Official Website

          [Official Discord](<https://discord.gg/UY8AXjhzhe>)       

Intro

Owlbear Rodeo has risen up out of nowhere by providing a quality tool that is responsive and free. A place to put your maps with tokens that doesn’t bog anyone in the group down with extra necessary learning before the game starts. Since its initial launch, Owlbear rodeo has added fog of war support, drawing tools, and text.

Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 does take a step backwards from its original open vision by forcing you to log in to use the platform and learn some of the new tools, but it compensates that by providing cloud storage to keep maps between sessions in “Scenes”, allowing images to layer on top of each other, integrating characters, dice, initiative trackers, and adding spell effects to the platform. This is what truly converts Owlbear into a right proper VTT.

Overall, if your character sheets are hosted somewhere else, (DnDBeyond or Character Sheet Apps) then all you need is Owlbear Rodeo to get the game moving.

Cost

Features

• Battlemaps
  • ✅ Shared battlemaps with player- and GM-controlled tokens
  • ✅ Basic drawing capabilities
  • ❌ Map-making tools
  • ✅ Ruler
  • ✅ Fog of War
  • ❌ Dynamic Lighting
• Chat & Dice
  • ❌ Basic chat with roll commands & macros
  • ❌ Die rolls from character sheets
  • ✅ Visual (non-chat) dice rolling interface
• Character Sheets
  • ❌ Character sheets for various games
  • ❌ Moving character sheets between games
  • ❌ Custom character sheet creation
• Compendium
  • ❌ Game SRDs available
  • ❌ Game rules available for purchase or upload
  • ❌ Drag-n-drop to character sheets
• Handouts, Etc
  • ✅ Types of handouts able to be edited and displayed
  • ❌ Playing cards, random tables
  • ❌ Calendars and note taking
  • 😕 Storage
• Automation
  • ✅ Turn Tracker
  • ❌ Click-to-roll sheets
  • ❌ Targeting, damaging, healing, and other effects
  • ❌ Macro buttons
  • 😕 Community modules are available, but currently there are only very few small features beyond the ones created by Owlbear itself (March 1st 2023 launched this feature)
• Music & Video Streaming
  • ❌ Integrated voice & video calls
  • ❌ Stream uploaded music to players
• Extras
  • ✅ Mobile device support
  • 😕 Help & support is mainly showing off the new features in document posts. This is honestly good enough for the platform right now, but if it wants to grow then this section will have to expand to more interactive support.
  • ✅ Community - Oddly for something that doesn’t really require much community support, it seems like every conversation about VTTs will include the platform as a large subset of DMs have already played with and loved the platform.

Pros & Cons

• The 3D dice have real weight to them and look great
• Owlbear Rodeo is amazingly inexpensive for small games
• Owlbear is in active development and new features are coming fast | - Absolutely no character sheet support. This means no targeting, damage rolls, no weapon or spell storage, etc
• Monthly subscriptions are required for server based systems to function, which is a major detriment to any system that doesn’t allow self-hosting
• There are no video calling or music capabilities |

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