@dawngreeter I think you might have missed some big ones in your search.

Roll20 has a free tier.
Foundry is buy-once, with optional paid add-ons.

Buying the books is completely optional and a nice-to-have for both.

I'm sure there are other options.

I have very little experience with playing RPGs online and I had just assumed there exists some sort of an online tool for managing your game. Character sheets, NPCs, notes, that sort of stuff.

As best I can tell, there is no such thing. But there are a million virtual tabletop services that force you to buy the books you already have, in a proprietary format you can't use outside of their website.

I am very frustrated. How is this normal? Who is paying for all of this, and why?

#ttrpg

I have very little experience with playing RPGs online and I had just assumed there exists some sort of an online tool for managing your game. Character sheets, NPCs, notes, that sort of stuff.

As best I can tell, there is no such thing. But there are a million virtual tabletop services that force you to buy the books you already have, in a proprietary format you can't use outside of their website.

I am very frustrated. How is this normal? Who is paying for all of this, and why?

#ttrpg

@dawngreeter
Many people just run it paper and pencil on Zoom or Discord, TotM. Some have a cam on their dice tray.

I know for me, Foundry has modules that help organize my stuff. I have yet to buy anything beyond the initial purchase of the program. All updates are free. A bit of tech savvy helps, but there is a big community for support. The systems and sheets for many games are available for free. Content can be uploaded as scenes and even compendium packs. It helps if you have PDFs.

@kevin @dawngreeter
Yeah, Roll20 may *push* the buying of books in a proprietary format on their site, but you can also just... use community character sheets and do manual data entry into them.

@dawngreeter Not a specialized tool, but a lot of people use note-taking apps. Obsidian seems particularly popular.

Turing Incomplete in my humble experience, that tool is simply a wiki. Foundry, as mentioned by others, has some fancy organizing and dice rolling utility even if you don’t use the VTT, but honestly, nothing beats general purpose tech and a dice bot if you need it.

@dawngreeter
in a pinch we've gotten by with video-chat and shared docs. the map was a little fraught, but it worked out in the end, with the keeper scribbling annotations on an image file.
and as for rolls, you will have to pry my physical dice from my scratchy little claws.

@dawngreeter

When I used Foundry to play Cyberpunk Red, the community had put the entire game and all the add-ons into the module. Amazing community.

Roll20 uses the SRD for dnd, but the only thing I've bought through them are modules cause it's nice when the maps and tokens are setup already.

I reccomend Foundry for what you're looking for, but ymmv on the system

@ta11dave Yeah, it appears Foundry is the thing I need. It appears significantly more useful than what my initial assessment was.

@dawngreeter

Just know that system support is still community based. I got dnd4e working on foundry but I had to get the links from another discord server because they didn't want to get it shut down.

Apparently the cyberpunk team doesn't care as much. Pathfinder2e had everything imported as well.

Dnd5e only has the SRD because they bank on people using dndbeyond and importing the data.

@thegarbagebird I struggle with the idea of not using physical dice, too... I guess we'll see how it goes. Clicking a button and seeing numbers pop up just doesn't have that RPG feel.

@dawngreeter and you can't put a randomiser in dice jail