TaleSpire

Talespire in my honest opinion is in its current state something I would have to not recommend, and it comes down to a few key issues and design points. A: The amount of figures natively in the game is quiet limiting, even by a base DnD campaign. This is both alleviated and further exasperated by the handling of issue. An external program exists for making figures and you can browse the imported ones, but it is often times clunky to find what you need if it exists. Heroforge integration is present, but if you've never bought anything from the site this isn't a solution for you, and isn't overly a good stop gap for missing enemies A first party editor was suppose to be part of this, but that has not yet emerged, and this is on top of a honestly somewhat weird choice to not allow paper tokens since it breaks the art style, although this leans into some DnD boss monsters being weird to replicate B: The tile building at times feels weird specially with added furniture, which if their is a good snap grid system I haven't fully figured it out yet, but I stray from topic. The tiles themselves are a semi decent set of tiles, but several small issues arise the more you attempt to merge …

Game only sort of costs $24.99. If your party doesn't already own copies of the game, additional seats for Your Players To Join The Game are at a rate of $15 per seat, or a "party pack" of 4 seats for $50. While you can get it up and running for a lower price by streaming the game to your friends or somesuch, if you want the full experience, you or your party have to pay out ~$75 dollars, assuming a 4 person party. The software works as intended, but I *really* don't like the lack of transparency on how much this system actually costs. Currently, I'm stuck with VTT software that does *nothing* because of this pricing model.

Making my own model with TaleWeaver Lite was an excruciating process that made me want to pull my fingernails out. I never leave reviews, but this process was borderline purposefully obtuse and frustrating well beyond what anyone could consider reasonable. The public download for taleweaver is the wrong version as of this review (0.0.70 vs 0.0.73), and upon attempting to update (which requires unity), the project seeminly broke itself and is now newly inaccessible. Prior to that, attempting to package my mod into the game required multiple logins to mod.io, setting my mod to private made it inaccessible, and the only error visible from within Talespire is "it doesn't work". Nothing informative. Troubleshooting this has been agony, and this only gets to about 50% of my troubles with this mod upload process. Awful.

The game desperately needs way more QoL features for running campaigns and automation, it is probably it's biggest Con that can be fesibly fixed. Otherwise it's 3d features are great.

I only played in someone else' campaign but I was very impressed with how well it worked. It made playing dungeons and dragons remotely feel like we were all around the same table.

Its a dungeon master's dream come true