Achtung! Cthulhu - forced changes as the Role VTT downgrades

 

Some disappointment just before Christmas. Three sessions into the campaign (four if you count the Session Zero), changes force me to migrate VTTs. You may recall that I was minded to use the Role VTT for the game, as it's very much video chat first with a nice character sheet building tool and dice roller. That was the route I took, and I've spent a couple of evenings populating it. The time on Role blurs with time in the Affinity suite building handouts, as unfortunately Shadows of Atlantis uses chunks of the artwork and material from the previous edition which means that it isn't really VTT ready, unlike The Serpent and the Sands.

Fun on the Role VTT, people front and centre.

In building the game, there were a few things that I was missing; the dice roller didn't yet have custom faces, and the assets could do with folders to allow you to sort them. The music player was also a bit flaky (but I had routes around that) and had I been using the maps, it would have been very basic. However, apart from minor niggles and one of the players struggling a bit with the interface as it was new to him, it worked really well. Gaming is fundamentally a social activity and putting your players front and centre is works really well.

Move on to the shock announcement from Role, which one of my players (who is active in the Role community) pointed me at. 

This brought the shock news that the AV (audio-visual) part of Role was shutting down imminently. Their service provider Twillo had decided to refocus on what services it delivered and was sunsetting its third party AV provision in December 2024. I can only assume that the Role team have chosen to exit quickly to avoid spending on a platform that they won't get any long term benefit from.

One of the founders/ developers, Elle Dwight further expanded on the Discord:

There are many great video providers out there. The issue is that swapping them out is labor intensive no matter who we go with. There is a lot of custom work and tuning that goes into getting video to run smoothly and consistently on a platform like ours. Since our team is quite small, we have decided to prioritize Open Source and finalizing release of our Owlbear integration first. But beyond that, there are many options we could explore!

and:

We tried to take an honest look at how various groups use Role. And while it might sound surprising, we actually found that many rooms play without video at all, and instead use our basic map tools or just use the middle area for imagery. We recognize that some games are very video-centric, but we also want to focus our limited resources on a path that benefits the widest range of play groups. Our hope is that developers within the community will likely make various video plugins that will allow video-centric groups to choose their favorite option for play. Video integration and optimization is time consuming, and we don’t want that to block people’s ability to create with Role. We’ll have many more details on Open Source early next year. In the meantime, we hope you’ll use Discord or other video chat tools to augment your games.

I can see the logic for the developers (who are small team) but ultimately this pushes me away from the platform. Graham introduced me to it around the lockdown, and immediately it struck me as a perfect replacement for the Google Hangouts with dicebot I'd used for all the games that didn't need battle maps and a heavy degree of crunch. People front and centre, and a nice stable platform. Once early access became available, I signed up as soon as I could. I also loved that it ran on Safari on macOS and iOS without issue, something that Foundry and Roll20 don't do. It means I can travel light to play, just using my iPad.

The comments about many rooms running without video is interesting. I know that about half the rooms I have in Role haven't used video, as they were builds for games which either didn't happen or I was using to develop and experiment (for example, when I built the officially approved Mausrítter and Cthulhu Hack sheets). I've asked the developers if they account for this.

Over the last three years I've used three different VTTs (Role, Roll20, Foundry) and two other video platforms (Zoom and Discord).

Roll20 got progressively better over the time period; originally, we didn't use the AV features as they were flaky, but the update around 18 months ago changed everything. It became stable and effective.

Foundry was done through LiveKit and I found it a pain; it broke when I used it in some hotels (despite trying running in a VPN and other solutions). When it worked it was great. 

Discord was randomly flaky; we ended up abandoning some sessions as we couldn't hold a stable connection (although we did use it for Roll20 before we went full into that platform).

Zoom had rock solid AV and, well, nothing else. 

Role had the same kind of rock solid AV, and useful tools.

Ordinarily, I'd have been really excited about the announcement of the move the open source the code (as I suspect that it will accelerate development), and the integration of OwlBear Rodeo would have solved all my challenges over mapping for games where it's front and centre (for example for OSR clones). 

However, the loss of what was originally presented as the platform's raison d'être means I'll be pulling away for now. It's not an easy decision, as I've advocated publicly for the platform and built official sheets for a number of RPGs, and I like what the team has done. I'll keep a weather eye on development and see if there are changes that will bring me back, but I'd rather not kludge two or three services together for what will probably be a subpar outcome.

I realise that Twillo's announcement has led to the Role team having to make a whole series of decisions quickly, and hope that the open source approach sorts AV quickly.

Rebuilding the campaign in Roll20

So what does this mean for our Achtung! Cthulhu campaign?

I've decided to migrate the campaign to Roll20; there's a workable sheet on that platform, and fortunately, the way I prepared the material for Role means that I don't have a huge amount of work to migrate the material. I do lose the flexibility to do preparation on the iPad, but I gain a stable music player and a stable AV platform. 

Ultimately, I did consider Discord with Role, but the stability of that platform has been variable in my recent experiences.

I'm part way through now; most of the important material from the first mission (Vienna) is uploaded and I'm about to dig into Rome. Still, it's a chunk of time that I'd planned to use to complete the build of Castle Xyntillan in Roll20 as a drop in game.

I guess, ultimately, you get what you pay for. Role has resisted the need for subscriptions, and Roll20 is funded by theirs. 

The Secret War will continue.

24 December 2023