DASH_1080.mp4?source=fallbac...
https://www.foundryvtt-hub.com/package/grape_juice-isometric...
While (as I understand it) Talespire isn’t written in Common Lisp, one of its main developers often explores solutions for the software in CL, and has written some cool REPL-based shader tools in Lisp. He streams his coding sessions and some Lisp tutorials here: https://youtube.com/user/CBaggers
TaleSpire really unfortunately feels like someone had an idea for a 3D VTT and implemented the 3D part first, instead of the VTT part. It's a beautiful 3D map toolkit with assets for a very specific slice of RPG settings, but nothing included to help with the actual game mechanics or organization.
And while I get that it's still early days, I don't see anything here that to be excited about where it'll wind up. Streamers will get great visuals out of it (they already are, TaleSpire's doing a good job using streamers for marketing) but this is just another fiddly prep timesink for everyone else that would be better spent setting up characters, locations, plots, etc.
This was very much intentional. For us when playing online, a focus element was missing, something to gather around (I know that sounds a bit vague). We were looking for something that felt a bit like being inside a video game, but allowing the flexibility of a TTRPG system. Help with game mechanics or organization felt secondary, and it still does in our games. There is of course a lot of different players out there. And we are looking into doing some rules integrations. It will unlikely go the route of full automatization though. Being able to build/play/share together, make changes to the board in real time, and the feel of playing is going to take precedence.
TaleSpire isn't going to be right for everyone. Luckily the TTRPG space is incredibly diverse and have excellent creators with different priorities. So it has a lot of people covered.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the game!
TaleSpire beautiful but I've always found I actually want something simple for RPG playing which is why so many players are using tools like Roll20. In my experience not handling rules is a strength though, as someone who wants to try new RPGs and plays with homebrew the platforms that run the rules for me work against me because unless I implement every homebrew weapon, creature, etc. into the application I'm double checking every roll anyway.
I built my own entry into the VTT space with that in mind before the pandemic with Tableplop[1] when I wasn't happy with the front ends on what was available at the time. My aim is something free, solid and always online to move tokens about a map with fog of war and a simple dice roll syntax. The 2d maps have a lot of weaknesses in judging heights and especially with flying creatures but it's unbeatable for the number of existing assets and maps and for making your own with something like DungeonDraft[2] or DungeonScrawl[3]. 2d also makes it easier to draw lines on a map on the fly and will in the gaps with imagination when you need to improvize, something that does not translate to 3d very well but is the epitome of RPGs for me.
[3] https://dungeonscrawl.com/
Edit: formatting
Reminds me of the last year and a half of my life...
I play table top rpg's a lot online and it would be nice to have something besides roll20 and the various play-by-post options.
The thing is, I think the best thing you could is something less data intensive than roll20 and something more aesthetically pleasing. If the video is a guide, this seem like a thing that an average consumer machine is going to completely choke on. Roll20, the go-to full-featured ttrpg server is infamous for audio, video and general connectivity problem, to the point most people doing video on a different server (zoom, discord, google-meet,etc) and just use the server for simulating the table top. I'm doubting this thing, even more feature heavy, could work better.
And just generally, succeeding in making this truly look like a video game might not be realizing the imagination-based ttrpg ideal.
This looks really cool, but I feel like there's just too many obstacles to using this with my group. Right now we use Roll20, which has a LOT of faults. Weird glitches happen basically every session. But it's free, and it works on everyone's computer, and those two benefits outweigh all its faults. To switch to TaleSpire, we'd have to make sure everyone is on a Windows PC (or know how to trick it into running on their non-Windows computer), we'd have to make sure everyone's hardware is capable enough, and we'd have to spend a collective $150 up front. And if anyone else wanted to jump in for a single session, they have to jump through those same hoops.
It feels like the sort of thing that will be great for groups dedicated enough to organize it, though.
You should really take a look at FoundryVTT. Its a one-time purchase of $50 if you are willing to self-host it. I've been using it for the past year or so, and I've had almost no issues (none that reading the docs or asking my players to refresh the page didn't fix). The 3rd party support is great, some publishers (Fria Ligan at least but others too) sell modules for their rules systems on Foundry.
Here's a demo: https://demo.foundryvtt.com/join
Still need to get around to trying this. My problem with playing online is not so much the method used, as coordinating everyone and preventing them from being interrupted.
This is really easy when you are in a room together. Not so much so when apart.
If only there was some sort of online collaborative audio and video enabled thingie. Cool kids use Twitch I gather (it sounds like a minor STD to me). You could get together with Teams, Zoom, Blue Button, whatever and then play.
Organise your online events in a similar form to err ... ... reality and you'll have the same problems to deal with 8)
Create a place and arrange to meet. Have a chat and then get on with the event. You may want to require no mobiles or be more inventive by penalising them somehow - that way people who have to be contactable can do so but still play. You could even fold call outs into the game. An RNLI call out causes the characters involved to be thrown into another realm ... and ... get your imagination out. Or perhaps they get thrown into another time/space. Again, it's all about imagination.
My friends and I have a private Discord and it’s basically ideal.
We have a text and voice/video channel that’s restricted to just the DM and the players, we’ve all got webcams and pick a time where we can dedicate the attention to the game. Small groups also help.
Funnily enough we’re going to be using Talespire for our upcoming game, but all mechanics/tracking goes through DnDBeyond.
We have all that. My point is that both doing everything on a computer, and being in your own home are basically distraction machines.
If someone turns off their mic or walks away from the computer you cannot ask what’s up until they’re back. And the fact that they went to get the door is eminently understandable.
I guess I'm not the target audience, but I don't see the appeal of skeuomorphism here over something like on-the-fly zone creation tools. Can someone help me understand the market here?
I've know that the first thing dice rollers seem to grow is 3D simulated dice, so clearly the market is there.
But this would be (for me) replacing an assortment of wood blocks, lego minifigs, scribbled-on index cards, and assorted tokens with a whole lot of additional prep time.
Well for starter it saves the state of the maps.
You never build anything too crazy in real life, because it requires a lot of setup during and between games. It's just not worth it.
In digital form, you can afford to prepare big 3d maps outside of the game, and you can even share the environment you've created with other people outside your game so that they use it in their own game.
After playing for a couple of sessions though, I don't think having huge maps is worth it (yet?). Just a map of the building you're in, in 3D is good enough and makes it easy for the players to imagine a city or town around and not lose track of where everyone is.
I can speak to this a little bit, as I've been running a game in Talespire for a couple months now. It's very good! Still in early access, so there's a lot of stuff that's still a little rough around the edges or features that are planned but not out yet, but even so, I'm happily running a game that I can craft beautiful settings in that my player's seem to enjoy.
Remarkably, it's probably more reliable in terms of performance and stability than Roll20.
Even though it can be a little more work sometimes building in 3D instead of 2D, 1.) you'd be surprised how quickly you can put stuff together once you get a little practice under your belt and 2.) there's already a ton of great builds out there, and the developer's have made it SUPER easy to import stuff (literally just copy and paste for "slabs" of content, or you can share entire boards with a URL). Plus, being in 3D makes it a lot easier to handle things like flying, verticality in map design, and just generally living in a 3D world in a way that I haven't found with most VTTs
Fantasy Grounds is where it’s at: the system actually understand the rules of the system. Everything else you spend hours doing manual rote stuff instead of playing the game instead of having fun.
Each player has to pay 20 quid. That's outrageous considering how rudimentary this is compared to free tools. I really don't need pretty graphics in a pen and paper rpg.
I get a feeling this is targeting the war gamer faction of pen and paper RPG players. For them knowing exactly where all the pieces are in 3D space is very important.
Projects that proclaim themselves to be “beautiful” are off putting imo. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, as in a bit full of ourselves aren’t we? I’m curious if others have this reaction as well?
I'm quite curious about how the game works. Should the other players require to buy the game itself, or is the host good enough?
It looks good, but isn't nearly moddable enough for homebrew campaigns.
So essentially a "PC version" of https://fireballrpg.com/ ?
Should be in VR.
Tabletop Sim should have you covered, for the most part.
Theatre of the eyes...