Vitruvian VTT Philosophy

Summary

Vitruvian VTT is an attempt to make a VTT that is meant to bring the benefits of other VTT's onto the kitchen table. The creators of this project love the in person play experience. Nothing is better than playing in person with maps and mini's. There are, however, some aspects of in person play that could use tools provided by popular VTT's. We (the creators of the project) have identified them as the following:

• Character Management: Depending on the roleplaying system you are playing, it can be difficult for players and GMs alike to manage characters that they are running. Sometimes it is tricky to scan a character sheet for the perfect spell you are looking for, or the skill you have been asked to roll.
• Information Passing: During any session, the GM will need to give players information about the world that they are in. Whether it be an image of a creature they are fighting, or even detailed rules on how a magic item works. The passing of this information is sometimes quick, but if can take time if players have to copy text on their character sheets
• Session/World Planning: World building / Session planning can be daunting for some GMs. There are already a plethora of apps that help with this task, however a limited few of them allow you to bring these notes to the other players in a efficient way. The most popular of these apps (From what we have seen) is Obsidian. Obsidian is a good app, but it wasn't design with this use case in mind.
• Resolving Rules: Depending on the system you play this one might not be as big of a deal to you, but sometimes it take a long time to calculate totals from a rule. Say the DM needs to roll a check for every monster within a range of a spell, an there are 10 of them. There is quite a lot of processing there. In 5e, even just rolling for initiative can be tough.

These are only some of many problems that we have detected from playing in person games for a long time. Some of these problems can be shortcut, but most the time they are just going to take a while regardless of the shortcut. That is why we set out to create this project.

With that being said, we also don't want the VTT to take over playing with your friends. The last thing that we want is everyone around the table staring at their laptops and not interacting with each other. Rolling dice is fun, moving minis is fun. We don't want to take anyway the act of play. So here is the rub: we need to find the balance to give players these useful features without removing them from play.

This has caused us to create these rules for the project:

1. Features added to Vitruvian must be made to only replace parts of the game that can be written on paper (Rules, Character Sheets, Maps, Lore, ect). Any feature that aims to break this rule must be Optional and disabled by default.
2. Any feature added must be faster than the conventional method.
3. This application must be highly configurable to fit in at any table.

Note that this is a daft. While the message should stay the same, some points maybe added or removed. When we have an official release, this will be set in stone.