Play with friends at the table

[thebonaz]

Hi guys, I have a question regarding the application. I state that I still have to get it but I wanted to know first if it was possible to play with a single PC with your friends at the table. We wanted to implement something dynamic during our sessions at the table that were not just maps or using roll20.
More than anything else we play right in person. It was to show the map to them. Like on roll20 I had mastered login on firefox and kept it on my screen. In the other monitor placed on the table and connected to the same pc I had opened chrome with the players screen

[Maximus Octave]

Well you can for sure share your screen with a DA map on it, if you don't want to hide the overall plan to your players (there is no fog of war or similar things). However, this is not the intended use of DA.

My personal suggestion to use DA: there is an option to take control of a NPC in first person view. This way, you can move around & interact with some objects (lights, doors), and still kind of control what your players can see (example: if there is a hidden door in a barrel, they will need to ask you to go closer to the barrel and interact with it, instead of seeing a hidden room behing a wall on the "map from top" and knowing something is hidden there).
However, two notes:
-there is no ceiling implementation yet in FP view (it is somewhere in the roadmap, but not there as of today), so the skybox will be always greyish
-in my experience, rooms tend to feel "overcrowded" with furniture when visited in FP mode, and FP controls are a bit clunky sometimes (when e.g. something is lying on the ground); so either try to create larger rooms, or test every corner of your map in FP mode before playing it in shared screen, to know exactly what to expect during your games

[MACx3D]

Originally posted by thebonaz:

Hi guys, I have a question regarding the application. I state that I still have to get it but I wanted to know first if it was possible to play with a single PC with your friends at the table. We wanted to implement something dynamic during our sessions at the table that were not just maps or using roll20.
More than anything else we play right in person. It was to show the map to them. Like on roll20 I had mastered login on firefox and kept it on my screen. In the other monitor placed on the table and connected to the same pc I had opened chrome with the players screen

Im not 100% certain what the person above is talking about but I think they misunderstood you.

The short answer is Yes

You can either use DA in conjunction with Roll 20 on a single TV tabletop setup or you can utilize DA itself to facilitate the gameplay.

As the Community Manager for DA, I've seen many in our community use Dungeon Alchemist for local TV tabletop or projector tabletop play.

Built into DA are several tools to accommodate localized play. For example, you can enable a grid & disable the mapmaking UI. This makes it perfect for tv tabletop play. You can place a real token atop the TV screen or use the tokens/3d asset import within DA to facilitate them digitally. Keep in mind digital tokens can only be controlled by the person with the mouse, making them ideal for you as the DM to control.

At the moment, there isn't an effective built-in "Fog of war," but there are several workarounds both within DA or physical tried and true methods. BTW with time, we plan to add more VTT lite features to facilitate in-person play, such as Fog of War. For now, I suggest zooming in to the area where they should see and reveal as they move, Covering portions of the screen with a divider or even black construction paper like the old days.
Within DA there is a Black smoke effect, which can work well for Fog of war but it takes a tremendous amount of PC resources to utilize effectively.