This DM Tool hits the Sweet Spot!

for years now i've been trying to find just the right tool to help me run d d games online i can totally see the value in some of the fairly robust options like fantasy grounds and roll 20 foundry vtt etc but personally i wanted something simpler i wanted the digital equivalent of rolling out a map and throwing some miniatures on google slides actually worked pretty well you can drag in some maps and tokens and players could join in and actually move things around but i kind of wanted a fog of war option to obscure unexplored parts of a dungeon now photoshop kind of worked for that i could paint on a fog of sorts but this made it tricky for me to actually see what i was erasing and i as the gm had to move things around for the players dungeon fog was pretty great for a while but you can only use maps that were created in their program so while i was pondering all this and preparing for my own online campaign my good friend matt click introduced us to owlbear rodeo in the provokers game and i couldn't believe it it was exactly what i had been searching for quick and easy for both players and gm it was pretty much everything i needed and nothing more also it's totally free so in this video we'll be taking a look at owlbear rodeo hi everyone nate here from wasd 20. before we get going here i want to note that this video is not sponsored i have no affiliation with albert rodeo and i have never even spoken with the developers i'm honestly just really excited about this tool however this video is patron fueled thanks to these amazing people for supporting the channel and making videos like this possible patrons also get access to weekly live map drawing streams campaign diaries for my ice wind dale campaign and more so go check it all out over at patreon.com wasd so here we are at owlbear.rodeo pretty simple menu here you've got this getting started bit here with some of the basics as well as a more detailed how-to page right there which i actually found to be a little bit out of date for the latest version you've got a start game option join game and then you've got some ways you can support them including patreon which is fairly new which is great it's completely free piece of software here or web application i guess and it's really cool that you know you can still support them even though there's nothing to buy here there's no premium account or anything like that so we're going to go ahead and start a game i'm not going to use a password because i'm not too concerned about security honestly and you know i'm just sharing links with my players usually so we'll go ahead and start this as that loads the first thing you'll notice is it's completely blank there's no map in here so we just need to click on this select map button here and then we can go ahead and choose one of our maps these are the default maps that come in aloe bear rodeo and these are all maps that i have loaded in here it's as simple as just dragging and dropping into here super easy so we can go ahead and look at this one notice that when i open this up this is my map from last game session in my icewinddale campaign and you'll notice that it saved all our tokens and everything here so that's really nice it actually saves all that stuff now how does owl wrote albert rodeo save you can't log in there's no cloud save or anything like that basically it is just storing this information i think in your browser cache and um you have a lot of storage i think it's like 600 gigabytes before you use it all up so you can add tons and tons of stuff but understand that you know if you go to a different computer you're not gonna be able to access that there's just nothing you can do there and when i had to reformat my computer a couple months ago i lost all my stuff fortunately it's really quick and easy to add a lot of stuff very quickly so i didn't have any trouble it took me like five or ten minutes to add my stuff back in go ahead and load a new map here let's take a look at this this one i got from a two minute table top pretty nice map and you can see that i do have some custom tokens here and i also have the default token so my custom tokens are all on the top here these are all tokens that i have loaded in if we hit the plus button you can see again just like with the maps you can just drag and drop them in here so these are all tokens that i have loaded some of these this one i drew in photoshop this one i found somewhere a lot of these tokens i have made using token stamp editor which i will put a link to in the video description it's a really nice little tool and then these ones right here from my player characters we made in hero forge so with the hero forge pro account you can get a token editor in addition to just being able to make your own characters so that's really cool they've got lots of great borders and other stuff the default tokens are totally fine so don't feel like you need to import your own tokens if you're just wanting something super quick and easy go with the default tokens once you have your tokens in here you have several options when you click on them you can add a ring around them you can actually label them so let's go ahead and label grukkvar here there we go which is actually something newer that i didn't know you could do i'll probably be using that in the future because especially when i'm streaming i think it's handy for our viewers to know who's who uh you can see that this one is lightened a little bit and that's because i hid that one from my players so i can turn the eyeball back on and now that one is visible let's get rid of the ring around it there we go now up here with my bores i actually made a red one just to show like hey this one is the boss this one's a little bit bigger than the rest or maybe you could say this one is partially maimed or something like that so you can also color code those or you can label them i often do label my monsters because it just helps me keep track of them so i'll show you the let's see mountain climb map here and you can see that on this one so durgar1 durgar2 and durgar boss right there in addition to labeling or adding a border you can increase the size if you'd like you can also rotate them and you can lock them if they're ones that you don't want to be able to move now speaking of moving your tokens players can move any token that's out here unless you as the gm have it locked so let's talk about how you can add players and what they can do if we click on the pencil here you can see you can name yourself by default it will give you a dnd monster name i think but you can change that you can also click the little plus person button here and you can invite your players so this code they could use on bear rodeo's website or you could just give them the direct link which is what i usually do just copy that paste it into our zoom chat or whatever and then my players can load up right into the map super quick and easy i was also really quite surprised how mobile friendly the site is like it's pretty easy to just navigate around the map and drag tokens around and everything now i have had a player one time who just couldn't get in the game and we couldn't figure out what was going on and i was also playing in a game with matt click at one point where we just couldn't see the map the players could not see the map and he figured out that it was probably because the file size was just too large the dimensions of the map were too large and albert rodeo was having trouble loading it so once your players are in just be aware that they can move any token but you know just like if i were to put a battle map out on the table put a bunch of miniatures out there i trust my players that they're just gonna move their own token all right it's not a big deal i don't think you need that much control to keep them from moving other tokens if you want to get rid of a token you can just start dragging it and a little trash can appears at the bottom and you can just drag it down there and voila it's gone let's take a look next at the fog tool here which is really handy if you want to hide certain parts of the map that your players have not explored yet you can click on the fog tool now there are many ways you can add fog you can brush it on like this with the brush tool i'm going to ctrl z to undo you can add rectangles of fog like this or you can use the pen tool and you can actually kind of like hit the vertices of where you want the fog to go that could especially be handy when you get into some funky shapes now for me i'm just going to fog the whole map up here we're going to use the rectangle tool and we're just going to drag it from here all the way down to here make the whole map foggy now if we go to the player view with this eyeball here players can't see anything so i'm covering up the whole so i've covered up the whole map and now if i click on the scissors i can selectively erase certain parts i can erase by selecting the rectangle tool and i can just go in here and get rid of this and get rid of this because certainly my players would be able to see these areas we can click on the eyeball again and see exactly what the players would see you can also use the brush tool if you just want to brush that fog out of a room like that or you can use the pen tool once again to select certain areas and i could actually see this coming in pretty handy if you want to kind of get their point of view so if you want to say you can see into this room but only for example this much of the room is visible to you and that can be kind of a cool way to do that now i'm just going to click on the eraser here and i can erase all the fog and just get it out of there there we go you also got this drawing tool here so you can make little drawings like let's say one of my players is going to cast a bonfire and i just want to draw it real quick i don't have a fire token i can just grab this tool and make a little fire right there it's rough but it gets the basic message across of what's going on here you can also use this one right here let's say that my player wants to throw a flask of oil and it's going to create a spot on the ground just drag this brush tool here and make a nice little there's a spot of oil on the ground there you can also use the line tool here to make lines like that or you can use the area tools to make a square or a circle or even a cone which is kind of handy for certain spells next up we have this measuring tool right here and this is kind of handy if you want to figure out on a gridless map like i have here how far can we go so grukfar wants to move 25 feet how far can he get let's see here 25 feet maybe he goes 6 there and now he has 19 left there we go and you can kind of see how that works so grukkvar could get right there now i would love it if we could actually move the token and see as we're moving it how far it's going so that when we let go it's now there instead we have to go back to the hand tool here and we can just click and drag gruckfar roughly to where that 25 feet would have been so the measuring tool definitely comes in handy and you can also change the scale of your map so that you can kind of customize the distance the pointer tool comes in handy when you're wanting to say grukfar you hear something right over here and you can just drag that pointer tool and all the players will be able to see that the players can also use that if they for example say i'm going to try to throw this bottle of wine right over there because i want to make a loud noise and the last tool on the right here is the note tool and i'll actually show you you can drag a note out here you can make it bigger and you can just type notes to yourself in there i'll show you how i did that on this mountain climb map right here you can see that it's pretty transparent and that's because i hid that note from my players but you can see i made a note about some hit points here and a note that the party has one level of exhaustion so if you're not into leaving notes on paper you want to leave it right on your map that can be a handy way to do that you can hide it from your players with the eyeball just a couple other features that i actually haven't used you can supposedly share audio with your group that's kind of cool and there's a timer here the settings button here you can actually change the light theme you can change the token label size so for example my tokens out there and you can clear the cache or erase all content and reset which i definitely do not want to do because i don't want to lose my maps so that's about it for the hands-on look at the features here in owl bear rodeo so is aloe bear rodeo perfect no of course not but man i'm really digging it for my online games i usually stream them and i'm often managing a lot of stuff so wherever i can minimize setup and things i have to tinker with it is very much appreciated maybe someday i will jump into a more robust virtual tabletop with character sheets automated roles initiative and hit point trackers etc but for now i'm so glad i found owlbear rodeo i'm sure we'll see this tool continue to develop and improve over time and i'm excited about that but i hope the developers don't forget that it's the simplicity and ease that set owlbear rodeo apart in this case less really is more i would also love to hear some of your thoughts and ideas about owlbear rodeo or other tools that make running rpgs online easier just put those suggestions or any questions you have down in the comments below alright that's going to do it for this one everybody take care you'll see me again very soon you

Channel: WASD20

Views: 522,594

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, playing dnd online, vtt, owlbear rodeo, virtual tabletop, rpg, ttrpg, dungeon master tools, wasd20, game master, dm, best dm tools, best vtt, roll20, fantasy grounds, foundry, dungeonfog, gm tools, pathfinder rpg, 2-minute tabletop, dyson, dungeon maps, dnd 5e, icewind dale, dnd campaign manager, fog of war, tabletop, easy vtt, simple vtt, d&d 5e, dungeon master, running dnd online

Id: OE_o8bpWQA0

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021