Our gamemaster’s wife just had a baby (congrats, Matthew) and I’m taking over as GM. As part of that, I’m moving our D&D 5e group from Roll20 to Foundry. Two and a half sessions in, people seem quite pleased with the change. In this post, I talk about the modules that seem like they should be in the base version of Foundry VTT, modules I can’t imagine anyone hasn’t installed.
Simple Things (aka: Why isn’t this Core Foundry?)
Dice Tray: I can’t believe you have to type “/r whatever” to roll dice in core Foundry. Just add dice tray and make your life easier. This module puts a clickable d20 at the bottom of the chat area. Clicking on it brings up a dice tray that allows you to do a lot of dice rolling without having to remember commands.
Search Anywhere: This module allows you to, you guessed it, search anywhere in your game. It takes no time for it to build an index (which it only has to do when you add content). After that, you can search any parts of your game from one spot, rather than having to remember where you put something.
Tidy UI: I forgot I had this installed. This arranges the the settings for your game in a much nicer way than the standard interface.
Pings: Apparently you can’t ping in native Foundry? I’m not sure how anyone using a map wouldn’t want to ping a location. There are plenty of ways to customize how a ping works.
Compendium Folders: Adds folders to your compendiums, which you really want. That said, I have already had issues with it hiding some compendiums and I read this is not unusual. However, I have found out how to “fix” this. The module assigns your existing compendiums to folders. If it can’t figure out how, it leaves those compendiums unassigned. If you create a new folder, you can scroll down to unassigned compendiums and add those to the folder. Now you don’t have unassigned compendiums anymore! (note: I might to a YouTube video about this. If so, I’ll link that here).
PopOut: Allows players to move items to other screens, which is very nice. It does NOT work with all systems, and is only tested with 5e, I believe.
Edit to add:
Dice So Nice: No idea how I forgot this one, but who doesn’t love seeing dice roll across the screen? Also, it is very configurable by every player, so you can have the dice you want.
That’s it. Those six modules are pretty much must have (and all but the last is system agnostic). I’ll be adding a lot more Foundry content here and my YouTube channel over the coming months. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments!