Foundry Modules: The Top 5 Essential Modules that Everyone Should Use

[Music] hey everyone this is zephyr one of the greatest things about foundry is all of the modules from our amazing development community but it can be hard to sort through what modules you should have installed and when and in what situations so in this video i'm going to go over the five modules that we think you should be running no matter what kind of game you're playing no matter what system you're running all five of these modules are completely system agnostic so it doesn't matter if you're using d5e or a custom system of your own design these will all work for you and they are designed to work really well with additional modules check the time stamps in the description for each module and with that let's get started counting up from number five number five is pointer in pings no matter what game you're running it can be really useful to facilitate communication at the table corner and pings allows us to hold down a hotkey and bring up a pointer to gesture at various parts of our scene we can see that there is a pointer that follows my mouse while i have the hotkey pressed and when i have the pointer up i can gesture at particular books on this theater of mine scene i can also have the pointer up and i can left click in order to ping a particular spot this is useful for bringing my player's attention to a particular area i can also hold down the pointer and right click to drag my entire player's viewpoints to the area that i'm pinging when you first enable the module or visit the settings in the configure settings option you'll get this pop-up with some information and then you can go to the general tab to configure your pointer hotkey by default it is x your ping key which again is left click and your move players view on ping which is default right click note that players will not have this option it'll only be available for gms you can also toggle whether the ping is only when the pointer is active or all the time and you can push your settings to all of your users effectively setting a new default for them rather than pointer and pings default they'll still be able to configure this on their own though we can go into choose your pointer and customize a little bit by clicking on the names you can get a quick preview of what the different pointers and pings look like and you can use the tick boxes to select your pointer and your ping and change or customize the look of it just by clicking through these different options so if we make those changes and close we'll see that now my pointer has changed to an arrow and my ping is this rotating triangle back in the settings we can further customize these different pointers and pings if we click on a name then we can adjust the different scale if we want to be larger we can apply various effects so again upping the scale to make it larger maybe we want the pointers to be really really big and really obvious we can rotate the angle and if we rotate the angle then we probably need to offset the grid units for it so that we're still pointing in the correct spot this offers a pretty large degree of customization for you and allows you to achieve the look that you want you can also extend or shorten the duration of your pings and change the tint color on a particular pointer if you don't want it to match your user color and also animate things with a rotation and scale option additionally you can select the create new to make a brand new pointer and clicking on this preview space you can select different images there's already some included in the assets for this module you can also go into your core foundry data and in the icons and svg folder you can find all kinds of different icons available to you and select those and apply different effects to them this will accept any of foundry's default tile browser options so svg webp and png etc so whatever you want to use i would personally recommend using svg if you have it available because it's going to scale more properly with the pointer but it's all up to you hopping over to the player view you'll see that the player's pointer matches their color and they're able to ping but they're not able to right click ping and move the view the player also has their own configuration settings in module settings where they can update the pointer hotkey and ping as well as whether the ping is active all the time or only when the pointer is up and they can select any combination of pointers and choose your pointer but they can't add a new one if for whatever reason you wanted players to be able to add their own custom pointer you need to add a permission for that by going into your user management and configuring permissions then the setting you're looking for is modify configuration settings due to a limitation with vanilla foundry this is the only way to allow players to create their own pointer and it's to directly modify the module settings so use this with caution as this is also going to allow your players to change the settings of all of your other different modules so i would generally suggest not giving this permission to your players or doing it for a limited time but that option is available to you so as you can see pointer and pings is a great module for having clear communication at the table whether you're using theater of mind maps like this bookshelf or you're going to use a battle map like this called hideout so when your players are asking to check the contents of a crate the two of you can point with the pointer to make sure you're talking about the right box instead of the incorrect box using the pointer system and you can also ping to draw players attention to specific areas or maybe move their whole vision to see where an enemy has come through a hallway and is ready to threaten them it's a great communication tool and one that everyone should be using in their games module number four is dice tray and to give you a good demonstration of this i'm first going to show you how you would normally roll in foundry if you're not rolling from a sheet you've got to use the chat commands for slash r and then type in like 1d20 and if you want to add any modifiers or use different dice you're going to have to use something like kh3 to have keep the highest three values etc obviously you can do a lot with this but it's a little clunky and can be slow or unintuitive for someone who is new to foundry which particularly applies to players who don't spend as much time in foundry as us gms do the dice tray module makes this much more intuitive with a panel of the seven traditional rpg dice where you can left-click on the dice to add more to the roll syntax it will even keep the roll mode syntax that you have specified you can left-click to add additional dice and click to remove them you can use advantage and disadvantage to keep the highest or keep the lowest of a result and you can add modifiers by clicking on these different buttons so it's going to intelligently fill in the syntax that you need already for you and you can hit enter to pop it out into the chat and we'll see that it calculates everything just like a normal dice roll so it's much more convenient and intuitive for players and you can also just click the roll button to have it pop out so a much more robust option for adding roles and doing it much quicker than typing it out you can get as complicated or as simple as we want with all of these roles another really powerful feature is if you click on the d20 next to the roll mode it's normally does nothing but with dice tray it adds a dice calculator has a similar interface but also has much more robust options like if i have this bandit selected and i'm in the 5e system i can in addition to rolling this d20 i can add the bandit's skill modifier or their strength modifier here which is going to be a zero because he has a zero strength and we can see a three here we can also add this further for example if we want to add in expertise or something like that for maybe a tool check where for whatever reason this bandit is an expert in using this tool that uses his intelligence modifier and we can see that it is using his statistics so this is a really helpful way to bring in some of these more niche roles that aren't as easy to do directly from a character sheet and are clumsy to type out whenever you are in the chat this comes with a few different options we can enable the dice calculator which is that pop out when we click on the d20 next to chat we can also disable or enable the dice tray itself which are the little buttons at the bottom of the chat so again that is the dice calculator and the dice tray is down here with these little buttons so you can enable and disable them based off of that setting then we also have the override system option and by default it's going to be automatic it's going to detect whichever system you're using and that's what controls the advantage disadvantage and all of these other attributes that come in with your system if you're using any of these systems it'll automatically detect it otherwise it'll default to a generic setup but you can manually set any of these if you're not using directly one of these systems but you're using something similar with other useful features for example if you still have advantage and disadvantage you may want to manually set it to something else and finally there is a cosmetic option to enable pips on the d6 for visual clarity and that's purely a personal stack choice so see that's got six pips on it and this requires a refresh our third module is gm screen this is a really powerful organizational tool that i like to use a lot and you'll see that it adds this little button down here in the bottom right of your screen upon clicking that we're going to pull up this nice big panel with a bunch of different windows and it should remind you a little bit of an in person or a tabletop gm screen and from here we can drag in or configure these different cells to make them larger or smaller and what we can do with them is we can drag in all kinds of things for example if i'm running an encounter and i want to have the bandit captain and bandit stat blocks handy then i can have those right there and i can also bring in uh say my player characters so i know what their ac is and their health pool et cetera so i can keep track of that easily and at a glance it's very easy to keep organized then if there is an item or a spell that is going to be found here like this test weapon then i can have that handy and have the description ready to go without having to fumble through a pop-up can also have commonly referenced rules like these ability checks handy so i can have my little gm's cheat sheet for different difficulties or rulings that i don't use very often if i need more space i can change the rows and columns a individual cell spans to dedicate more space to these ability checks here and you can do that with all of these and it's very handy and customizable in that respect if you need different sizes you can also put in roll tables and when you roll on the roll table you'll see that it actually does pop directly into the chat so you can roll directly from the gm screen same thing with if you're going to roll a check or a attack from one of your character sheets here and this makes it very easy to run encounters particularly if you have several of the same type of enemy then you don't have to be cycling through each one in terms of using the abilities or checking their statistics it makes it very easy to keep track of everything and you can pop out the journal entries themselves and edit them right from your jam screen and save it then if you need to make sure that things come through you can just refresh and we can clear our grid to bring everything back to that original starting zone going into the settings we can add additional tabs so i've already added in this rules tab and it has four columns and four rows which is going to be slightly different and i can adjust what order they come in and i can also make one like a public tab here and what i'll do here is i'll change the columns and rows and i'll make it shared and shared is going to allow all of my players to see this as well so take a look at that shortly then other settings here we can choose to display the jam screen as a drawer or condense the text here or make other tweaks so when we save we'll be able to pull this up and we can tab through these other tabs and they're going to remain stored between them all and i can add these ability checks to the public one and that's going to allow my players to see that so if i want to have rules that we commonly reference or need to use or if there's house rules or table rulings that need to be referenced regularly this might be something good to have in the public side for players or it can have handouts there such as npc portraits or questline details or a specific item description it can be easily accessed for them when i condense the text then it's going to make a just an image rather than saying gm screen and if i go into the configure settings here again and i turn off display as drawer it's going to get rid of that little button down at the bottom but have no fear i can go into the journals and click on gm screen to have it as a pop out so whichever one you would prefer to use those are available to you and we've got the same functionality that we did as a drawer just a little less of the layout customization here on the player side we can see we have the player screen button now instead of gm screen and clicking on that is going to pull up the public tab because that's the only tab that we have shared and we'll see that it has that whole journal entry so again this is a great way to display a bunch of information for your players and your players are not going to be able to edit the items that you put in there unless they have edit permissions or ownership permissions of them and your players can then configure their player screen however they see fit making it a drawer or a pop-out or adjusting the heights and opacity all of those personal aesthetic or visual configuration aspects are available to them separately independently of your own and we'll notice that if we go in and they want to bring in a character or something like that onto this public they're not able to do so only gms can actually add content to the tabs again it's a really powerful tool when it comes to giving players handouts or having quick references for different aspects of your campaign module number two is tidy ui game settings this is another one where to demonstrate its power i'm going to show you it without you may have already noticed some really great changes as we've been going through this but i'm going to show you even more of that so we can see we have the standard all modules active active modules inactive modules and when we go to module settings this is just a massive wall of text of different settings as you go through here and it's a little hard to parse in vanilla foundry there's just so much information here and especially if you have a lot of modules it can be a pain to try to find anything i'm going to go into my module management and activate none other than tidy ui game settings and when it activates and refreshes we'll enter a whole new world of organization in our settings tab we can go to our manage modules and we'll see that there is a big red button to uncheck all but tiny ui modules and a check all modules that will allow us to enable everything that we have in the current filter i don't want to do that so i'm going to close but going back to manage modules we can see that we also have an export module list and an import modulus which can allow us to share our module loadouts with others or store different configurations for different setups like maybe we have a different building setup versus playing setup and also expand and contract additional information about all of our modules which makes it really easy to see what's going on with each of these modules and whether we want to keep them active or deactivate them or we want to go visit the githubs and get more information specifically then when we go to our configure settings and module settings we'll see the same beautiful uh condensed look that we've seen in the rest of the video where we can expand and contract these modules with a plus or minus which makes keeping up with a large modulus a breeze our final module and our absolutely most important module is find the culprit find the culprit is a very powerful tool for identifying what modules are capable of what things in your game and what modules are causing conflicts in this example i don't have a major module conflict to show off to you so instead i'm going to show you how i would hunt down something causing a either unwanted effect or an effect i want to learn more about for example here i have these rolling clouds coming through but for the sake of this example i want to figure out what module is responsible for that while i don't know this is entirely possible when you're going on a module installation spree and you install 50 some odd modules and you can't remember what does what exactly or you can't remember what broke everything so when we want to use find the culprit we go to manage modules and we'll listen to this button now it says find the culprit clicking on that brings up this little menu and this is going to be selecting our controls these are modules that you know for sure aren't responsible for the problem and you don't want to disable obviously the more of these you know the faster the process will go but i'm going to do just a few for an example i'm going to enable the levels suite of modules and set those as my controls then when i select start find the culprit is going to disable every module except for the ones that we selected as our controls and we can verify this by going into our manage modules and scrolling through you can see that only the controls and find the culprit are active so it is truly disabling all of those other modules it's asking us if our issue persists in this case we're looking for clouds and the answer is no obviously if you had something breaking you would be looking for that instead so now what find the culprit does is it's going to enable half of the remaining modules and keep the other half disabled and it's going to tell us how many steps are remaining so no more than 5 steps here and we're going to see if our issue persists and here we can see that there are still clouds and so that means our issue does in fact persist we have the problem or the issue or the feature that we're looking for here so we're going to hit yes and what's going to do is out of those modules that were green or enabled it's going to deactivate half of them and keep the other half so looking at this now it has updated our step count and it has like i said disabled half of those modules and we can now see that the clouds are still rolling in so our issue does persist and then we will end up selecting yes because again the clouds are what we are trying to hunt down and this process is the same if you have a major conflict or you're trying to hunt down a feature going down the rabbit hole we're going to continue this process of disabling half of the modules and checking to see if the issue persists if at any point our culprit is in the half that was disabled it is instead going to flip it from being half of the active modules to being half of the deactivated modules until we can narrow it down and finally get our final culprit and that is how we will know what is causing this this constantly dividing possibilities by two process is the most efficient way to identify a single module issue and find the culprit is just automating that process for you we finally arrived at our culprit being fx master and so that is the module responsible for our clouds and it's going to tell us we found the culprit and we can reactivate all the modules or don't reactivate all of the modules and so i want to select reactivate all of them because i do want to keep the clouds you would select no if you didn't want that particular module re-enabled as in if it had a large issue so now after a little bit of delay those clouds are going to come back in and if i want to change that i can go into my manage modules and find the culprit again fx master and disable it or re-enable it so again you can use this for hunting down conflict and that's going to be the probably the most important use for it but you can also use it if say you forgot everything that fx master is capable of you can now use that information to go check the github and you can find out that oh this effect controls button is from fx master and you can learn about how you can update those weather effects or change things and so find the culprit is an incredibly important tool for anyone using a large amount of modules or even a small amount of modules for identifying conflicts and identifying key features that you want to learn more about in the inevitable slew of modules that we almost all end up installing and enabling when getting started with foundry all right that is going to wrap up today's countdown of the top five most essential modules that everyone should be running in their foundry games no matter what system no matter what kind of game they are running as we all probably know there are a ton of modules to get through with foundry vtt it's one of the greatest things about the virtual tabletop and this community of the wonderful developers putting these modules together and so i hope that these five essentials have really helped kick-start your journey and your foray into modules and especially our top two find the culprit and tidy ui game settings will hopefully help you with keeping yourself organized and being able to navigate the world of modules with more confidence as we've established there are a ton of modules so if there's another area of modules that you'd like us to cover next or talk more in depth about please let us know in the comments down below this has been zephyr thanks so much for watching happy gaming and have a good one you

Channel: Baileywiki

Views: 36,713

Keywords: roll20, foundryvtt, fantasygrounds, dnd, dnd5e, pf2e, pf1e, battlemap, vtt

Id: w0p3M90EUBc

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022