Much Needed Status Update

[rob]

Originally Posted by flyteach

I think @markelphoenix is onto something here. For playing around a table, with everyone on HLO and linked to the campaign, then some of the functionality may be useful. However, for a VTT, the dice rolling and encounters are already set up. So, while CT may be useful for in person play, there's a different paradigm for integrating with a VTT (and, quite frankly, I believe quite a bit less work if we stick with the bread and butter character generator/tracker). We don't need/want to recreate encounters, stat blocks, and rolls outside of the VTT when we're online.

This argument runs counter to many of the comments littered across these forums, where users lament how poorly things like dice rollers behave within some VTTs. There is also the question of the level of granularity provided by dice rollers. For example, our dice roller breaks down damage rolls into all of their constituent elements (e.g. 5 point slashing plus 4 point fire). We can also toggle criticals on/off without losing the original roll. This has all been designed with an eye to the future, where we'll be able to automatically detect resistances and apply those appropriately. The VTTs don't even have the necessary information to manage all of that, but we do, so we can leverage it to further streamline all the bookkeeping for a game.

That's just the dice roller. There are many other aspects where CT will be able to do things that VTTs simply cannot hope to do, unless they want to start tracking all of the gory details for each game system they support.