VTT d20Pro Installation

Virtual Table Top – d20Pro

Installation

What is the Tool

Virtual Table Top (or VTT) is a tool that allows a group to see a digital game table, without having to be at the same location. This does not have to be something that replaces all the aspects of a tabletop map, but it can replace most of them.

d20Pro is a VTT that can do most of the replacement at a reasonable price. The more time you invest in learning how the tool operates, the more capability you can give the tabletop. For most of my games I use it for positioning, hit point tracking and initiative. Though it depends on the encounter just how much I use for the tool and how much I personally manage elsewhere.

Getting the Tool

You can download the tool from www.d20pro.com which comes with a free trial. The great thing about this trial is that if the person hosting the game has Guest licence available, players without a licence but with the trial copy can enter as long as the host has spare licences.

As a host I have 6 licences available to my players as guest accesses. Though I have suspended player access until I fix a few network issues not related to the tool. I will write about connecting players into the tool at a later stage.

Installation

This is one of the first programs I installed on the laptop so the steps might not be needed on all other computers, but these are what I had to do so next time I upgrade I can just refer to these steps if I get stuck again.

Installing the program had a few issues, but they were easy to overcome once I followed these steps.

• Allow it to run with the virus protection (I have installed it before but some need to be shut down to allow the installation to complete)
• Install Windows components (I had to install some components as requested but as it was on a clean laptop ).
• Install the latest Java from Sun. This might have been better to have been installed before trying to install d20Pro.
• Reinstall d20Pro after the other components had been installed.

Basic Setup

Set d20Pro to run as Administrator, then set Java exe to run as administrator. Both of these are simple fixes that solves a few issues down the track.

Once you have the program running and if you already have a licence, you need to log in and download your licence to the computer otherwise your ready to go with trial of the guest licence. Its been a while since I set up the tool for the trial, so refer the website for sets on that process if it is not straight forward.

Upgrading the Installation

With the 2.9 update there were a few bugs that needed to be sorted out. After reading through the discord server for the group and chatting to the developers it is recommended that you rename the existing installation and doing a fresh install, then copy your campaign information from the old installation to the new one.

This should solve a lot of the legacy issues, but not guaranteed. So if this does not solve load and connectivity issues, you can export and inport the content, and connectivity might also be related to Windows needing permission to allow another “new” application to connect to a remote destination. Not a bad feature, but took about 10+ attempts to solve the problem before the windows dialog opened for me to approve it to work.

Concluding Thoughts

Now that you have the tool installed it is ready to use, I will write up another post on using the tool for migrating existing content as I get around to doing that for my current games.

Content Updates

• 2021-08-11 – Updating the layout, content and links.
• 2020-08-04 – Adding in information about upgrading to 2.9.

Game Management

GM – 2021 in Review, Choosing a New Campaign, Downtime Uses, GM’s Luck Roll, House Rules, Running Games over Skype, Sandbox vs Linear, Story RPGs, Table Rules, Tracking Experience

Annotated Stat Blocks: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2, Star Wars FFG

Creating a Campaign: D&D Mystara Design (2022), Genesys, Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2 TRAP Design (2022), Shadowrun, Star Wars (Mandalorian, 2022)

Character Creation: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder 2, Star Wars Beta, Star Wars FFG

Concluding a Campaign: Star Wars

NPCs – Talking to NPCs, Working with NPCs.

Virtual Table Top (VTT) Software – d20Pro: Installation, Realm Works: Players and their Characters, Using for D&D, Realm Created

Library of Books

B5, d20 System, Pathfinder, SW

This site is constantly under revision, no blog posts are final as this is a work in progress place for me to develop my game settings and rules. Some posts might be placeholders for future content, so feel free to check back later for updated information.

General Links

Basic Links: Who Am I?, Home, Game Tools, Game Session Videos, My Campaigns, My Library, Site Map, Subscription Information

Game Systems: Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder 1 & 2, Shadowrun, Star Wars. Other Game Systems

Site sponsored by the author AS Hamilton (my wife) with her books available on amazon kindle.