Module Tutorial: MidiQOL Part 1. Ultimate Combat Automation in Foundry VTT (dnd5e)

[Music] hey guys you're looking at a combat encounter in in my actual live game the game that i play with my players and you know you're seeing uh some flashing animations from jb 2a and there's actually another few modules at work here that make my battles go quickly and you're also seeing effects that get applied attacks and damages resolving automatically even when there's complicated things like damage resistance or distance and other factors that you know frankly for me as a gm i don't ever seem to get straight and including like remembering things like available reactions like a shield spell and but what you don't realize necessarily just by looking at this is that one module is really powering all of these other modules these effects and all this automation and that's midi qol so this is the first video of a three-part series where i actually interview the midi ql developer tim pozney in a sort of a conversation slash tutorial slash demo that actually spanned a couple of hours so in it we're going to we're going to deep dive into midi ql including its functions and also what modules of powers and how you can combine all these things for maximum effect and there's probably a dozen at least modules that it that it powers and and when you understand it you you can not only speed up your combat but you can give your players some some quality of life improvements but also just leave them gasping at a vtt experience that i think you can only really get with foundry and and some of these modules like like midi ql so uh so with that let's jump into it great so hey everybody i am excited to show this to you today i've got on on this session here tim posney he's a developer and if you're not aware he's the developer behind midi qol and uh so hey tim how you doing hi good thanks great so i i've been really wanting to do this for a while because i tell you what i've been using midi ql since before it was midiql was what used to be mini qol or what was the predecessor and i've been using it so long that i honestly don't know what stock foundry does it does not do anymore okay every single instance i've got i've got midi cue all installed but it's become this whole thing and it works with all these other modules and it does so much that uh you know people ask all the time when they get into like automating foundry like what what is this thing and it's like pretty big like it you know it just accomplishes a lot and so this session is about going into detail about what midiql does what it's meant to do you know common maybe common issues that people might might have that you want to let them know about here in the video but i tell you what as far as like one of my core modules this is it but even i don't really understand everything that it's doing and why it's doing it so thanks for making the time this this should be it should be fun now before you jump into showing us some things it can do like you know why why did you make this module and sure who's it really for it's for people really it's designed to help automate combat um i hate having to once a dice is rolled do all the ads think about all the special conditions that might happen whether this particular attack should have advantage because your opponent is a an undead and you've got a special feature that allows you to do that whether you've got immunity to particular damage types and remembering to apply that when the when it's done all those sorts of things that make calculating stuff in dnd tedious i wanted to take away also the group i play with really doesn't like having to press too many buttons on screen so they really like to be able to press one button to do an attack and have everything resolved for them and that's really the sort of the basis of the motivation well i tell you what that's probably why i use this i have young players i play with my sons and some of them are younger than others but it is really hard to get them to know how to start calculating things and you know just the fact this takes care of it for all of us yeah it's my life easier well interesting enough i've got older players but the motivation's the same yeah now is this i'm a dnd5e guy that's the game system that we play in is does this work with other game systems no it's only d5e okay great i thought that might be the case because it's so rule specific and you're looking up all these d specific attributes and correct decisions on them okay great all right well i would love to see this thing in action it looks like you've got something prepared for us yep i've got an accounter set up it's actually got players from my game so it's got the things that they have and the sorts of abilities characters might normally get so if i just i've got an encounter set up i use combat utility belt to hide the names of the other creatures so you'll see and then encounter the baddies are marked as unknown creature by the way what's this artwork that i'm looking at this is a great little map all right this is a battle map from venitus maps who's on patreon and has lots of good maps that you can use some of them quite simple some complicated sometimes when you've got just a random encounter you actually want a fairly simple map so this is just one i pulled up i've looked at a lot of uh vanities maps or however you pronounce it and they're amazing really a ton of assets in fact i'll link to it in the video description yeah i'm pretty happy with it i use a lot of different map assets i must say um yours obviously but a variety of others as well and there's just so much good artwork available that you can do anything you want i also use moolinet to bring in scenes pre-configured and everything which i'd also suggest is a huge time saver a lot more than that yeah it's great so this scene's pretty simple i've got a bunch of player characters as i said one of them is flying so you can see over the over the wall this guy here you'll see when i select the other character it disappears from you and the walls come and that's using better walls i think it is which is actually really nice and the advantage is that midi understands about wall heights if they're present so this guy for example could target an attack the baddie that i'm highlighting but this guy couldn't a cause he can't see it but because it goes through a wall it'll get blocked but let's just have a look at um i thought maybe it's worthwhile just starting with the settings because that tends to be quite daunting for people so yeah the mitiqual settings confuse a lot of people probably with good reason because there's a lot of them there are three tabs that are particularly important the first one is gm and that configures how roles done by the gm are going to behave there are a couple of concepts there's the auto roll attack and what that means is if you click on the icon for a character so for example if i clicked on warhammer that will roll the attack and then skip the dialogue sorry we will roll the attack if fast forward is enabled then that will skip the dialogue for whether you want advantage and disadvantage in my game i always use all of those disabled because i trusted to get most of the conditions correct great so enable and disable fast forward from this screen also it looks like correct okay you can just see it here where the mouse is fast forward attack and damage there's a similar tab for players because they have their own settings so in some games p people like to roll dice and they like to click on buttons but gm's typically want things to be fast and easy for them so you have a separate set of settings for players then the next one which is the biggest and most complicated screen is the workflow now the way midi works is when you click that attack button or the item button it launches a workflow that will go through a sequence of steps so the first thing it does is work out who's targeted typically those that's the creatures that you target by double clicking or single clicking if you jam that that mummy lord is targeted alternatively you can have an area of respect effect spill like a fireball when you place the template there's a setting to allow midi to auto target all of the people within the template yes great so that's here and it says always ignore defeated or walls block so you've got a choice as to how those that template placement works the next section is called specials it's probably in the wrong space because it happens generally at the end but it covers things that normally you wouldn't see in the dnd game so the first one is macros to call when an item is used and i'll talk about those a bit later auto apply effects to targets that's the big one because what that does is it says if you've got an item with an effect on it when the target is hit it will apply those effects to the target so let's just do an example roll so what that's done if you have a look over here in the chat log it's done an attack it's adjudicated that it hits sailor because the role was above his armor class and it's then prompted for a saving throw i'm using monk's token bar here to prompt players for their saving throws you can also use let me roll that for you and it's up to you which module you prefer you can even have it completely automated so that there's no prompt at all so let's say i'll do the saving throw fascinating see i'm using amongst token bar and i didn't even know i could do this with it yeah so what happened is he did the saving throw and he failed so what's happened to say ella is is had the rotting fist active effect applied which is rotting fist which happens it's just a placeholder that i created it could be any active effect that you want and in fact this has got an extra feature which is is one of the other bits here you'll see that rotting fist doesn't actually have any active effects defined at all but what what i do have said here is apply convenient effects and this is another integration that works really nicely convenient effects is a module that defines all sorts of effects that can apply to creatures all sorts of spell effects all of the standard conditions or ones that you create yourself and what i've done is created an effect called rotting fist and so when the attack hit and the creature saved it automatically went to convenient effects and got the rotting fist effect wow so tim what kind of setup was required to get here did you just have to install modules did you have to in uh you know i had to i installed modules and then i had to create the effect for rotting fist within convenient effects so for the most part those effects were created in the standard module but you just created a special one is that correct okay so let me show you for example a haste spill can you up cast it so you can target two or is it smart enough it's not smart enough to know about upcasts um that increased numbers of targets so you'd actually have to change the spell to have multiple targets noisy that's on the list it's actually quite complicated to get the right information is it possible to just apply the haste effect to the second target just absolutely so you can use convenient effects great so you can just do that wonderful the problem with doing that is that the haste spell created on the haste effect created on this guy has a duration that's been set from the spa the spell i'm not sure if the convenient effect uh convenient effect does as well so yeah that's absolutely fine great you're going to talk about durations and what's powering those as well right sure i can do that now or i can i'll probably come back to that because it applies in a few other areas so if that's sort of side stepped us into effects which one of the useful features hits you can have many auto check hits everyone can see the result or just the gm or don't check it at all if you say don't check that basically stops the workflow there and then all right then there's reactions this is fairly new if you have items that have a reaction available then midi will prompt you to do the reaction so for example tim by the way when you say items you mean any item spell or fee correct okay anything that's got reactions set in its activation conditions so let's have a look for example at the shield spell so you see this is marked as activation cost one reaction midi looks for those and if it's um prepared and it has a reaction type then it will prompt you to cast it if you're hit so let's for example do a hit from this guy uh we'll do the rotting fist again oh i've got two go sorry what happened then is that it warned me that the target i was attacking was out of range because i hadn't remembered to target the new guy so that's another feature we'll come back to it's in the optional rules but you can check quite a few things that people forget about by using those optional rules so what it did it blocked the attack from happening and so if you were going to consume spell slots or anything it saves you wasting that okay so i missed it's a problem with attacking a guy with really high armor class okay this time it hit so it says he's hit by running foot fist and can use reaction the attack roll total was 28 and you can figure you can configure whether you want the player to see that or not because this will pop up on the player who controls luther's screen it's popping up on the same screen because i'm gm so everything's happening in the same spot so let's say i say yes i want to cast a shield spell and you'll see what happened is that the 28 was wrong love it now he missed because luther's now had the shield spell cast on him so you can see that he's updated and his armor class has gone up by the appropriate five from the shield spell so it's 32 so the attack missed instead of hitting is that what's causing that um animated shield it turns out it's actually the convenient effect okay so you've got a timed effect that that's going to last one round for the shield and it has a special so convenient effects can also apply visual things like this not just the tag okay so let's just go through and have a look what the um convenient effect is in active effects if you want to be able to look at it you actually have to duplicate it as custom interesting so the effects that it's got an ac dot bonus which is just a completely standard um dnd 5e effect so it adds fire to armor class and the second one is special in that it's a dynamic active effects option called macro.token magic i don't want to go too much into what dae does because there's a lot but basically it lets you in apply a token magic effect to the target so i also need to install token magic if you want those effects to work yes okay and then i need once i do that i also do i need to also import all of those filters into my world from the macro no dae looks at all the predefined filters and makes them available and you can see here in this field it's actually got a list of all the ones that it knows about oh good that's amazing okay point and click we're gonna have to do a whole other session on dae because that's some real eye candy but okay great so so far we've we've installed convenient active effects token magic effects and most of this is working out in the box once they get installed so you need dynamic active effects now the other thing that i'll show you is the automatic expiry so let's have a look here so this was cast on an arbitrary player's turn let's just advance it to luther's turn who's got the shield if it says one round normally it would expire at the start of ebay's turn but you'll see that this effect there we go special duration expires at the start of the target's next turn in combat so instead of asking for a whole round it should expire at the start of luthier's turn which it did now that was a dae setting right there that we were looking at that particular one is from another module called time's up right anything anytime you want to expire thing effects or anything in fact based on time or combat rounds you need time's up so that's the module that handles all the expiry of things on a time basis and tim what we're talking about here and why we're pausing on some of these modules is you know you've built this in such a way that other module creators can interact with make qol and so to really maximize what midi can do we're talking about some of these other modules that you know can handle some of these major functions yeah um to be fair there's a little bit of a cheat there because i wrote time's up and dynamic active effects as well okay so it's not surprising that they play nicely together there you go but for example convenient effects is a completely different author but uses a lot of the features for applying things so there are lots of so you'll see that it's got effects and it's relying on midi qual effects to have those effects so for example it provides disadvantage on ability checks uses a dnd flag initiative disadvantage so it's bringing together things from different places we saw that it uses dae effects as well so there's quite a lot of interaction going on between the various modules and so is it fair that midi actually enables more flags and things to be manipulated a lot more flags yes than core foundry okay yep so it has in fact i'll show you it's a little bit daunting but so if you look here here are all the um mini qual specific flags that there are and there's a lot so there's things like advantage and disadvantage auto failing or auto succeeding attacks skills critical hits a pile of things they're almost all sorry i should be saying they're all documented but occasionally i forget uh in the readme or there's a spreadsheet that has all the flags detailed as well i would recommend people who are just getting into the module do have a look at the readme it's got a lot of stuff in it quite a few people contributed and it's reasonably up to date i'll i'll love to i'd love to link the readme in the spreadsheet from the video description if you think that'd be sure okay so we'll end that session uh right there for today uh tune in for the next part two of the three part series where we uh go into more of the settings of midi qol and talk about some of the other things that you can do with it actually show you guys some of that stuff as well

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Id: 0ImgwRlGyV4

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022