News Roundup: Behind the Scenes with VTTs

Welcome to this week’s TTRPG Insider roundup! In this issue, we examine a deep cut that the owner of Evil Hat Games offered designers into his thoughts about making virtual tabletop systems.

We also discuss some new TTRPG-related video game projects and other gaming stories from this week!

How the ‘Virtual Tabletop’ Sausage Gets Made

Fred Hicks, the owner of Evil Hat Games (Monster of the Week, Fate, Blades in the Dark), started a long thread on Bluesky about what it takes to add new game systems to virtual tabletop platforms like Roll20 and Foundry. If I have to be honest, it was honest-to-God catnip for me, who spends more than my fair share of time following the news around VTTs and uses them to run professional games.

Fred goes into detail about the market forces and player forces that lead to why a publisher like Evil Hat might put in the work to create sheets and systems that allow Roll20 and Foundry to run a game.

Creating a system sheet on Roll20, for example, is ‘full time web developer’ territory — solid javascript competence, robust sustainable html architecture, twisty-brained CSS development, and at this point dozens/hundreds of hours of Roll20 sheet code familiarity,” Hicks notes. Thankfully, he has the skills to do so, but it’s still a lot of work and time. Hiring someone else to do that work would also be expensive. It’s also not easy to transfer. The work that Roll20 demands does not easily convert into a system over on Foundry.

Roll20 remains the market leader, which is why it’s worth Evil Hat’s time, Hicks argues. While he’d love to create systems for Foundry or Owlbear Rodeo, he recognizes that the cost conversion to sales doesn’t add up. So if a system wants to appear on other platforms, it will either occur through a licensing deal where the VTT creates the resources themselves, or a fan puts in the hard work. A quick look at the Foundry community shows that many people are willing to do that work.

The problem with the fan-powered model is that it requires tens and hundreds of hours of coding from people doing it for free. Some devs have learned to make money for their work through websites like Patreon, but they’re in the minority. If that person stops updating the rules for a game like Cyberpunk Red on Foundry, the game doesn’t work, the mods stop functioning, and DMs and players are left out to dry. I know this has bitten me. I wanted to run a Cyberpunk Red game recently, but could not do so on the current version of Foundry because support for the system has fallen behind.

It’s also a reminder that “TTRPG companies are almost all small,” Hick noted. “The quantity and variety of VTTs out there do not provide a favorable divisor on effort and attention when it comes time to decide what to support and what not.” The thread also illustrates how “unpaid fan labor powers so much production [in TTRPGs] and alternative models cannot yet scale fast enough,” as Rascal’s Chase Taylor Carter posted.

For a deeper cut, check out Mellie Doucette (head of game content at Roll20 and Demiplane) and her thread about digital conversions for VTTs. Short version? It’s -hard-.

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Neverwinter and Golarion: Coming to a Console near you

This week had more than a few major stories related to video game adaptations of TTRPGs into gaming.

Wizards of the Coast president John Hight said in an interview discussing Giant Skull’s upcoming D&D action-adventure that the company isn’t done with “serious CRPGs” like Baldur’s Gate 3. Still, they’re going in on action for now. What does that mean for future D&D video games? They would not say, but we’ve a lot in the future and a lot to be excited about since it is the game director for Star Wars Fallen Order.

While I am definitely hungry for more CRPGs like Dark Heresy (the Warhammer 40k game that follows the successful release of Rogue Trader) and BG3, I have to admit that I’m skeptical about a not-Larian company making another CRPG as good as BG3. That game took a lot of time and money to become the blockbuster it is today.

In the meantime, we have some stuff to sate ourselves.

Neverwinter Nights 2, a classic 2000s video game based in the D&D-centered Forgotten Realms, will be remastered in July. NW2 is a RPG as well, although it’s built around D&D 3.5 (a ruleset I’ll admit I’m not super familiar with. We also don’t know if it will be a good conversion like past attempts to bring 1990s CRPGs out and update them to match modern ideas.

Pathfinder Abomination Vaults got a gameplay trailer. Looks really hack-and-slashy if you’re a big Pathfinder fan, so it doesn’t fit that particular niche. But it will be a nice addition for fans of the Golarion setting. No release date is set.

In Other News

DnDBeyond added Mage Hand Press’ Gunslinger class to the website, the latest third-party class to be added to the website. It’s a nice addition and expands functionality beyond the gunslinger fighter that Percy De Rolo of Critical Role introduced into the canon. It is $14.99, which has caused some fans to question whether the class is worth it.

Many businesses are unionizing, but I’ll admit that board game cafes were not on my list. The left-focused outlet Jacobin published a story diving into Tabletop Workers United, a series of gaming stores in NYC that finally unionized and reached a serious agreement. Rascal News already got the scoop and covered this in much detail over the last 18 months, so Jacobin’s a bit behind the times. But seeing this unique story get coverage outside of gaming outlets is still good.

This isn’t a big TTRPG story, but the board game manufacturer Panda is expanding out of China. Tariffs drive the decision and will hopefully help publishers make more games without risking China-related tariffs or penalties going forward. Board Game Wire has the story, and it seems like a big deal.

The cinematic VTT Alchemy announced plans to add Blades in the Dark and its upcoming expansion, Deep Cuts, to its marketplace in the fall of 2025. It also added Legend of Avantris’ Crooked Moon to its marketplace now.

And that’s all for this week! Did we miss a story? Want to send us a scoop or a tip? Email us at [email protected]