FoundryVTT: The Ultimate DnD 5e Automation Suite! (Foundry Modules)

[Music] hey everyone this is Zephyr and welcome to the Bailey Wiki Channel where we teach everyday DMS how to create truly amazing experiences for their players by combining art and Technology if you're a DM who likes to wow your players and you're using platforms like dungeon draft and Foundry virtual tabletop then you're in the right place today we wanted to show you the ultimate automation suite for Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition in Foundry vtt this is a suite of add-on modules that take pretty minimal setup to give you incredible levels of automation this handles complex effects such as on movement and overtime and special summons with extra attacks very well it makes it incredibly easy to just get going with your group of players after only a few minutes of setup and you're Off to the Races your combats will be snappier easier to manage and you can focus more on the narrative and the strategy of the battles rather than the bookkeeping we'll first get started with a kind of General summary of the modules we're going to use and then we'll go into the settings you need to go through before you get started next we'll assemble characters and monsters and finally we'll demonstrate a little bit of a combat and how all of these different automations play together now let's dive in for the modules that we're going to be using today we've got a pretty long list not all of them are required for automations we do have things like 3D canvas and levels and a few other pieces to just Elevate our experience and we're using the bay Wiki modules to bring in all of these gorgeous maps that are in the background and it's actually part of our latest release that's available right now in the description there's going to be a detailed list of every module that we use today and it's going to have the category that it fits under for example the midiq Suite is going to be a section and there will be a section on levels and 3D canvas and essentially what all of the different pieces do so we're going to run through this really quickly but remember to reference the description for a detailed and organized list of the categories so first up we have 3D canvas and it's kind of companion modules including the mat making pack and the token collection and then 3D portraits first to be able to use Hero Forge icons then we have active auras active token effects those are going to help fuel our automation alternative pause icon is this little ey candy here down at the bottom argon is our HUD of choice we have automated animations as well as fxm and token magic effects and jb2 it doesn't matter whether you're using the free or the patreon version of that just one of those those will all add some eye candy relatedly the D andd 5 animations module is going to allow you to bring in a bunch of preset animations for for non SRD content then we have some of the biley wiki modules and some quality of life features such as Carousel combat tracker to make our combat tracker really nice and pretty that also fits in with dice so nice and dice tray furthering the automation we have things like deds convenient effects the whole midi Q Suite which includes Dae item macro and then we have effect macro template macro Etc and we have Chris's pre-mades which is kind of the glue that brings a lot of these things together it leverages things that midi and Dae and a lot of these other macro modules can do and makes it really easy for us to bring in a bunch of automation at once and that goes hand inand with the D and D Beyond importer from Mr primate we've showcased this a few times in the past but this is going to really show off how useful it is whether you're using d& Beyond or not it's super helpful to be able to bring in a bunch of the content from there even if it's just as Rd with a lot of smart intelligence built into it rounding out the rest of this we have some of monks pieces we have monks active tow triggers and little details and SE navigation to help get around a lot and then we have monks Token Bar for being able to manage tokens and we're also going to be using that as an integration with midi some important choices that you have available to you as we mentioned earlier we have argon combat HUD from Ripper and you can use any combat HUD you want you can even forgo a combat H but it just makes combat significantly smoother and faster and easier for everyone involved and we prefer argon for 5e because it also breaks down your action economy and includes those base actions of you know Dodge Dash and disengage for newer players and veteran players alike we also recommend action-packed and of course the classic token action Hut just pick your favorite but we highly recommend you have some form of token HUD to use then in terms of rooll support Port we're using midiq and that's going to be the backbone of our automation one of the things for that is prompting players to roll saves and other rolles there's two ways to do that you can use let me roll that for you which at the time of this recording Works in version 11 but is not technically approved for version 11 so it needs an update and there may be some bugs with it or you can use Monk's Token Bar to request the roles then for cover calculations such as half cover full cover Etc then you can either choose to use symbols automatic cover calculator or the levels automatic cover calculator since we're patrons of Rippers and we are leveraging levels we're going to go ahead and use the levels automatic cover calculator relatedly if you are using levels and you're a patron of rippers we highly recommend you grab the levels volumetric templates Ripper recently also integrated patreon with all of his modules so you can download them directly from the module browser which makes keeping up with all of these great little pieces that he has much easier finally there's an important note that with Chris's pre-mades you do not want to use the dynamic active effects SRD module or the midiq SRD module Chris's premades incorporates a lot of those features into the module itself and will actually produce errors for you if you use them together rounding some things out we also have simple calendar which is a midiq requirement but we're going to show off a few nice things about that for your game and then is going to show off small time which allows you to manage time a little bit more effectively it's not strictly combat related but it can help with managing certain lasting effects with all of the modules out of the way let's dive into settings when you first activate all of the modules you should get a popup for the DND 5 animations update menu unless you've already been leveraging that with automated animations this is basically telling you all of the different effects that's it's going to bring in and add to your automated animation menu and this won't overwrite things that you already have entries for for example if you already brought in something that was like asset Arrow it shouldn't overwrite that to be safe though you can go into configure settings and go to automated animations and launch its main menu then in the menu manager you can export your menu to a Json file and then later you can merge it back in so that it does not get overwritten and you don't lose any special animations you've already set up and spent time on but this is going to add all of these different pieces and when you're ready you just go ahead and click update and from there it's going to fill out your automatic recognition menu here for you and if for whatever reason this didn't pop up when you first started you'll go ahead and hit the update menu down here in your settings and in this case we just updated so no updates were found but if you had not clicked that yet you would have the options for all these updates similar L if for whatever reason you've really mucked up all your settings you can do the menu manager to restore default menu and get rid of everything and then you can repport through this update menu for all the D andd 5D animations and a nice feature of that is if you're using 3D canvas you'll notice that if we go into automated animations and we look at 3D canvas these are also set up for all of these entries that came in from the D andd 5 animations menu for settings the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to go into midiq and then we're going to make sure that this enable roll automation support is enabled we need that for Chris's premades to hook in properly next we're going to open our workflow settings and we're going to go to Quick Settings and this is basically where everyone should start when you're using midiq there's a lot of settings here and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot of fine tuning you can do but just pick a quick setting that describes what you want the best and start from there we highly recommend Fallout automation especially if you're trying to make things Snappy and quick it's very smooth and very painless and then you can make adjustments as you go so we're going to start with that and it'll tell you all of the changes that are made whenever you select a preset so we'll go ahead and hit apply changes and that will also check some of these settings down here next we'll go back to the workflow settings and in workflow itself you want to go down to the save section and then in the prompt players to roll saves you want to change that to whatever module you're using whether that's let me roll that for you or Mon's Token Bar there's also some other options if you would prefer or combinations would let me roll that for you but just pick the one that's most appropriate for you and your group Next we're going to go into the MK section we need to make sure that we have this add actor on use macro to sheet and add item on use macro to sheet these are also important for our automation then we also need to make sure that the merge roles to one card is ticked this should be ticked by by default if you selected that full automation but just make sure that it is next we'll go into mechanics and you want to make sure that you set this up down here which is the effect when HP equals zero mql will give you errors if you don't you're going to have different behaviors for player controlled versus GM controlled example generally speaking players are going to be unconscious and if a GM control token dies is going to be dead for zero HP it doesn't matter what you choose there and you can either do ad effect as only an overlay or as an icon or don't update whatever you want to do just make sure that you have this filled out then we want to go down to the check weapon range when attacking section this is kind of a section about just how AC and calculating things works and the main thing we want to do is we want to look at walls block ranged attacks and here you want to choose the appropriate cover setting that you have for example are using levels Auto cover so we're going to select that and this is important because then you're actually using how levels Auto cover calculates things as opposed to the center check it's just going to look Center on Center one line between the tokens can they see the center of each other the levels autoc cover actually looks at sight lines and then dynamically calculates things out so you actually can get things like half cover and 3/4 cover versus just full cover or half cover or no cover then for calculate cover you need to also select your appropriate module again we're using levels Auto cover but you could use symbols or alternative token visibility as well then that's everything we need in the MK and mechanic sections from here you can choose whether you want to make additional changes here for example this rule section is a good one to check out because there are a lot of optional game rules about flanking Etc or hiding people house rules having different margins on things and this is a really good place to mess around with because this is is all the optional pieces and you're not necessarily going to really complicate how your automation is going beyond that if you want to alter things such as more of the attack formula or how reactions work or concentration Etc feel free to go through these it can be a little overwhelming so don't feel like you need to if you are wanting to dive more into midiq and you're feeling intimidated don't worry we have an interview series with Tim hne the creator of mql who goes through midi and all of his modules to kind of explain how they work and break down kind of your first ports of call for that additionally Tim has a Discord that will link in the description it's full of helpful folks for all things midi and Automation and Foundry in general it's a great resource definitely check it out if you're looking for further tips on automation whether that's tweaking things to your own liking or developing your own automation for some of your effects after midiq the next settings we're going to go two are the levels automatic cover calculator and the first thing you need to do is make sure you have the library mode checked it should tick automatically but just to be safe Make sure you do that and then I would suggest either removing the tokens provide cover or making sure to have the ignore tokens of the same disposition ticked on reason being is that particularly if you're using summons and some of the very Niche summons that have you making attacks from your character that actually come from the token that can cause some strangeness with cover calculation and Chris's premades so just keep those two settings in mind you can also adjust some of these other settings if you would like but those are the only really important ones that I think you need to make sure to take a look at after the automatic cover calculator we need to take a look at item macro and you just need to make sure that this character sheet hook setting is off you can check all these other settings according to your personal preference but make sure that this one is not selected then we need to go into Chris's premades and there's a lot of different settings for Chris's premades and it can be a little daunting at first the really big one you want to start with is module integration and this is basically saying whether you want to have these different modules be supported big things are going to be the D andd 5V animation sounds I would highly recommend that you check that and same thing with the dice so nice compatibility assum when you're using that these other colorize options will show off in a moment but they are really helpful for looking at a clients to see okay do I have my automation good to go period Then I like having those ticked on because I can see it really easily there's some other options in here if you would like and some of them are dependent upon you having different modules enabled there's also the Homebrew section and the Homebrew section has some special rules in it that you might consider adding in such as the range or unarmed Divine strikes and how magic Missile is rolled so take a look at those these other features you'll notice if you go into your compendiums and you open Chris's prades and you look at different things for example if we drill down into the equipment and wonders item and we look at Boots of Elven kind the descriptions on Chris's pre-made items or Feats or class features or spells Etc are always going to tell you if there's any settings that need to be enabled or anything that needs to be brought in so for example a creature that needs to be in your sidebar and if it's safe to rename Chris's premades checks some things against name some to start with just to see if okay we have a match for this and then others it will need to check that name every single time that you use the effect and that is when it is not safe to rename so pay attention to that for these you could easily just drop these on someone and say okay these are Gomer's shoes or whatever after you have it set up not a problem but this says that it requires the skill patching setting to be enabled so for that make sure you go to your Chris's pre-made settings and then in general that's where some of these broader effects are and you can look down there and then you have the skill patching and it's got a brief description of what it does allowing certain macros to modify your skill checks most of these aren't going to be ticked by default so if you have an issue with your automation then make sure to come in here and check what is going on similarly there are other pieces in here like spells and feats and class features where you can open these up for specific automations for example I booming blade ticked right now and that will power the booming blade automation similarly I would generally recommend that you do these one at a time rather than doing them in bulk but use your own judgment on that especially if you already glance at this you know you're not going to be diving into someone else's automation of it you're going to just be using the christas pre-made one and you know you're going to be using most of these then Fair enough next since we're in the neighborhood we need to go to the D and D Beyond importer the big thing here is the core setup core setup has two really big things and that is your Cobalt cookie this is absolutely required in order to be able to use the D andd Beyond importer Mr primate on the GitHub has instructions and there's also a link to follow manual steps for being able to grab your Cobalt cookie it's basically it's almost like your password for D and D Beyond it stores all the information about what products you actually own and what content you can access so you need to have that to be able to import things you also if you are a patron you should go ahead and put in your detect patreon status if you click on this it will open another web page for you to log into your patreon and authenticate it and if not there's steps for putting in a key to make sure you have your patreon verified so make sure you have those filled in after D and D Beyond is squared away let's take a look at two other modules that you can just leave alone but they add a lot if you do a little bit of work with them so simple calendar is the thing that adds a game clock in the background and it's part of the time that midiq uses to track effects for example if something has a 10-minute effect then is going to use Simple Calendar's game clock to determine when that effect elapses there's another module called times up that we have installed it's a mql requirement that will have things time out based upon combat time but with simple calendar you can just leave it as is or you can use the buttons to bring it up and you can also open up this configuration and there's quick setup for if you're using one of the really popular settings chances are their calendar is in here and if it's not then you can actually go through and you can rename your week days and months and set up your lunar calendars and all of those good things so you can dive really head deep into the World building and small time really helps with integrating that small time introduces a little widget here it is small and it controls the time you can advance the time in chunks which again is helpful for adjudicating you know you are having a conversation with an NPC for a while but you're not actually using real time to represent that conversation so you might need to advance at 20 minutes based on the conversation or the role play going on there you can adjust these step amounts to whatever you want both large and small and then settings that are pretty impactful here are synchronizing sunrise and Sunset and that's going to link it up to your calendar so then you know in the winter you have shorter days in the summer you have longer days and then whether these affect the scene darkness and whether the moon phase affects Darkness as well and how much that impacts I would suggest turning these on immediately if you are really interested in these features if not don't worry even though it says that only applies to new scenes it does also mention that you can change these settings in the scene config by going to the lighting section and then under small time you can adjust that as well it's also useful for determining whether there's global vision or not on a scene after setting up your calendars and time management everything else is kind of personal preference except for our final core setting so if we go into core we need to open up our permission configuration and we need to add some extra permissions to our players if your players are all trusted then you can go off of this column but assuming any of them are using the regular player you need to make sure you have these three settings enabled for warpgate you need to have configure token settings create new tokens and use the file browser these are all things that warpgate which helps manage summonings and other effects it allows it to actually fire when a player uses one of those abilities so make sure you add that in and save one important thing to note here if you get tripped up on some of these settings midiq has a pretty handy troubleshooter it's in early development so this is not going to be a end all Beall source of figuring out what your woses are but it has has some helpful features for example you got a summary of different settings including important things for being able to figure out like okay roll separate attacks per Target is set to false that is also an important setting for Chris's premades so you can use this to double check what settings you have that can have major impacts on your Automation and how it works you got a list of common modules that are used with it and then the problems section can be really helpful for finding these large mass head issues for example if we were to go back to our core and we did not have configure token settings enabled and we went back to the midi section and under problems you'll notice that now there's a warning for warpgate the players don't have permission to configure tokens so this can help you find those big issues that are a quick fix but can be hard to find sometimes just because they're easy to overlook just in the settings so keep that in your back pocket if you're running into issues after configuring those permissions and familiarizing yourself with the different settings for mini quall and Chris's premades everything everything else is pretty much up to your discretion and personal taste on what you want to tweak so feel free to poke around in all of these modules but that concludes the things that we think are strictly necessary to configure before getting started and speaking of getting started with our settings all configured our modules all enabled it is time for us to start fulfilling our automation dreams and we're going to do that first by importing a character from d and Beyond from scratch what better place for a character to start their Journey than this beautiful Airship dock which is again a part of the latest Bailey Wiki release that you can grab on our patreon right now so to create a new character for D and Beyond you simply need to create an actor or create them from your folder I've got a player characters folder here and their name literally does not matter because it's going to be overwritten by the DND dbond section if you don't recognize this sheet this is the Tidy 5e sheet which is one of the modules we installed when you install it and activate it by default that's going to be your default cheat you can configure that and there's different ones for NPCs versus player characters so you can adjust that at your discretion once we have that then we're going to go ahead and click on this D and Beyond button next to the name and this is where we are going to put in the URL for our character so if we just go to our player character on D and D Beyond make sure you grab the whole link copy that and then go back to Foundry we can paste that in at the top and with this URL you can see it's green so that's a character right there and now we're going to have some selections to make all these update things generally speaking you can leave them by default this is what's going to come in you can also use D and D beyond in order to update something as you go so you can choose whether to exclude certain categories of things if you know like we're keeping track of currency only in Foundry I do not care about what it is in D and D Beyond and I don't want to override it then you would untick that Etc then again I would generally leave these things the same and you can choose whether to use icons from the SRD compendium or just leave them to be imported from d and Beyond next for companions for example if you have a lot of summonings you'll need to import the character and then import again to bring in the companions if you are a patron of Mr primates you can update back to D and Beyond so you can use this to send these different categories back to D and Beyond and the important part for our purposes is the active effects tab for this this is generating effects for equipment spells features ET and then we also have the option for Chris's premades module you can easily just hit the apply recommended active effect settings and you can see all these green dots are the required modules that we need and we've got green across the board so that's good and then we're going to go ahead and TI Chris's pre-mades and that's going to fill in any of the gaps here for the most part the last thing is maybe you want to review the advanced setting I don't really worry too much about how these are being replaced but down here at the bottom your players can add their own Cobalt cookies and patreon keys for Mr primate if they are using separate resources from you when that's all squared away go ahead and go to the import characters section and hit start import by default it's going to prompt you for resources if this character has a variety of resources for example this tentacle at the deeps is a fathomless warlock feature that has a limited number of uses and it's going to go on my resource bar I'm just choosing where it goes I'm happy with leaving it at the default and now we have our character allbr in and we'll notice that our attributes are in and our proficiencies are in everything is good to go the only thing is we don't have artwork but that's because we didn't have it on D and D Beyond so I going to update Ventress and be right back all right now Ventress is in here and we're looking good so let's take a quick little tour so we have all of our inventory from d and Beyond note that if you didn't have things equipped you probably need to adjust that for your character sheet here and one of the reasons why we like the Tidy 5 sheet is if you go back to this Main page your favorites will show up there so you can have a quick access that's also why we have a token Hut in terms of equipment he doesn't have any crazy magical items so there's not actually a lot that's going to be added here we'll notice that this is colorized thanks to that setting from Chris's pre-mades and it indicates that we do have an automated animation ready to go for that particular piece if we go to our spell book though then we can actually see Chris's premades in action if we edit the item we can see that we have the green icon for this med pack this means that there was an Automation and it's linked and if you go ahead and left click it you have the option to update or replace it and then you have the option to configure it if I say update replace this isn't going to functionally change this at all because we brought it in from Chris's premades but if you hit yes it does tell you what it needs enabled in the settings for it to work so if there's anything that you replace or you add it will tell you beforehand and and basically Chris's premades in the compendium is going to have that this information but it's also cross referencing it with things for the SRD that do have full description so it we'll fill that in then the configure option is going to have different numbers of options and different kinds of options depending upon the type of effect you're dealing with here so in this instance the booming blade only has the option for different colors of Animation but you can configure that as well and then automated animations is not on here because the booming blade automation itself is going to kind of take over from automated animations so there's that you can review this with eldrid blast Etc and you can also see the Dae is colorized here and that is actually a default Dae setting just indicating that there is Dae here and you can modify things at your ledure but this is a quick way to look at a glance and tell what's automated and what's not if we head over to the feature section we can also check out any additional automation that's here so if you want to look at say the tentacle of the deeps we can see that there is a Chris's pre-made setup for it and for this one you can see an example of a slightly larger bit of configuration so here you can put in file paths for custom tokens and avatars if they're going to end up in the combat tracker don't worry about that if they're not and then a custom name if you have one in mind if you're not sure if something should have an automation for example we have Steady Aim does have the Dae here but if for whatever reason you weren't sure you didn't have something colorized you couldn't see then there is a really handy resource that's actually available in the form of the midi quall Wiki here this has been put together by moto moto and I think some Community collaborators but there are a few different pre-mades lists here and this breaks down where you can get automation for it there is a code up here at the top for the different Suites and then little breakdown up at the top with the legend for what each of those stand for for example the pne's items in script showcase is a channel within Tim's Discord and that's linked right here as well and then you can see what covers these different features here so you can scroll down and you can look over to the side or you can use the search function with contrl f to find it and you can see what's covered so an important thing here is Chris's premades and midi SRD actually conflict you'll notice in the vast majority of cases that midi SRD and CPR actually are both in the same column or something's only in the midi SRD then there's usually something in another column that takes care of it so again don't run midi SRD with CPR CPR rolls it in and conflicts so just stick to the other columns and ignore the midi SRD column in terms of figuring out what's got Automation and what doesn't having done a quick tour of the character sheet to make sure everything looks good and you familiarize yourself with the different controls let's go ahead and test things out I'm going to go ahead and drop in Ventress here and there is his token and we'll go ahead and give him an enemy of a bandit so to show off some of these features we're going to go ahead and open up this argon combat HUD as that's our combat HUD of choice today with argon if whatever reason you don't have a weapon down here just go to your sheet and make sure you drag it into one of these options here and then just open and close argon and make sure to click on that and you should be good to go so to show off some things I'm going to give this Bandit a lot of health because he is going to be a bit of a punching bag and let's test out the booming blade interaction one of the things with midi qual is you have this option to force targets with the full automation Suite so even though I haven't selected this Bandit already I'm going to click on him to Target it and we can also see that the levels calculator here has the no cover option and we'll see that booming blade automatically used my Rapier and it dealt the damage and everything great for me let's see what happens if we have multiple viable weapons equipped now if I attempt to use booming blade we choose between what equipped weapons we have so if you're main handing a Rapier and offhand a dagger for whatever reason you want to use the offhand you have that option as well and again on target the levels autocover calculator is going to give you a message in the chat and then let's check out what some look like if I attempt to use this tentacle summon of the deep it's going to tell me this automation requires the following sidebar actors sidebar actors are used by CPR and as templates for creating different summons so we need the spectral tentacle if we go into our companion packs for Chris's pre-mades then under the actor section we've got CPR Summit you can optionally bring in all of these if you know you're going to use all of them but for my case we're just going to bring in the spectral tentacle and don't worry about the spectral tentacle having a placeholder image it's all going to be generated from that configuration so when we go to use this we use the Ability and we get this nice little preview so now I've added this and you can see with visual effects indicators that I have a way to get rid of this up here I can end it at will and I've got my tentacle buddy hanging out here now I'm going to go ahead and attack this Bandit with the tentacle of the Deep's attack and we'll notice that the tentacle of the Deep's ability is one going to be down here under this section tentacle of the deeps one of the modules that we're leveraging is custom character sheet sections and you can basically just add text down here to create individual categories so that you can organize your sheets more deeply instead of it just being a passive ability or an active ability it's going to be specifically the tentacle of the deeps ability we can then copy and paste that so then our summon and our attack are always going to be together but reviewing how the ability Works basically we can create a tentacle at a point we can see and then we can make an attack with it as a melee spell attack and as a bonus action on subsequent turns we can move it and keep attacking and it does a d8 of Cal damage and then it also slows people down so when we look at this this went ahead and rolled the melee spell attack our spellcasting ability modifier is seven and it applied cold damage and if we look at this here Bandit we can see that the Bandit has a temporary effect of 6 seconds because that's the duration of a round and if you want to open him up and look at the effects we can see that this is reducing his movement so it all works beautifully and the only thing we had to do was put in a file path for the token and it's ready to go there's one other thing to note though that you'll see that it says we have plus two AC cover here and this is why I was recommending we either turn off tokens causing Collision or we turn on Allied because Chris's prades doesn't automatically know what disposition the token is going to be when you summon it it has all of them set to neutral because your enemies may also summon fairies or Woodland creatures or something so you may want those to be neutral but for this how Chris prades is doing this attack it's coming from Ventress but then Chris prades is changing the location that Ventress is attacking from to wherever the tentacle is to then calculate cover which is all well and good however the tentacle is listed as neutral by default meaning that it's going to assume half cover because we have the whole tokens create cover if you double right click on this and you change them to Friendly and we make this attack again you're able to successfully attack and not get the cover penalty so if you know for a fact that only your player characters are going to be using this tentacle from the deeps or only your enemies are then what you can do is you can come into this sidebar character and on the Prototype token change the token disposition to Friendly and the same logic applies for if only enemies are going to be use a certain summon and you're positive of that then you can make them hostile and then you'll avoid the cover situation or again just disable the whole tokens cause cover but I wanted to call that out because it was something that was very confusing for a little bit until I spent some time figuring it out but there you go this is actually a somewhat complex character to automate in terms of going through all of their abilities even though they don't have a very expensive of Spellbook they still have a lot going on and for example if I attack with my Rapier and I'm a swashbuckler it's going to even ask me do I want to use sneak attack and I can choose to say yes to that and then I will just automatically add my sneak attack so there's a lot of different pieces here that would be kind of a pain to set up um if you were going through all of these individually and it has been done in a matter of seconds once I had all of my things set up so this is a great way for your players to have those interesting builds those complex effects and be able to use them very smoothly in combat because we know what the abilities do but sometimes the bookkeeping of counting out how many dice you're going to use can be a little much or making sure that when you have a larger party of say six people you can keep track of oh this guy is slowed still for this turn or that guy has disadvantage it's all being automatically applied for you and it's really easy again with the booming blade if I attack then it's going to again give me the option to sneak attack and we'll even see that this guy has the booming blade effect on him so if he moves he's going to get the question did the Bandit move willingly and he did yes so it's going to automatically apply booming blade there's a lot of different things here that uh again while players understand how they work you understand how they work it can be wonderfully freeing to no longer have to micromanage and keep all kinds of notes or have to remember everything that's going on and you can focus on the narrative and story of the combat instead and so that's really the power here next we're going to go ahead and dive into updating some characters whether we brought them in without automation earlier or we already brought them in with some Automation and we're going to be overhauling them for Chris's premades now that we've brought in a brand new character let's take a look at updating a older one we're going to start with my friend Gomer here and this guy is an artificer and he was brought in with d and d Beyond however we did not enable any of the automations for this so absolutely nothing is automated you can see that he too has booming blade but this is showing yellow you can update individual items by clicking on this and hitting update replace and then when it's done you'll notice that now it's green and it should be working as intended but when you've got this expansive of a character if you brought it in with the beyond what I would just recommend doing is clicking D and D Beyond and we're going to go ahead and basically update this guy so we don't need to bring in any extras we're not going to update D andd Beyond we're going to go ahead and make sure all of our active effects are selected here we don't need to use well actually select not to display this resource dialog because we want to keep it the way it is and then things that we need to change we can honestly get rid of name HP hit dice bio languages and just stick to the actual meat and potatoes here and then if we start import we can go ahead and take a look at the spell book now and this new booming blade has been properly automated you can also see this magic Missile which we didn't touch earlier has the Automation and it is good to go with the green color you'll also notice that there are some that say Dae and these are automated pieces and you can go ahead and edit these if you would like to but for the most part you can leave those alone and basically if you see the green bar up at the top that means it's got an automation that's already been set up for you and it is ready to roll so now this character is also perfect and ready for action so we will test him out in a combat later for a simpler character or one that we know already has the other automations for example if we already had Dae midi qual and the like from D and D Beyond but we didn't have Chris's pre-made yet the update process is even more simple we can take this barbarian from hell that Colby designed at the D4 Network and then Joby actually showed us how to create in Foundry in his video earlier this month within this he already brought in with all the Automation and then he updated armor of agius to use Chris's premades instead of just the the default automation that's brought in from D and D Beyond but we've already got the Dae and the midi Etc automation on here we just need to get the Chris's premades in we can even see if we scroll down here to the genie wrath that there is an automation available for Chris's premades rather than going through and checking every single one to see if it has Chris's pre-made integration you can also click up here on the character sheet to click the medical bag here for Chris's premades and then this will just apply all of the automations we select yes the actor update is complete and it's also going to let us know what was updated so we have armor of agathist the genius vessel and rage all of those have now been set up for use with Chris's prates we even see that for any of these particular animations that we want to customize and those nice green dots there so we are all ready to rock the final piece of setting up your games automation before you actually start running combats is of course setting up your enemies there's a few different options for this since your players are so heavily automated you could easily just use the regular midi quall handling of saving throws and damage applications and hit checks and just deal with the rest as it comes but if you want it fully automated then maybe you pick and choose on specific enemies the more complicated ones that have those extra effects and do them as you come you can open up and use the Chris's pread option in order to apply all the automations you have available for it or you can go through and you can manually select these to update and configure them or bring in the actions from the side the ladder may be particularly useful if you're home brewing creatures and just stacking different features on something but if you want to have a nice large library of fully automated creatures ready to go in your compendiums then we'll need to turn to the D and D Beyond muncher now to use this you do have to be a patron of Mr primates in order to bring in all of these things but if you hit the muncher you can then select this use effects from Chris's pre-mades module this is going to help bring in everything else and tie it all together then you can optionally include any of these other pieces so from there you'll first need to actually bring in spells rather than bringing in mod monsters seems a little counterintuitive but since the monsters reference the Spells and some of the features we'll need to go ahead and do that so go ahead and spell Munch this is going to bring in all of the spells that you have on D and D Beyond and it can take some time I don't even have that much content on D and D Beyond but it can add up so maybe set aside a little trunk of time where you're not going to need to be actively working on your world for this when you're done importing your spells it'll tell you that it's finished and we can move on to the monsters from here you can now go ahead and select any additional options you want for example if you want them to retain biographies or you want to change artwork Etc you can make those selections there and then finally when you're ready we can go ahead and monster Munch and this is going to similarly take a good chunk of time as it's going to bring in all of those monsters for you when you've completed munching your monsters you can go into this D&D beond folder here and we can see all of the monsters in here and you can search for them Etc so I can bring in this AER for example and he's not going to look quite the same as these other guys but here we are and now he actually has all of his different pieces automated with Dae or with Chris's pre-mades depending so and we can compare that to his original Budd IES and they're not quite as automated here so you can use that to update things and a reminder that you'll need to go in and replace any of these that you've already placed into your Maps additionally with that munching you're going to have a bunch of spells in your ddb spells folder some of this is a little redundant as you already have a bunch of them in your CPR folders and you're already going to be applying those and you're already using D and Beyond importer to bring in your characters but if you're going to be slapping them onto people this can be helpful now that we have our player characters and our enemies let's go ahead and run a combat so we've got venturous and Gomer here with some Bandits and a bandit Captain we'll go ahead and toggle the combat State as we would normally with Foundry then we've got our beautiful combat Carousel here and we can use that to roll all instead of having to open up our combat section and we're going through here and we've got our initi sh determined and now we can just hit the play button over here to start the combat off our Bandit Captain can go first and attack with his citar towards Goomer and since he's got multiattack he'll go ahead and do those as well and then we can just pass the turn with this convenient button right here on Argon it's a common feature on a lot of different Huds but it's really nice to have then we've got Goomer and Goomer has a whole lot of stuff going on over here he is a artificer that has Thunder gauntlets that on a punch will cause disadvantage on attacks against anyone but him so if he moves over here and helps out venturous a bit go ahead and punch this guy and of course sometimes people just die and that's that as an artificer he also has two attacks so we are going to go ahead and smash back another guy as well and we can see that this Bandit Captain has the ability to Parry so it's going to prompt us for this reaction if this role was reversed it would also prompt the player to use that reaction if they had one so we can go ahead and do that unfortunately it's not enough for the Bandit Captain end the turn and Ventress can take his movement over here and another convenient part of argon is it's keeping track of how many squares we've moved so another handy thing for reducing bookkeeping and we'll do our classic booming blade and no sneak attack required on this one but maybe we'll go ahead and summon a tentacle of the deeps and since we can attack at the same time we notice that this one is friendly so we shouldn't have any cover issues we can go ahead and attack this Bandit Captain's already used his reaction we can set up further automations for that but it can be useful to keep track of separately so now this Bandit Captain is in all sorts of pain and for the captain to demonstrate the power of the Thunder gauntlets he'll go ahead and try to take a couple of swings at Ventress and we can see that he rolled with disadvantage fortunately still getting in a hit but that's no concern here we've got all of these beautiful animations playing as well which is another great feature of having the automated animations module to bring that home why don't we go ahead and cast a spell and show what that looks like so we've cast as spells we've run our combat really nice and beautifully and if we end the turn remove those templates although they're already automatically removed we've gone ahead and used some pretty complex abilities actually we've done reaction pieces we've done a booming blade ability that's actually been adjudicated with the movement and thunder gauntlets adding the disadvantage automatically on not one but two attacks although they didn't help in this case and we've summoned a really cool creepy eyeball tentacle here to assist in our battle and this was really fast yes there would have been player decision- making here but it is still so much faster than if we're going through manually and I think that's the beauty of having this level of automation here but let's take one more look at all of this great Automation in another setting another great feature about this setup is that it even works incredibly in 3D we've got a much tougher opponent for Our Heroes here so so we'll go ahead and add them to combat roll everybody's initiative and see how they Faire you can see there's also a really nice hover distance ability here I have everyone selected so it's a little convoluted but I can see exactly how far away someone is for example Center on Center is 30.4 ft to get to the bayor and I can drag around and see how far everyone is with 3D canvas when I'm ready I can go ahead and make my Target and I am going to actually use a bonus action here and show off another really great integration and that's going to be the hex Bell and this actually asks me what ability I should give him disadvantage on he seems pretty tough but maybe we can outmaneuver him so we'll choose next there we' also got these fantastic spell effects and of course we'll use our classic booming Blade with the Rapier and we'll use sneak attack because we are flash Buckler and we get to do that for free and you can see we have all of our damage calculated in here and you can look at how this is broken up so it's really easy to run a combat with this particular setup again swashbuckler rackish audacity silliness we can take a few steps back even and not provoke an attack of opportunity but that might not be enough to save poor Ventures here it's now the baylord turn and he's going to take a step forward to attack Ventress and it's very simple to just hit T to Target or wait until after we've determined the attack to go and wow lucky break for ventures here but he doesn't have too many chances for this and that is a big hit you can see there's glorious animations even in 3D here and we'll finish off with our whip here wow very lucky breaks here for Ventress G's turn we'll demonstrate a really beautiful integration of magic Missile so if we cast magic Missile and we even upcast it we can select as many targets as we want so we'll go ahead and even though it doesn't really make sense to hold shift and T as you do it and you cast the spell we can then assign how many darts are going where so we're going to send four at the bayor and zero at venturous just to demonstrate that you can have the multiple targets and you can show where they're going now the animation here is going to shoot at all Targets regardless but it's pretty neat to see it going through in all of those directions and that's going to include our technical demonstration and our tutorial on this ultimate automation suite for D and 5e on Foundry VT you'll just have to wonder on if Gomer and Ventress managed to make it out of this one I hope that this has shown you how easy it can be to introduce an incredible amount of automation to your 5e game on Foundry it may seem a little intimidating with the amount of modules at first but really in terms of setup it's not a lot that you actually need to do on an individual basis once you get it set up you're more or less on fire and forget mode and it makes your combats smoother snappier and also visually stunning without you having to do as much bookkeeping as a GM or as a player and this allows us to focus more on the tactics and strategy of combat and the role playing and the descriptions and Narrative of the combat rather than having to bookkeep things as much this level of automation may not be for everyone but you can apply these principles to find what's the right level of automation for you and your group once again I hope that you found this helpful if you have questions about automation or anything you need to troubleshoot let us know feel free to stop by the Discord Additionally you can check out Tim pne's Discord and the Chris's pre-made Discord in the description below lots of helpful folks in all three of these communities some with more specific expertise than others but all fantastic resources to go check out if you need additional help if you're interested in learning more about any of the modules we've covered specifically we've also got a playlist for module showcases and module tutorials that may be of interest to you again this has been Zephyr with the bayy wiki Channel if you enjoyed this video then subscribe to keep up with all of our latest videos and consider becoming a patron not only do you support the channel but you also gain access to all the modular systems and scenes that we've ever made including all of these brand new maps that are out today for Foundry VT again it's been Zephyr thank you so much for watching happy gaming and have a good one

Channel: Baileywiki

Views: 12,173

Keywords: dnd, dnd5e, fonderie vtt, foundry dnd 5e, foundry modules, foundry tutorial, foundry vtt, foundry vtt dnd 5e, foundry vtt modules, foundryvtt, foundryvtt best modules, foundryvtt combat, foundryvtt tutorial, fundição vtt, fundición vtt, gießerei vtt, gießereivtt, rpg tools, vtt foundry, vtt, foundry vtt tutorial, foundry, foundry vtt review, d&d, foundry vtt 2021, foundry vtt features, foundry vtt modules d&d

Id: fP84agllbJQ

Length: 54min 4sec (3244 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023