✅ ❌ 💙 3️⃣ 😕 💰

          [Official Website](shardtabletop.com/)       

Intro

Shard Tabletop is a clean but bland looking VTT that sacrifices looks for responsiveness. It is fast! While it does only work with DND 5th edition (and 5th edition variants), it does have a fully featured marketplace that focuses on non Wizards of the Coast products. Kobold Press is their premier partner, so if you’re running games in the Midgard campaign setting you will be right at home.

Importing Character sheets from DnDBeyond works incredibly well as well.

Cost

Features (under construction)

• Battlemaps
  • ✅ Shared battlemaps with player- and GM-controlled tokens
  • ✅ basic drawing capabilities - just a pen with colors, no shapes or textures
  • ❌ Map-making tools
  • 😕 Ruler during movement only. Not a separate ruler for determining ranged distance.
  • ✅ basic Fog of War
  • Dynamic Lighting
• Chat & Dice
  • 😕 Dice can be rolled from the chat window, but not by slash commands or macros
  • ✅ Die rolls from character sheets
  • 😕 Visual (non-chat) dice rolling interface do exist, but they aren’t exactly real dice movements
• Character Sheets
  • 😕 Character sheets exist, but since Shard only supports 5e there are no sheets for other games.
  • Moving character sheets between games
  • ✅ Custom character sheet creation
• Compendium
  • ✅ Game SRDs available
  • 💙 Shard’s marketplace makes game rules available for purchase or upload and they’ve taken the initiative to partner with what are normally considered 3rd party publishers to give players a unique look at 5th edition
  • 😕 Drag-n-drop to character sheets doesn’t work, but you can add certain things to party treasure
• Handouts, Etc
  • ✅ Any type of image can be made into handouts able to be displayed
  • ❌ Playing cards, random tables
  • 😕 note taking is done diary style, but calendars and collaborative notes are not available
  • ✅ Storage
• Automation
  • ✅ Turn Tracker is kept simple with a countable list. initiative itself is rolled, but not shown
  • ✅ Click-to-roll sheets
  • ❌ Targeting, damaging, healing, and other effects
  • ❌ Macro buttons
  • ✅ Community modules
• Music & Video Streaming
  • ❌ Integrated voice & video calls
  • ❌ Stream uploaded music to players
• Extras
  • ❌ Mobile device support
  • ✅ Help & support
  • ✅ Community

Pros & Cons

• Shard’s interface is very lean, so it can run on low end machines better than most other VTTs with the amount of features displayed
• The tie-ins with 3rd parties mean you can pull in fully complete vetted assets that are unique to most players. | - Shard only runs D&D5e so if you wanted something else you’ll have to look elsewhere
• You can’t target creatures directly or even measure how far you are from them
• There are no tools for creating walls or lighting effects.
• There are no WotC products, so official material would have to be recreated if your players want a specific subclass for example. |

Recommendations

• GMs who don’t want to spend a bunch of money for a perpetual monthly subscription just to have the number of games/players you want each week
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