Foundry Basics: Getting Started with Foundry Virtual Tabletop - 2023

foreign [Music] this is Zephyr and welcome to the baileywiki channel where we teach everyday DMS how to create truly amazing experiences for their players by combining art and Technology if you're a GM who likes to wow your players and you're using software such as dungeon draft and Foundry virtual tabletop then you're in the right place today we're getting back to basics with Foundry virtual tabletop reprising our getting started video this is going to cover the getting started process with Foundry vtt as of September 2023 we're going to start immediately after you have installed and activated the license for your Foundry vtt installation or set up your server via a hosting service then we're going to go through a tour of all of the different areas of Foundry creating our first world a couple of scenes actors and running a simple combat basically everything that you need to know from the installation of Foundry to the point of being able to run your very first session if say you had a game night tomorrow we want this video to serve as a useful guide and reference tool for you as you are getting started with Foundry So to that end there are timestamps in the description that you can skip around in the video to re-reference certain sections as you encounter them further there are additional resources outside of this video that you can take advantage of we have a whole Foundry Basics playlist that we are updating and expanding upon that will cover all of these topics a little bit more in depth and go over some other areas that we don't have time to cover here additionally there are Community Resources in the form of guides to specific tabletop role-playing systems or additional documentation put together from the community finally Foundry has also introduced the tours feature that has some mini guided tutorials within Foundry itself so be on the lookout for the hiking man icon in different places to indicate that tours are there we touched on that briefly but it's a helpful reminder for you if you don't need to go back and re-watch a whole video or a whole section of video and just need a quick refresher on some basic tips without leaving the program without further Ado let's go ahead and dive in when first launching Foundry after you've entered your license key you're going to be met with this initial launch screen here the first tab it will start on with a new installation is game systems as you will need a game system installed before you can create a game world and many modules will require a specific game system for you to install them as we mentioned earlier while there is this video you can refer back to there are also the tours and you can see this small kind of hiker icon here and this will give you a tour on how to install the simple World building system provided by Foundry so you can click on that if you need a refresher just to demonstrate what tours kind of look like you're going to have these little pop-ups where it will tell you how many steps you are it'll give you some information and you can advance this and we'll highlight different buttons and walk you through different steps when it comes to completing the tour so we're going to go ahead and open up the install system and as you can see there are a lot of different systems for Foundry you can search for systems up at the top or you can go through some of these different categories systems don't have as much categorization as say add-on modules but we'll cover that in a moment we are going to use the 5e system from Dungeons and Dragons just because it's the most popular system here and we're pretty familiar with it simply go ahead and click on install you'll notice down here at the bottom there's also a manifest URL you can copy and paste a link to a system.json in order to install that this is particularly helpful if you need to install an older version or an experimental version of something or a patreon exclusive or some kind of specific link for things once you've installed it the system will appear here and if it has a special icon that will also appear you'll notice that there is this green text here around the 2.31 and that's going to be the version and because it's green it's indicating that the package is verified for this version of Foundry you can hover over these for different information such as the link to the project repository on GitHub if that's available you can see the author which is a tropos and you can see more information by hovering over and clicking these buttons you can check for updates individually by clicking this check for update since we just installed this it's already up to date additionally if you have multiple systems and you can install as many as you want you can select update all and it will automatically update everything we're going to go ahead and hide it over to add-on modules now for the purposes of this tutorial and in general with getting started with Foundry we highly recommend you stick to just vanilla Foundry for a little bit and get used to The Foundry system before you go installing add-on modules and why do we say to hold off on using add-on modules we'll add-on modules can really complicate things in general add-on modules fall into two different categories you have content modules which are mainly going to be things that include actors scenes items or whole worlds that you can use for developing your campaign then there are what we call technical modules which expand the technical capabilities of Foundry there are automation enhancers audio improvements Etc that can drastically change how Foundry works and some of them can be quite complicated we can even do full 3d scenes in Foundry vtt through the 3D canvas module and we can do things like have tiles create whole puzzles or combinations using monks active Tau triggers just to name a couple of examples so atom modules can really make things complicated so we recommend you stick with just vanilla Foundry for a little bit until you get your feet wet when you are ready for modules you can search for modules up at the top just like you could systems and you can see the categories here on the left if you want to go browsing and additionally there's that manifest URL down at the bottom you'll want this if you are subscribed to certain patreon or Kofi specific modules that have just a link that changes every month or if you want to pick either previous versions or experimental versions of the modules that you are using again we're going to leave this for another day but we just wanted to show that to you now after add-on modules we have these news clips that you can use to check out some different updates from The Foundry vtt team for example learning about upcoming patreon votes for the next major version of Foundry gears in review overview videos Etc and there's usually a featured content piece down here that is typically a free map moving up from that you'll see there are three buttons up here at the top the first is your warnings and it will tell you that you have no warnings right now if you did have warnings you'd have this little orange icon up in this top right corner you'll typically see that if you have issues with modules or systems but if you are just running a single system and no add-on modules you're probably unlikely to see that next we have the settings wheel more on that in just a moment and then we also have update right now this is on the latest build of Foundry and so we don't have an update available but if you want to check for one you're going to go to the software update Channel and you'll select which channel you want and I would highly recommend you stick to stable stable is really what you want to be using if you are playing with Foundry and some Niche situations you may be okay with going to a testing build but the development prototype builds in particular are for the module developers to be able to experiment with some of the changes in Foundry there may not be migration setups already in place so you may lose some of your data so in general you want to stick with the stable releases and whenever you're ready you can just select this check for update and we'll let you know if there is a new update within that particular Channel some updates you're going to have to download the installer again from foundryvgt because it changes some core files and it can't just update from here but that's no stress it's just the same process as you went through for installation before and you'll keep all of your data without any worries in terms of updating you are safe to update immediately to a new stable version if you are not running any modules and you only have you know the one or two systems if you are running a lot of modules and there is a new update you may want to hold off a day or two if it's a minor version you can see this is version 11 stable and says build 308 for example updating between build 308 and 309 generally you're safe to do so immediately regardless of your module Loadout but you may want to give it a little bit of time in case something changes going between a major version so from version 11 to version 12 . if you aren't running modules then you should be safe to update immediately but if you are someone who has a lot of modules at this point then you'll probably want to hold off for a month or so to make sure that all the module developers get a chance to update their modules to work with the new version trying to set up let's go to this configure or settings tab and this has a lot of different options here the most important of which is your administrator password so set that to something to protect your server otherwise if someone is able to connect to your server they can just hop right in and mess with your systems your modules your game worlds Etc then we have a few different pieces here for example where you want your Foundry data path to be and so before we create our first world if we don't want the default folder for this we should change it now otherwise it's a much bigger pane to migrate it afterwards there's the share usage data policy which you can opt in or out of here there's the setup theme and these are just going to change the look out here default world is going to be empty if you don't have a world but otherwise when you first launch rather than being on the setup screen you'll have a world here that you can go to in specific you can adjust your language settings and then you also have here port settings and this is going to be something that we cover in a future video that discusses how to set up port forwarding and everything so that your players can connect to your server if you are locally hosting then we have a few other different settings such as compressing static files and websocket data in general you can leave all of these as their default down here at the bottom you have SSL certificates if you are again going to be hosting this and allowing people to connect to it then you might need an SSL certificate and key in order to use foundries built in audio and video call features finally there is an AWS configuration path if you're using S3 integration for your storage if these don't mean anything to you and you are confused by what I'm saying please don't worry these are completely optional setups and you don't need to stress about them or worry about them basically if you need to use them you'll already know that you'll need to use them don't worry that you're missing out on something and whenever you make changes to this for the most part you're going to have to restart Foundry so you'll just have to say yes and we'll be back after I have restarted now that we're back you can see that it is going to prompt me for my administrator password so I'll just enter that and we are back to here and now that we have a game system installed it's going to have the game worlds once again you can go through the tour if you need a quick reminder within Foundry or we can go ahead and create a world you also have the option to install a world and these are worlds that are already set up for different things and some systems lean a little more heavily on this or have more available but you have this option available to you if you are interested most folks though go to create a world and for here we are going to fill out the form so first off we start with our world title and then we can adjust the data path by default it's just going to be all lowercase and then hyphens instead of spaces for your title it's going to just get translated into your data path but if you want to change it to something else then you're free to do Uso such as my world next we have to select a game system and this is exactly why we had to download a system first and one note here is we're talking about game systems whenever you are in The Foundry community and people ask you oh what system are you on generally speaking we're going to be referring to the tabletop role-playing game system that you're using such as DND 5e or Pathfinder 2E or Savage world's Adventure Edition Etc and that's usually what we're referring to when we say system rather than the operating system of your machine so typically if someone wants to know if you're on Windows or Mac or Linux they'll ask what's your operating system versus what's your system in The Foundry Community just a bit of vocab to keep in mind we can also set a background image and we can go over how to upload files here in a bit but you can select any file you want for that or you can select a file that is from this core data and this is going to have all kinds of different assets from Foundry itself then the join page theme you can determine if you want the default or minimal style and then you can also set a next session here and don't worry you can edit this as much as you want so you can keep updating this so if you wanted to say you know this is going to be on January 1st 2024 at 9 pm then you can have that there and finally you can add in a description so use this to create whatever World building things you would like Etc once you've created this you can see that this is all ready to go for this particular version of Foundry whenever you update to a new version of Foundry this will be orange and it will have to migrate the data before you can actually use the world that'll happen automatically when you launch it you'll just have to wait for a brief process we select launch it's going to load everything and then this is our just general description here you can see when the next session is you can see how many players we have this is our world description the background image if you don't specify it is going to be the default Foundry background and then you will have a return to setup as a user and now we're ready to jump into our first world and get started by default you're only going to have the game master player and you're not going to have a password so just hit get join game session and you'll be ready to go so now that we're ready let's go ahead and dive into our very first world so this is what Foundry looks like when you first load it up to the side you're going to be greeted with these chat cards here that have some getting started and inviting players tips but let's first do a quick tour over here on the right we generally refer to these as your directories at least we in the baileywiki group do and you first off with your chat directory you have combat encounters and this is only going to be filled when you have people ready for a combat more on that later you have your scenes directory actors items journals roll tables card stacks playlists compendium packs and finally our game settings before we dive into the game settings over here on the left these are what we refer to as our tools or our controls so you've got token controls measurement controls Tau controls drawing tools wall controls lighting controls Ambient sound controls and finally Journal notes and if you have a lot of different add-on modules this might expand this so if you ever see a video where there are extra buttons over here it is probably additional modules down at the bottom you have a little pull tab that has all the player information right now we've only got the game master and so that's the only person showing here this Arrow which we'll demonstrate more later will expand and contract based on who is currently logged in to the right you have your macro hot bar and you can cycle between five different Hotbar pages with this and you can also lock the Hotbar so you don't accidentally switch it Etc and you can set up macros for this as well and then the macro directory rather than being in a panel up here is going to be down here next to the macro bar now that we've completed our little tour let's take a look at the settings directory up the top is general information here you can find your Foundry version and build your system and its version and the number of active modules you have this is useful for communicating to people at a glance what version of Foundry you're on and your system and its version which is really helpful if you're trying to troubleshoot different issues then we have the game settings category and the first section is the configure settings so here you can open up all these different pieces and you'll notice that we have filters over here to the side by default it's all and you can see as I scroll down there's going to be another heading you can also go to specific categories so these are going to generally be the core which are the settings that are Universal to every installation of Foundry it doesn't matter what system you're on doesn't matter what modules you're running you'll always have these core settings that you can alter then you have a system and then after that there are settings for different modules if they have settings so under core you can configure all sorts of different things and some of the things that might be important to you are things like the photosensitivity mode the token drag vision and some of these different animation pieces then you have your system settings and you can go through here and generally that's going to vary from system to system what all you want to change or what all is necessary to change in here but this is where you go if you want to make adjustments to core settings system settings or module settings next we have configure controls you can also think of this as configure hotkeys and similar to our configure settings by default it is all and you can scroll down until you get to another heading and then that will show you the different breakdowns here and with these you can change different pieces and you can see that there are conflicts and you can reroute them a lot of times these conflicts are not that important and you can see that there is a potential conflict but it's not necessarily a big issue generally with all these core bindings these conflicts aren't actually an issue for example you know select all objects is showing a conflict with panning left because you can use wasd to pan around a scene and so control a might cause you to pan but it's not normally an issue you can use this to change all of the different key bindings to your liking and once again if you have additional modules or settings that have hotkeys you can reference those and change them there next we have manage modules again we don't have any modules here but if you were to have modules then you would be able to enable and disable them Etc next we have the edit world and this is really helpful for you to change your session times with an actual calendar really handily within your actual instance of the world instead of having to back out to setup Etc so really helpful if you know you're wrapping up your session you're just going to get things ready for next week in terms of updating a description say you change your description every week for example the game I play in RDM add some fun little saying or a play off of and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia title for our sessions each week and so you could do that directly from your settings configuration after your players are heading off for the night and you can go ahead and set that up for the next week and set your next session you're probably already talking about it with your players you can do all that from within this hello world even change the background image or change the world title and the join page themes all from right here next we have user management and this is where we actually create our players so by default it's going to just number them as if game Masters player one and you can set their passwords rename them Etc and then over here you have user roles and we'll go into this in just a moment when we go over configure permissions but you can set the level there's player trusted player assistant GM and game master if you go to configure permissions then you can kind of see a grid layout of what each role can do game master is going to be able to do everything you can see some of these are grayed out and you can't change them because that's just what the game master has to be able to do the game master has to be able to do everything but you can change some of these other different things such as canvas pings or displaying the mouse cursor and other pieces like that so you can use this in order to configure some special permissions for players and you may want to make certain people trusted players and other people's people people not and you can configure whether you have someone helping you or not in general you probably don't need to change this too much some of the things that may be really helpful are things like create new tokens for example if someone has a ability in the game that you're playing where they can summon an ally or a creature or something like that then you may want to add this to either trusted players and make them a trusted player or just give this to players across the board and with create new items if you are allowing your players to create their items in order to add automation or extra customization then you may want to set that up as well so just things to keep in mind another really helpful one is create journal entries so they can keep their own notes but that all depends upon your group how much people will use these things and how much people will abuse these things when you're done with that you can hit save and return and it's going to take you back to having the chat open first so we'll have to go back to settings here one other thing is you'll notice that now we have this player too they're grayed out because they're not logged in and so when you expand this it'll show you people that are not logged in when it is collapsed it's only going to show those that are logged in finally under game settings we have the tour management and you can see this as a list of different tours for example if you want to start the creating a world tour which is in this setup there's also a UI overview and everything like this so you can use this to check what tours are available for you in case you closed out of a prompt for example if you did not go through any of these then you may want to come here to find them additionally there might be tours for different modules Etc and you can see that this is grayed out because we've completed it but you can hit these buttons to reset them and allow you to do the tour again if you need a refresher so this is helpful if you need Refreshers on anything or if you're looking to see if there's any kind of inbuilt tutorial with a module or a system the next section is help and documentation if you click on the support and issues this basically gives you a flowchart of what to do in order to submit a comprehensive bug report to Foundry vtt and try and get some help and the folks at The Foundry BTT Discord are really helpful when it comes to figuring out different issues and of course we at the baileywiki community we're also happy to help in general we are not always able to answer every question about Foundry but we help out where we can there's a lot of helpful folks in there so feel free to pop by our Discord as well but The Foundry vtt folks are phenomenal at being able to diagnose an issue in instant The View documentation is going to bring up a kind of like a big journal entry it's basically the web page for Foundry BTT that has just the knowledge base so you can go around through here to get some general ideas on things and then finally we have the community Wiki pages and this takes you to The Foundry VCT Community Wiki and this might have some more detailed topics and a few other pieces there finally we've got the game access and we've got the logout and return to setup buttons and then finally we've got invitation links and these are how you are going to send links out to your players you know you will just copy and paste these game invitation links and then DM them or post them in your chat etc for people look at it the top one is going to be your local network so someone who is just on your local area network being able to join that's how you can get there and that's going to conclude the settings tab now that we've finished our tour of the settings let's dive in and create our very first scene Mr get started we'll go to our scenes directory then there's the option to grade a scene in the option to create a folder as a demonstration of how folders work in Foundry if you click on this you can just specify a name so and then we can set a folder color by default it's empty and so the folder color is going to vary depending upon your system and if it changes any default settings otherwise it's going to be kind of this gray color and then you can choose the Sorting mode so basically this just means of the contents within the folder are they going to be sorted alphabetically or manually if manually you can drag them into different orders in order to have them display differently you'll see this has got kind of a great Outlook I can right click on the folder and edit it and then change the color to whatever I want there's this blue now we can either create AC in here and specify the folder that we want to be in or we can also click on this button directly next to the folder in order to create a scene within the folder we're going to specify it and we'll see that we initially get greeted with this big gray screen and this is the scene configuration menu there are four general areas for that Basics grid lighting and Ambiance we'll go through them briefly here we do have a video on scenes in detail in our Foundry basic Series so check that out if you want to have a little more in-depth knowledge on some of these features first up we have the name and that's just the name of the scene and that's how it's going to appear here in the sidebar then we have the permissions for show in navigation navigation is this section up here at the top that allows you to just click on it to go to the scene and then the permissions you can specify whether only you as the GM can go there by clicking on that or if all players can next we have the navigation name and this is what's going to display up here which is particularly useful if for example you have like you know a number code for determining where this scene is in relation to other scenes or the order that you're going to be going through the scenes but you don't want your players to see that little number code up at the top either for meta gaming reasons or just because it doesn't look very clean so you can change that navigation name and they'll see the navigation name when they're on the scene regardless of the navigation permissions so that's something to keep in mind next we have the background and foreground images so to upload an image you're just going to hit browse files and these are going to start in either user data or core data you definitely don't want to upload anything to core data and you don't even have this upload option here but you have your user data and then by default you've got modules which there's going to be nothing in there and systems and that's going to have whatever game systems you have installed you generally should not put anything in these unless you are a developer then you have worlds and you can upload things specifically to a world and it's got your data structure which is going to consist of everything from these directories and thumbnails for your scenes you can also add in things for like if you only want to use certain character portraits within this world you can go ahead and do that I personally prefer to create a new folder so you can get this create directory and we can just call this assets and then assets you can create additional subfolders so you may want to name this backgrounds and then you are going to Simply select choose file and on my desktop I have one of our maps from The Babe Wiki premium Maps pack and that's what I'm going to be using here for this demonstration we're going to just select the file and the foreground image you can kind of think of as like an overhead layer so the background is what your tokens are going to sit on top of and the foreground layer would be above that so for example if you want to have clouds or something like that next we have background color and that is this shade right here and the foreground elevation which kind of determines how high up this foreground is in relation to other overhead tiles Etc so you can Tinker with that if you would like I generally leave it at default the initial view Position will experiment with in a moment but that's basically how you can choose where people first look when they get on your scene under the grid size you can specify whether you want a gridless square or hexagonal type of layout and then there's also a larger grid configuration tool and then you can specify your grid size like how many pixels are each grid unit note that you cannot have this any smaller than 50 pixels so keep that in mind whenever you're selecting artwork Etc and then scene Dimensions you can adjust and that's going to just be how far this is and if you want to figure out how many grid squares wide you're going to be just take your width divided by your grid size and do the same thing with height respectively padding percentage is you see this area around the outside here you have this dark line right here and this is the actual scene itself the scene dimensions and then padding is this area over here your players can't see into the padding but you as a GM can so this is useful for if say you want to have tokens over to the side or tiles over to the side that you want to bring in later or you're moving things out of the way during your session and you don't necessarily want to delete them I would generally recommend leaving your padding percentage at this default 25 but you may want to change that depending upon your personal needs then you have your offset background this is useful if your background image doesn't neatly fit into your scene dimensions and you can use that to kind of adjust it slightly then we've got our grid scale by default it's going to be whatever your systems units are for a grid so in 5e it's going to be 5 feet as opposed to you know one meter or 10 feet Etc then you can adjust grid color and opacity so this is black but a 20 opacity so it's a light gray lighting will cover a little bit more in a bit when we go over a theater of the Mind type of scene for a battle map the main things to consider are just are you going to have token Vision so people have to have tokens and are you going to have fog exploration finally we have ambiance if you want to link a journal entry for keeping track of notes on something you can specify both the entry and the page here then if you want there to be a playlist that happens when this scene is activated then you can specify that and especially if there's a specific sound you want and then you can also add in weather effects and now we're going to go ahead and hit save changes now that we've saved changes you'll see that we have our background image here in place and you'll notice that this is quite a bit bigger so when we go to configure and we go to the grid we'll notice that this is automatically adjusted to this 5100 by 5100 which is the total dimension of this particular piece of artwork now if you want to change the dimensions and scale down the image then you can adjust these additionally I know that this was made in a 150 pixels per square inch so we could change this to 150 in order to increase the grid size so we can make a choice on which one we want to use so with that said I'm going to adjust my scene Dimensions here and make this 3400 by 3400 which be basically this is supposed to be 34 grid units and you can get that by taking that original Dimension and dividing by 150 and then you can multiply by 100 to get you your new widths and then when we save our changes this has just scaled down and so that's something to keep in mind as you are making changes and adjustments notice that my grid still isn't quite lined up so another thing you may want to double check on is that you set the grid size to be 100 because it also scaled down from that initial 100 when we had these Heights so we're going to change it back to 100. and go ahead and hit yes and now this lines up beautifully you'll notice that there was that little pop-up displaying that if you change the grid dimensions for example you just change this to 150 and hit save changes it's going to tell you that there are underlying dimensions of the scene Etc and it's going to cause things to shift and so for that reason you really want to figure out your scene dimensions and your grid size before you really get into the designing of your scene otherwise things are going to move around and it's generally just difficult to resize a scene once you've already made it so now that we have the scene this is a battle map that we can immediately put tokens on and go to town but let's go ahead and dress it up a little bit with our Foundry systems so we're not going to go through the Walling process for this entire piece but let's focus on just one particular room here now Foundry has a system of walls and when you hover over these you get some tool tips which is a great feature that they've added and you can disable these in the settings if you would like them to no longer show up for you but we have a few different types first off you have basic walls and your system May rename that slightly and for example some are just say walls others will change things to like curtains Etc so just keep that in mind but these icons should be the same so basic walls you can see just this yellow piece right here if you double click on it you can see a few different pieces about walls you can see its coordinates and then you can see these different restrictions movement restriction is just can a token pass through this and you've got none or normal then light restriction is will light pass through this or not now light we have a few different things here so there's none limited normal proximity and reverse proximity we're not going to go through all of these different ins and outs in this particular video but the main thing to note is that normal means that nothing's going to pass through it limited means it would have to pass through two limited walls before it stopped so we'll do a little demonstration on that here in a bit then proximity is going to mean based on how close the light source is then it can pass through otherwise it will not site restriction has kind of the same thing but it's going to be based off of tokens and their vision and same thing with sound restriction except that's just going to be based off of can a token hear it and the sound and everything finally we have Wall Direction we can choose either both which is going to kind of have a normal wall situation but we can also change it to left and right and you see this Arrow towards the line indicates the side of the wall that's going to function like a wall so if you're coming from the west and traveling East this wall is going to stop you but if you're traveling from the East and going west this wall effectively doesn't exist so someone over here can see everything on this side where someone over here cannot see over here and also cannot walk through the wall this is useful for a few different Niche applications and we go over some examples of that in our Foundry Basics video on walls if you are using proximity then there is this attenuation option here and some other settings open up if you have proximity with feet Etc then finally we can also make this into a door but we're going to go ahead and leave this normal and we're going to put everything back to normal on here as this is a normal wall now when it comes to your wall tool you can you start at a point and you start dragging it out one thing you'll notice is even though I didn't put it exactly on that point it kind of snapped to one there are kind of sub snap points on each of these and if you wanted something really precise for whatever reason you can hold shift and then it will drop it exactly where you place it and that's true of placing just about anything in front of your vtt if you hold shift you ignore snapping and that is useful for a few different applications when it comes to Walling a room when you're selecting a wall you can either hover one of the end points or if you hover over the midpoint then you can double click it or single click it to select it and then double click to open the window if you have two walls that overlap and you're trying to hover over this node hover over the middle part and then you can get to the node to change it if you're hovering a node you can hold Ctrl and then you can continue placing walls in a contiguous segment here which is really useful for doing a big round room like this there are ways to be more precise with this but for the purposes of this demonstration we're going to keep it simple here we have a door and you can choose to either close this with a regular wall and then change the settings later or leave it open so we're going to do both techniques as we have another door over here and one thing you'll notice is I went clockwise around all of this and the reason being is if I hold down alt to select you can see that when I press alt all of these nodes light up and that means if I select this I'm going to select this entire section of contiguous wall pieces and then if I hit wall Direction left because I drew them all going in this counterclockwise fashion they're all going to have the same Left Right orientation so that's really useful if you're drawing a lot of segments that you know you're going to change into a directional wall I can hit Ctrl Z to undo that and then I don't have that anymore now let's go ahead and we'll select these two walls I'm going to select this and I'm going to make them both into a door and so this is one way you can change things into doors and we'll notice that we have both these turned into doors now one thing to note I'm going to select one of these doors and this other wall here something to keep in mind is if you have both of these selected and one's a door one's a wall you want both to have the same light restriction of say Limited if we select that and hit update wall you'll notice that now all of a sudden this wall is no longer a door so if you have multiple sections of wall selected and you make an adjustment to one of these settings it's going to still apply all of the settings it's not designed to go through individually and see oh we only changed this so we'll turn this back to limited and we'll turn this back into a door the other way you can create a door is going over here in our wall tools and there are draw doors right here and we can hold down control again to make sure that we're snapped in nicely so we have some regular walls and some doors now let's go ahead and add a few other pieces in here next we have terrain walls train walls are going to have a limited light and sound Etc restrictions on it and that works really well for these columns where you can allow people to see the artwork of the column but they cannot see past it so I'm going to go ahead and draw that in and when you open this up you'll see that the site light and sound restrictions are all Limited so we'll see a demonstration of that here in a moment when we add in some lights and an actor basically that means that anything of those three categories will must pass through two walls before it gets blocked and one thing you can do with walls as well is you can copy and paste them so I'm just going to copy and paste this wall design and put it on top of my other pieces and so that's a really fast way for me to put out four of these notice if I switch back to a tool other than walls I won't see the walls anymore so you are not going to be played by these little nodes everywhere we may also want to use these for say this bookcase here you'll notice that I'm drawing this out to the wall because otherwise you're going to have like kind of a weird Gap back behind it and while that might be technically a little bit more immersive it can also lead to some strangeness with the different lighting now that we've set up our terrain walls let's go ahead and take a look at this altar this altar is probably not so high that it's going to be obstructing a bunch of vision or anything but maybe it doesn't make sense for people to clamber over it Etc so what we'll go ahead and do is we'll use these invisible walls you would also probably use these in the case of Windows Etc but this works great for furniture pieces that you want people to be able to see over and it not obstruct the lighting or the sounds Etc but you don't want people to move through easily and we can follow the curve of this particular altar here and then characters won't be able to walk through this note that since we're mainly concerned about constricting Movement we don't actually need to follow the curve of this perfectly and in fact sometimes it's better not to we can delete this and then there is a feature for Force snap to grid and basically this is going to cause our pieces to always snap to the corner points of the grid and this is particularly useful if you're doing things like this where you're only concerned about restricting movement and then we're always going to be on those grid points so this makes it so that there's no weird ways that someone might be able to move past a wall Etc and this creates a nice way that no one's going to walk through this altar here that's going to conclude kind of the walls that we're going to use here but I want to demonstrate a couple others and that's going to be this ethereal wall basically it's going to make it so that people can't perceive what's on the other side of it except for through sounds but they can move through it so it's cool for creating a little like hidden effect and you'll see some systems actually refer to this as curtains rather than ethereal walls and then another type of door is secret doors and secret doors are doors that to a player you can see that these have door icons a player would not actually see this icon so a GM is going to be the one who opens and closes it and you can right click on doors to lock them as well there's not a placement for that but it is something you can do as a GM so if you lock this and a player attempts to open it it's not going to actually open now that we have our walls in place let's go ahead and get some lighting in so first we're going to go to our lighting controls there are a couple of options to be aware of there is the reset fog of War which is going to change exploration we'll go over that when we have some tokens in play then we can also change the scene lighting so there are the transitions to daylight and darkness respectively by default the scene is going to be at zero Darkness if we hit transition to Darkness it's going to gradually fade it to a full black useful for nighttime scenes Etc if you want to have a specific Darkness level you can do that from hitting the configure and going under lighting you can adjust this Darkness level zero is full brightness and one is full Darkness then we can hit that transition to Daylight and it's again going to drop that Darkness level down to zero and it's going to be kind of a gradual transition so it works well if you are having that transition with your players still on the board all right and then finally we have our drawing light sources and this has got some instructions on and everything so very easy to see what's going on there for creating light source you're just going to left click for the origin and you're going to drag out for the radius and you can see that it's also showing how it is going to be restricted by different walls around it you'll notice on these pillars here we have the two terrain walls so there's the walls all the way around and then the light is going through either one of these walls first and then when it hits the second walls it's going through a second limited site and so then it's obstructed so that's how we get that cool effect of you can see the column it's illuminated but you cannot see past the column now when you double click on the light to open it there are a few different things to configure the main thing that you're going to want to look at is the dim and bright radius so for different systems they might have different rulings on how people can see with dim lighting versus bright lighting and this is how you can affect that this is also where you can get precise and have like 10 and 20 here then we've got our emission angle and this allows us to make it kind of a wedge shape and you can then also rotate it which only really matters if you are using this emission angle then we can also change our color so we have this nice red color and you can adjust the intensity you know if you go all the way down to zero there's basically no color if you go up to one it's pretty intense as you play around you may have favorites on that as well this Darkness activation range is particularly useful if you want to have say a cityscape or something like that where there's you know torches or Street lamps that come on at night but are off during the day so you can set this up so that you know this is only going to be on between say 0.85 and 1 and remember this is Darkness level not brightness level so that 0.85 and 1 is going to be at night time then you've got light animation there are a staggering amount of light animations that you can have just right out of the box with Foundry and you can get a bunch of different effects out of it we're not going to go through all of these and these are changing every now and then so just take a look at it play around and you can also check out our lighting video in our Foundry basic series if you want to learn more about all of these different effects for now we're going to go ahead and go with a kind of pulse option here and then animation speeches how fast the animation Cycles through and intensity is going to vary from effect to effect as to how much it is for this pulse it's just kind of how bright and how dark does it get and you can increase the speed or you can drop it then in advanced options we've really got a lot going on here there are constrained by walls and you can see by default this is checked if I take that off it's going to ignore the walls provides Vision it creates like a spotlight effect so tokens Can See the area illuminated by that light from anywhere that's useful for if you want to have a specific area that your players can always see maybe there's a special effect or something like that or it's like a scrying effect Etc that's useful there but it's not super common coloration technique there are a lot of different things in here to mess around with and we're not going to go in depth with it but just play around and you'll see there's a lot of different options the Adaptive luminance by default is kind of your standard this is a light then you have all of these different settings and again we go into more depth in our lighting video and you can adjust these different pieces to affect how the light looks as you play around you'll get a feel for your personal favorite settings here so I'm going to set mine up now and these are going to affect how the light behaves with your artwork and with the different elements within your scene they don't do anything mechanically per se but it does change the look quite a bit and so now we have a cool animated light source right there and you could adjust this in any number of ways now let's make another light that's going to be on this uh orb up here and I'm actually going to make the dim radius pretty large and the bright radius smaller you're not stuck with just one or the other or a specific ratio on them you can have them function very independently so now we've got another light source up here and if you look at the lighting you can see that we don't actually have the whole area covered one trick that you can do if you want rooms to be illuminated within these buildings but you don't necessarily want to give people global vision or something like that is you can draw out a larger light source and maybe this is just representing ambient torches in the area so you can color it not color it Etc and you can also make this just say a dim light instead of a bright light and with that then you are able to give people Vision Without obstructing things now that we have our walls and lights in place let's add a final touch with some sound we're going to draw in a sound Beacon from our sound section and just like the lights we click and drag out the radius and that's always going to pop open this create Ambient sound dialog and you're going to first select your source file path I'm going to browse files I'm going to go into my user data and this is in my assets folder that I created earlier create a new one and we're going to call it sounds and then we're going to upload a file and I'm going to use a file from the beowiki premium Maps towns module here and that's another thing to note I am selecting this however if you had a module that has a sound in it that you want to use you can go into your modules and then go into that specific modules folders to grab that sound so I have my sound selected I can manually adjust coordinates and also change the effect radius here if I want volume easing basically just means that the closer you get to the source the louder it is and the further away you get the quieter it is constrained by walls is exactly the same as with the lights they are going to be blocked you know by the walls but you can turn that off to allow it to pass beyond that you're not going to get a live preview because we haven't fully created this just yet if you close out of this without saving it it's not actually going to create the Ambient sound maximum volume is just what says on the tin you're going to adjust based on how loud you want this to be at its absolute loudest point so if you've got volumizing that's going to be at the center of it if you don't have volume using all of it's going to have the same volume finally we got that Darkness activation range just like we talked about with the lights so you can also have certain sound effects such as bats going by at night and birds chirping during the day so we create this sound we now have this sound beacon in place now that we have the sound Beacon you can test it with a token or over here there is this little preview button it looks like a set of headphones if you turn that on then just wherever you hover your mouse you will hear the sound it's pretty quiet so we can up this max volume and have this louder sound for us within your playlist folder you can also increase individual volume so for example if you crank up an ambient it's going to also make your Ambient sound beacons as that's what these are referred to as Ambient sound beacons it's going to make those louder and we can turn off this previews then we won't hear anymore if while you're working on a scene you don't want to be hearing the noise constantly then you can just right click on this while you're working on it and moving tokens around so that you're not hearing it over and over again and the same thing also applies to lights if you're going to turn out a light you just right click it and that will toggle between this red deactivate State and the white active state so leave that on for right now again works just fine a final element of scene building that we'll cover briefly here is tiles your tile controls over here look like a bunch of stacked blocks and there's a few different options here first you can toggle between the background layer or kind of the ground level and the foreground layer or overhead level with this little house toggle you can tell there is a little Aura around the edge of it it's a little bit brighter and that means you're on the foreground layer and if it's dim that means you're on the background layer and we're not going to dive into that today for a simple battle map you don't really need to worry about it but just so that you know it is there then we have the tile browser and the place tile place tile functions by drawing out this area and then you put an image in it generally speaking I would recommend against using that when you're first getting started there are some tricks you can use with it but in general the tile browser is going to be a little more friendly for you so the Tau browser opens up this file browser just like choosing our scene background or another image and in here we're going to go find our tile so I'm going to go to my assets I'll make a new directory and I'll just name it tiles then within tiles I am going to upload a file and I've got this kind of Rune door that I like here and then I'm ready to bring in this tile now one thing you'll notice is you have this asset grid size here asset grid size is going to determine the size that this is you can think of it as the DPI of the image if this is in 100 DPI and our scene is in 100 pixels per grid unit it's going to come in at its one to one size but you can make this number smaller to expand the image or make the number larger to make the image smaller so if we bring this in this is clearly way too big so I believe this was in 150 we'll double check and now we'll see that this fits perfectly and so now we have a towel right here and just to demonstrate you can make it even smaller by specifying something really large or you can make it massive by making this much smaller you can use tiles in a variety of different ways but for the purposes of this getting started video you don't really need to know how to use them you can just use this to add extra Decor along the way or in this case I can hide this tile and then my players won't see it and they'll walk through it so I'll probably do something like hide this tile and open a secret door here so people can go through into this other chamber we're not going to do anything else with tiles here today but I just wanted to show that off to you now that we've covered a bit of building a battle map we're going to get into actors and tokens this process is going to vary slightly from system to system but some of the basics are the same obviously we're going to be covering the DND 5e system here but again check our Foundry Basics playlist and the description and comments for links to guides for other systems including ones from the system developers we'll be updating those as we go so let us know if there's a specific system you'd like to see covered the initial process is either create an actor or create a folder from your actors directory I recommend generally having a player character's folder and also an enemies and an NPCs folder so we'll go ahead and do that really quickly and I like to color code these as well it's another great part of the organizational tips you can have for Foundry once you've created your folders you can either hit create actor and then set the folder or you can create it directly off of the folder just like with scenes now every actor is going to need a name we're going to call this test I recommend you always create a test player character for yourself to be able to check out movement lighting Etc within your scenes before your players hump jump into it next there's the type this is going to vary from systems to system in DND 5B you have player character non-player character vehicle and group most systems are going to have at least two types of actors some sort of player designation and some sort of non-player designation as player characters typically speaking are more complicated within different RPG systems this case we're going to leave it as a player character and keep it in there when we hit create actor this actor sheet is going to open the sheet is for DND 5e and it's going to look a little bit differently from other systems and additionally the sheet can be configured we only have the default 5e sheet but if you have modules you can change the look of it or create whole new sheets this starts off pretty blank and basic but we're going to fill it out first we're going to go ahead and add in our attributes the 5e system does not have a stat generation method built into it due to kind of the rules around that with 5e so we're going to go ahead and fill this out with approximately a standard array here so just some general generic stats next for 5e you can drag in content from this compendium for your DND 5e SRD content and under character features there are a host of options to drag things in from you can also manually develop these and add these in or use modules to automate the character creation process but we're going to keep it really basic here and just show you one way to do this first we'll grab racial features and we're going to go ahead and make this person a gnome so I'm going to show you the feature side and I'm going to bring in Gnome and gnomes get gnome coming additionally gnomes get their intelligence increased by two so if you want to play by that rule instead of the options to change the racial bonuses then you can do that after we have our race let's go ahead and get our background there's only one background in this and it's the acolyte background and this one is automated unlike the races it's going to automatically bring in this feature called shelter of the faithful you can click on it to get additional information Etc hit complete it's been added to the background and to your passive abilities next up we have classes and we'll go ahead and make this gnome a fighter and this is going to go through all the features for you'll see we're going from Level zero to level one and we're getting all these different pieces and it automatically adds those in whenever you level up you'll just drag in another level in whatever class you're getting so example fighter again you can either take the average or you can roll for the stat and it will automatically add that as well as your features when you get to third level we'll go ahead and roll for our stats again and this is going to give us our Marshall archetype now this isn't going to automatically bring in the subclass so we'll have to open that up here as well and for fighter we will be a champion and now we have a level 3 character it's automatically rolled its hit points and everything now one thing you'll notice is that this does not take care of our proficiencies so let's go ahead and do that from our class and our background so for example acolyte gets proficiency and insight and religion and then for fighter we get proficiency two from any of these so we're going to keep it simple and do acrobatics and animal handling and so there we go we have that all set up and the final bit of proficiency to add is changing these armor and weapons proficiencies so we're provision with all simple and martial weapons easy enough and then we're also proficient with pretty much all armors so that's pretty simple if you were doing some kind of custom generation you could pick and choose that again there are different ways to automate this process or change things up it's completely up to you but this is a good Baseline now of course one of the most important things about this is to go ahead and give this person a face so if you just click here this is going to allow you to set up your portrait so this is what's going to show up in chat and also when you look over here in the sidebar so I've already made this folder for player characters and I have this portrait in here from one of our modules and so here's a good no much looking fellow now we can just go ahead close there's no need to hit a save button or anything then we bring test out we'll notice that he is a full just square that looks like this if we want a top-down token we need to do is go into this prototype token and then go to appearance and in appearance we can then navigate through this now here's an example of where we're actually going to grab something from a module or a system because we go into D and d5e we can see in tokens there's all kinds of options already in here when it comes to looking at these items you can look at them in list view or we can look at it in thumbnail tiles or images View I generally prefer the tiles or thumbnail version so I can see what I'm looking at here we'll go ahead and select this deep gnome it's close enough so then we can just update the token one last piece of housekeeping is we're going to want to set up our vision on this so we'll go into senses and we'll give them a dark vision of 30 feet we also need to go into the Prototype token and go to the vision Tab and assign that something that is sometimes a little confusing with the way things are worded in Foundry is this Vision range this is specifically the distance token can see without any light if you don't have dark vision you leave this alone and then you'll be dependent upon lights and you'll want to set up scene lighting such that it gives Global illumination if you want something to be in the day in this case we want to go ahead and set up Dark Vision properly so this is 30 feet now you can have different Vision modes here such as basic dark vision monochromatic Etc and that's going to affect what the person actually sees when they're using that dark vision but we'll leave it at the default for now now we'll update the token and we'll close out of our character and now we have our token and it's got that great top-down model obviously there's Lighting in here and we're going to get to where there are no more walls but you can see there's this circle around us where we can see even though there is no more light being projected from the other room if we want to edit this token while it's already in the scene we can double right click we've been double left clicking in order to open the menu so we can double right click in order to open the token configuration itself unless this says link actor data so this is going to talk back to this particular sheet so it should update all of these settings between them so some final things you may want to do here is display name and that's just the name of the token you can have this set anywhere between never displayed to hovered by anyone Etc if you haven't always on then it's just going to constantly show for allies you may want to be something like hovered by anyone so that then when we Mouse over it it's going to show up but you'll determine the exact way you want to handle this as you play next we have resources and you can set up bars to be displayed in 5e you're probably most likely going to be using attributes.hp or something similar to show Health you may do something if you use like spell points Etc you'll put that on there in other systems there might be things like morale or other attributes that can be raised or lowered that you want to keep track of here you can have something set up like hovered by owner and then we can hover over them and you can see the health bar and if I lower their health to say 10 then it's going to reflect that on the bar while we still have our tokens out let's take a look at how tokens function within Foundry you can move around by clicking and dragging one thing you'll note is as a GM you can drag through these objects if you were a player you get an error saying this movement collides with at least one wall however as a GM you can click and drag anywhere if you want to test out the movement you can use either the arrow keys or wasd in order to move around and you'll notice that I am not able to move over this altar because we have those walls in place so this is really helpful for testing things as a GM and you can see all the lighting and how things collide if for whatever reason you need to move diagonally you or your players you can use two arrows or a two key combination of wasd in order to move in that diagonal so up and Right Moves you diagonally to the right Etc do you have a full eight tiles of available motion to you and this is useful if you have some kind of quirky Walling Etc you'll notice that this black area is the fog of war and if we go in to configure our scene under lighting we have the fog of War settings here so you can set a specific image if you want to either overlay another image on top of it or use just a different color or something like that A texture rather than a solid color and then you can adjust the unexplored and explored colors so this solid black here is the default unexplored we haven't seen that as our character and then you can see this area where we have seen but currently we don't have sight or light there we can't see through so that's our explored fog of War color and you can tweak those to your heart's content we've explored a bit and we've been doing testing if we were using one of our player characters then we might want to reset this fog of War right here and that's just going to be this button under the lighting it looks like a fog if we reset it and we select this we'll notice that now this is again the unexplored color so this is how we can reset our fog of war after we've done our testing or if something has changed and we want to alter it the last thing to get a character ready for use is to set up the permissions so on our test character we're just going to demonstrate this here I'm going to hit configure ownership configure ownership is going to have a couple layers first there is the all players you can determine whether they are going to be limited Observer or owners of a particular object limited basically just means they can see the name of it and they can take a look at it Observer means they're going to be able to look at the sheet but they're not going to be able to make any changes to it and then finally owner means they have complete ownership of that character they can move it around they can alter aspects of the sheet Etc so by default for all players we're going to leave it at none and then player 2 will set it to owner and so this means that whenever our second player comes in here they're going to be the owner of the test token that's going to be the token assigned to them and this is what really marks them as a player character not just a complicated NPC you can also manage permissions through the folder here and basically you're just setting up the default permissions here so for all players we can set this to limited so they can all see each other's names and you'll notice that if we go to configure ownership the all players up here or the default is set to limited and player 2 is still the owner all right we have one of our player tokens all set up but we can also bring in some party members and the DND 5e rsrt content there's the starter Heroes compendium you can open this up and you can bring in any of these characters and these are all level one characters that are more or less set up for an adventure so you can use this to bring in kind of a starting template or if you want to just get people going on something then you can bring those in and just have people play with these so all you have to do is you can import the entry and then we'll have Merrick the halfling Barbarian in here we can also import from the sheets when we look at them so bring in this Barbarian and this Ranger and put them into their proper places so now we can bring in these characters with our party assembled let's get some adversaries in there returning that SRD there is the monsters folder that has the monsters compendium you can also use the monster features from the SRD to build your own monster and you can select from a variety of these now when it comes to importing from a compendium when we've just been grabbing single player characters this doesn't come up often but when we are bringing in actors from a compendium then we need to be a little conscious of how we're doing that you'll notice that if I bring in say this constrictor snake it's going to automatically import and appear in my actors directory if I bring in another constrictor snake there is a second entry one thing to keep in mind with Foundry is that all of the things in your regular directories are going to be loaded for you and all of your players every single time you start Foundry and this means that you can have performance issues if you have a particularly bloated actors or scenes directory this isn't something that you're going to all of a sudden run into overnight but if you have something like thousands of actors particularly if they are really complicated using modules to add extra data Etc then it can add up and it can cause some system performance issues so it's best practice not only for system performance but also for your own organization to instead import one and then drag from the actors directory multiple times for however many times you want this enemy to appear so we have these constrictor snakes as our enemies and I am selecting them and I'm holding down control and using my scroll wheel to rotate them all right so now we have a party and some combatants and now we're ready to actually run a little bit of a combat just to give you a taste of what it's like this process is going to be pretty much the same regardless of what system you use some systems May automate certain features such as rolling for initiative or however determines the turn order or determining how hit points are removed and whether hits are made Etc but this will give us the general idea here so this is worth watching regards of what system you're on to add people to a combat encounter you're first going to select them and you can either select all at once and select this toggle combat state or you can do this individually so if it's easier say one of these constrictor snakes is not involved you can then take it out of the combat this is particularly helpful if you have a constrictor snake that's going to appear later and then you can toggle the combat State on or off there once we've toggled the combat state for all of our combatants we can actually look at the combat tracker itself that's going to be this cross swords icon here some systems may change the icon to a fist or something similar and here you can see all of the different initiative options you can also right click this to bump it out and then this little pop-out will stay even if you change directories or tabs over here particularly useful if you want to keep track of the initiative order while also seeing the chat So within the combat tracker you have the option to roll for everyone Roll Just NPCs or reset the initiative and there's also linking the scene and unlinking from the scene which is important if you have cross scene combats but that's a little more complicated and you don't need to worry about that right now for Rolling initiative you can click on any of these Dice and it will prompt you to roll them some systems will handle this automatically or have a different methodology for this but this General system is going to apply for most games so here you can add any bonuses like situational things or whatever then when you roll it it's going to populate it and if you want to check how it was arrived at you can go to the chat screen and you can see this 1d20 right here and they got a natural 20. you can continue this process for everyone players can also click on their own tokens that they own Etc now I'm going to use one of these roll all options first we'll reset it give the players a better chance after that snake rolled a natural 20. and if I hit role NPCs you'll notice that our two player characters that we have rolled automatically but not our test and that's because when we assign that ownership to test we actually gave a player control of them so that kind of marks them as not an NPC as far as D and D is concerned these two characters that are quelap and Merrick are concerned they are effectively just more detailed NPCs so they were went ahead and rolled Central rule our final initiative and now when we are already we've rolled our initiative we can begin combat and so you'll see who it is first and there's a little sound at the beginning of combat and so it's going to be quillath in order to use these different actions we're going to open up our character sheet we can see we have different features and inventory and that's how we're going to actually be attacking you don't technically have to have things equipped in order to use them by default in Foundry and 5e but if you have certain modules that are automated then it might so we're going to have our Longbow out and we're going to hold T while we're hovering this snake just tapping T and we add these little arrows that are going to point in and indicate that we have targeted this constrictor snake and now we're going to hit this die button and we'll see in the chat that we now have a chat card for using the longbow and now we can roll for the attack and we can see we rolled a 9. that is a miss for this Armor class of 12. so this does not hit so then we can just move on to the constrictor snake that was actually just targeted note that if you're a GM you'll maintain the same targeting between rounds and phases there are different settings for changing that with different modules but in vanilla Foundry you'll just have to remember that you need to change that not too complicated as a GM when you're usually running NPCs maybe you're attacking the same person Etc and that's definitely going to hit this poor Ranger with an armor class of 14. so I'm gonna go ahead and roll the damage and it's going to be a four you can just subtract 4 from the hit points and we'll automatically do the math or we can manually enter eight for setting it up with different modules or in different systems for example the Pathfinder 2E system actually automates a lot of this and it will determine whether a hit happened and automatically subtract damage Etc so depending upon your system this may be more or less automated for you but this will give you the basics so that you can run combat with absolutely no automation at all like this in order to continue through the combat you would just keep using the next turn options and if somehow you accidentally skipped someone's turn you can use the back button for previous turn in order to allow someone to continue the return Etc and if something happens we're going to advance the round then you can just click through it or you can use these previous rounds or next round options in order to advance it that way so you can keep going when you're completely finished with the combat say the snakes lie defeated or the heroes have been vanquished then you can simply select this end combat it's going to give you a little pop-up to confirm whether you want to end this combat encounter and empty the turn tracker or you want to cancel so if you select yes you'll notice that everyone has been emptied out of that in this toggle combat state has been turned off and so that's the absolute basics of running a combat and 5e it's very easy to get started and while there may be a little bit of extra manual work on your character sheets it's quite serviceable and you can run a game in this in no time flat so we've done the basics of a battle map but that's not the only kind of scene that we typically use in our RPGs we also use theater of the Mind scenes where we're mostly going to talk it out we're not going to actually have a physical token for everybody or a physical map for every location we're going to we're talking through it and we have kind of a general backdrop so let's go through how to create a theater of the Mind scene go back to our scenes I'm going to add in my first theater of the Mind scene and we are going to go into our Basics and once again we're going to grab our background image going back into our assets and backgrounds and I have another image prepared for this go ahead and grab this Market and select the file and save changes now it's a good time to also talk about scenes and scene navigation listed up at the top we can see this my first theater to the Mind scene because when we go to configure it it is available in navigation if we turn that off it's going to disappear have no fear we can go ahead and configure here to bring it back or we can just hit this toggle navigation right here of course you can turn it off from here as well you'll also notice this kind of target symbol around the name for battle map and we can see that that means activate or the active scene the active scene is going to be the scene that when someone logs into your world this is the first thing they're going to go to so we want this theater of the Mind scene to be our first one actually and here we can see our lovely scene there are some different considerations you may want to take for a theater of the mine scene you might not have any tokens on here at all so one of the first things we want to do is go into lighting and we want to turn off token Vision so that means a player can see this scene without having to have a token on it we'll also probably want to turn off our fog exploration and we can turn on global illumination this then makes it so that players can see this whether they have a token here or not particularly useful if we're not actually using tokens depending upon how you run your games you may find it helpful to have your tokens down here in a corner or something like that where players can double click on them to quickly access their sheets if they prefer that versus going into the sheets over here now additionally you'll notice that the grid is maybe a little obtrusive so another thing that you probably want to do on a theater defined scene is go into your grid and just drop that opacity all the way down I don't generally recommend turning off this grid type to gridless just because you may still want to position things if you add in tiles or lights or sounds onto your theater of the Mind scene so turn your grid opacity all the way down and that disappears and this may be one of the few times you actually want to change the amount of padding that you have here I still tend to prefer having the padding on it might make things a little more Messy as a GM in terms of seeing extra clutterife here but if you have a tile for example that extends over this corner and you don't have padding it's going to actually clip and not allow you to keep pushing it further you can't push it off the edge last thing you might want to do is you might want to change the background color to something like black and this mostly makes it easier on the eyes for you as a GM your players will have a similar experience with or without that change in color but it's nice then you may want to have a very specific view set up so this has a zoomed in with our bar over here to the side and we have the whole scene in place so if we configure this we can set this initial view position and this is just going to be where someone looks when they first come to this scene you can manually alter this if you want to be more precise like 1500 by 800 and 1.2 instead of 1.19 but you can just hit that little button there at the end that looks like kind of the crop symbol mirrored and overlaid a little bit and that will set your view to exactly what it is currently so you know that your players will always look at exactly this it may be slightly off depending upon monitor sizes but this will get you very close for most cases and so now you have a great theater of the Mind scene that your players can come take a look at now that we're on our theater of the Mind scene that we've got set up it's all nice and neat if we are running a scene with our players as I mentioned before we can have their tokens on the scene so they can double click to open their sheets and then they can roll any checks directly from their sheet and you can customize all of the Rolling as much as you want adding situational bonuses making them with advantage or disadvantage Etc if you wanted to roll manually you can also use this great feature down here in the bottom in the chat and in Foundry all you do is slash R and then you're just going to type out the dice that you're going to roll so if you're going to do a D20 it's just one D20 and then any modifiers you want there's 1d20 plus five and with all of the dice rolls in Foundry you can click on this little Banner and you can expand out what the die result was and then see the modifier maybe not so necessary for a D20 but if you have something like you know 4d6 and you roll that and you want to see how each of them rolled with what the average distribution was Etc then you can see that as well so that's a way that you can manually handle rolls and everything the final bit of rolling here is there is a drop down menu and this applies to every single system and you have public roles private GM rules blind GM rules and self rules public rules are as the name might imply public every single person can see the result of the role then private GM rules are going to be between you and the GM only you and the GM can actually see the role and if you're the GM then you are still the only person who can see it then we have the blind GM rule it's where you roll a die and only the GM can see it the player who actually made the role is not able to look at it and then finally we have a self roll which is your rolling purely for yourself if you're wanting to RP something where you're doing maybe a wisdom check for yourself then that's how you could do that and have that inform the way you're role playing in a conversation without necessarily divulging that to the rest of the table now that we've concluded our session if we want to clean up this chat log perhaps you want to keep it between sessions but if it gets pretty cluttered this can also bog things down a little bit usually when it's very long but it might be a good practice to clean that up just in between sessions or you may want to keep it around for a session so you can refer back to anything that happened towards the end of last session if you're left in the middle of a combat for instance you can just hit this little clear chat log to delete it you can also export the chat logs every week to a text file that's going to have all of the different gen note that you'll want to export before you delete it like what I just did so with wrapping that up maybe you want to make some notes for your sessions or perhaps you're preparing a handout for your players for next session income journal entries just like scenes and actors and everything else you can hit create journal entry and you can use this to create a brand new journal entry and you can just call this something like session notes or anything descriptive journal entries and Foundry work as a journal entry itself and then you have Pages within that so you can create a new page and then you will write everything in here you have just kind of a standard wysiwyg-esque kind of layout here where you can type in things and then you have these preset formatting pieces where you can highlight your text and make it a heading Etc one special object is this secret and so with journal entries just like characters you can set permissions so if you configure the ownership here only owners are going to be able to see anything in the secret block so that's one little extra bit that you get from Foundry there's a lot of different formatting here you can make some really gorgeous journal entries if you want to add a lot of detail Additionally you can add images to this either inserting it or adding it as an attachment to this and if you prefer to edit things in HTML you just switch this HTML or code View and you can write out in HTML particularly helpful if you're going to be embedding any kind of links or things like that to web pages then if there's any specific items you want to hand out to your party there are create items and create folders creating items is going to vary heavily between each system there's a lot of different subclasses for DND Etc pretty much every system is going to have a items kind of compendium somewhere inside of it just as a part of installing the system and you can use this as a reasonable Baseline we are working on creating a Foundry Basics video that's going to talk about items in general and also in specific for a couple different systems so look forward to that or check the link down below if it's been a bit and see if we have that updated but you can use these as kind of templates to figure those out like I said it varies quite a bit from system to system so we're not going to go into detail there today so we have gone from installation all the way to installing a system creating our first world building a scene getting in our first character tokens and running a simple combat in Foundry all in a pretty short period of time while we haven't gone over every single component that there is a Foundry we have gone over all the essentials you need to get started and if you want a more in-depth discussion on any of these or a more detailed view check out the playlist for our Foundry Basics series that's again in the description and also in the top comment down below as we are updating that and adding more sections about the various aspects of Foundry but we've gone in again a pretty short period of time we are ready to run a session so I hope that this has shown you that even though Foundry is capable of some incredible things and things that have a lot to learn and master about them particularly when you add in our amazing module development Community it is still a phenomenal tool on its own without any modules or bells and whistles and you can Dive Right In and run a fantastic session for your players and that's going to conclude our getting started with Foundry vtt video in our installment of Foundry Basics I hope that this video has been a useful guide to you in getting started with Foundry obviously there is a lot more to uncover and dive deeper into with Foundry so in the comments let us know what Foundry Basics videos you'd like us to create or revisit next if you enjoyed this content subscribe to the channel to keep up with all of our latest videos and consider becoming a patron not only do you support the channel we also gain access to all the modular systems and scenes that we've shown off a little bit in the background here once again this has been Zephyr thank you so much for watching happy gaming and have a good one

Channel: Baileywiki

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Id: iOeqPNpHR10

Length: 91min 26sec (5486 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023