If you give me the ability to customize something, whether its fonts, colors, formatting, whatever, I’m going to end up spending way too much time playing with those options. Even when I know this is the case, it doesn’t stop me. The best thing I can do is to find a tool that lets me spend all that effort on customizing something that I’ll actually use, instead of letting me drift into setting up something I won’t use for months, if even then.

I’m mentioning this because I’ve spent a lot of time seeing what I can and can’t customize on a VTT platform recently, so I wanted to touch base on what I’ve learned so far. I’m going to talk a bit about Shard Tabletop today, a VTT platform that is customized specifically to work with 5e SRD games.

Disclaimer

While I started exploring Shard VTT on my own for a while, I received several products from both Lazy Wolf Studios and Shard Tabletop to look at for review. I made purchases and started my customizations before I received those items. I have run a session on Shard, and I have been a player multiple times on Shard.

How Did I Get Here?

My exploration of Shard is something that’s has started and stopped multiple times, and then went into high gear more recently. During the sheltering at home days, I was avoiding VTTs as long as I could, but eventually, I realized I was going to need to learn how to game on a VTT if I was going to get the gaming in that I wanted.

There were three main VTTs that I looked at, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and Shard. I’m going to avoid direct comparisons where I can, but I did want to touch on why I didn’t end up using Shard Tabletop from the beginning.

I played a D&D campaign on Fantasy Grounds as a player. It did a lot of things I liked, which weren’t easy to do on other platforms. For example, I loved that you could actually target a token, and the VTT would keep track of your success and failure without the DM even getting involved, and you could apply damage directly. That said, there were things I never felt were intuitive (adding gear to a character sheet), and other things that felt like it just had one more step than it needed to have, and that extra step was easy to forget. I reminded me of some of the software I’ve worked with working in data in the education field.

I spent a lot of time playing though some scenarios on Shard Tabletop. The biggest mark against it, at the time, was that it could only run 5e SRD, and I was running multiple systems. I wanted something that was going to have tools for multiple game systems, but I came back to Shard multiple times to run “simulations,” where I was able to see how different characters fared against different monsters.

Roll20 won out. I don’t know that its more intuitive than Fantasy Grounds, but I would say that some of the unintuitive aspects of Roll20 were clustered together in a few places, rather than spread out across the interface. It had a decent range of official product support, as well as the character sheets, which made it useful for games that didn’t have official support. In some cases, these character sheets made it must faster to roll dice pools or count successes.

Because I had been happy with Shard for my “simulation” scenarios, I talked to Ang detailing what I liked about the platform but mentioned that it didn’t have official D&D support. Ang used it way more than I did and learned the ins and outs of importing characters and building out monsters and encounters.

I returned to Shard Tabletop because I wanted to start playing with characters and options with Tales of the Valiant, especially making characters at different levels and using the heritage and lineage system. While there are multiple platforms that were included as options for VTT support, only Alchemy and Shard Tabletop had their implementations up and running. Since I was already somewhat familiar with Shard, I went there to start exploring options in the Black Flag Reference Document.

I liked what I saw, but my current D&D campaign was on Roll20, I had all of my official content on Roll20, and even though I could get Kobold Press material on Shard, that would require me to purchase everything that I owned over again for a new platform, and I wasn’t thrilled with that prospect.

Playtesting and Frustration with Roll20

I did some playtesting of the D&D 2024 rules as various Unearthed Arcana documents came out, but not as much as I would have liked. Part of the problem with this is that if I wanted to use Roll20, I had to build out the class/subclass/species options individually on the character sheets. Nothing was persistent. A new class, subclass, or spell would only exist on the character sheet where you customized it. I couldn’t keep up with that, especially when there were more and more spells included in the playtests.

I had the same problem with the Tales of the Valiant playtest documents I received from the crowdfunding campaign. That became even more frustrating because I could just use the base class and change a few things that were different. Because subclass levels were changing, I had to remove and replace several features.

There were also an increasing number of companies releasing playtest material, most of which would have to be built feature by feature for each pregenerated character. I could duplicate the character and change things around, but it still felt like I was putting a lot of work into one specific character sheet, not into that campaign. Even some of the custom items from different publishers may or may not work as well as official options. For example, the Kobold Press Witch and Theurge classes were included if you purchased Deep Magic Volume 1 and 2, but the spells available to those classes and several class features weren’t functioning as expected.

The Subscription Model

Before we get into some of the newer subscriptions, it’s probably important to touch on Shard Tabletop’s subscription levels. You can use the basic functions of the site without a subscription, but you don’t get access to the expanded 5e OGL options included in the subscriptions. It also determines how much you can share with your players. These levels include:

• Adventurer–$2.99/month
• Gamemaster–$5.99/month
• Gamemaster Pro–$9.99/month

Adventurer lets you do some customization. You can get fancier dice, you can have two campaigns active at the same time, and you get a bunch of the race, subclass, spells, and feats that Shard offers, which are mostly options that Kobold Press has allowed them to use for these purposes. This option gives you unlimited characters. If you don’t have a subscription, you’re limited to six. You can only share what you own in one campaign (but you can only have two active to begin with). You also get the ability to customize your character sheet with different borders, colors, and images.

Gamemaster expands the number of campaigns you can have active at once to six, you can swap out tokens to customize appearances, and you don’t have access to free products in the Marketplace unless you have this option. You also get access to a split screen mode that lets you display the player view when you are using Shard for an in-person game.There is also a watch mode available where you can let others watch your game as it unfolds. You can share what you own in five different campaigns.

Gamemaster Pro gives you an unlimited number of campaigns that you can have active. You can do additional customizations with your tokens, like borders or multiple images you can switch between. The watch mode allows the watchers to interact with people in the game. If you are comfortable creating art elements within the parameters used by the site, you can create your own custom token elements and dice.

I’ve got the Gamemaster Pro subscription, in part because I like setting up a lot of “potential” campaigns to test options out, and I don’t want to worry about exceeding the number that I can have. I haven’t done much with creating borders or dice myself, but Ang, awesome person that she is, created some custom dice for me, and I have purchased borders from places the DriveThroughRPG, so I can have the special borders around my legendary creatures. It’s an affection I picked up from my World of Warcraft days, so it’s fun to be able to do something like that in a tabletop game.

I haven’t done anything with view sharing options, but even though we haven’t been playing in person, we have played with the split screen options in the game that Chris is running for Ang and me.

Company Subscriptions

The newest subscriptions offered by Shard Tabletop are company specific subscriptions. Currently, the following companies have subscription models on the site:

• A Tiny Living Room
• Kobold Press
• Troll Lord Games
• Underground Oracle Publishing

I can’t really speak to the other bundles, but I have subscribed to the Kobold Press bundles. And I did say bundles, because Kobold Press has multiple tiers to their subscription models. It’s probably worth mentioning that Kobold Press has a ton of material on the site, so there is a decent amount of material in these bundles.

• Gamemaster Subscription
• Kobold Hoard Subscription
• Player Subscription

All these bundles have new items have had items added to them over time. There are still a few special products that are released that do go into any bundles, but the only example I have for this so far is the Free RPG Day adventure digital version that has been released on Shard.

The Gamemaster subscription includes the campaign setting material, sourcebooks, and adventures. It also includes the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault. It’s worth noting that while there have been several shorter adventures released for Tales of the Valiant, most of these items are pre-Black Flag RD 5e SRD material. That’s not a giant hurdle for most of these products, although some of the sourcebooks with subclasses are a bit trickier, and older spells are split out into the new, broader spell lists.

The Kobold Hoard Subscription includes the material from Kobold Press’ discontinued Warlock zine, as well as some of the short supplements from the website. These also include the blog article products that get reformatted and released after some playtesting and development.

The Player Subscription includes all of the player facing books that Kobold Press has released for the 5e SRD, including the “thematic” player guides (Southlands, Underworld, etc.), and the larger player facing sourcebooks Kobold Press has released, including the Midgard Heroes Handbook and the Tome of Heroes, as well as Deep Magic Volume 1 and 2. These sources are a little trickier to use, since they include a lot of subclasses and feats that don’t fit the Tales of the Valiant format, but converting isn’t insurmountable. If you’re interested in Tales of the Valiant, this is the option that gets you the Player’s Guide options, as well as the recently released Lineages and Heritages Volume 1.

This is what got me to commit to setting up a campaign to play on Shard. This lets me have access to the Kobold Press material that I currently have for Roll20, and don’t want to purchase over again.

Revisiting Playtesting

One of the things that made Shard more attractive for playtesting scenarios is that you can create classes, subclasses, spells, feats, talents, species, lineages, or heritages and save them, making them available over and over once you build out that game option. As an example of some of the playtesting options I have entered into Shard, I’ve entered the Ghostfire Gaming Monster Hunter class, as well as the Worlds Beyond Number Witch class.

You can also save other game elements, like monsters, which is possible in other VTTs as well. You can also create handouts for your players that you can make available for your players, which can be something like an in-game entry in a book that’s relevant to the campaign, or a document summarizing your campaign’s house rules.

How Do I Get What’s Out Here, In There?

Books do what you expect them to do when you purchase items from the marketplace, meaning there are pages you can read, where you can click to the next section and read the next topic. Books can also be used to facilitate importing information. If you put a spell or a monster stat block into a book, and you import that book, Shard can convert that information into game elements that can be saved and used like any other item of that type.

You can’t just drop any information in and hope Shard will figure it out, but it is easier than I anticipated. You need to make sure that certain sections of the stat block or rules elements have a certain header type associated with it, and if you want an expression in the text to allow you to click on it to roll dice, you need to bold that section of the text.

I’ve had a lot of luck importing monsters and spells using this method. If you get the hang of what formatting goes to what section, you may get a simpler monster to just work as soon as you click on that section and then click on the option for Shard to convert it. Even more complicated monsters usually look pretty usable and may only require a little bit of cutting and pasting to make sure some information that ended up in the wrong section goes in the stat block where it belongs.

You can attempt to import things like classes or subclasses, but I’ve had a lot less luck getting those to work well, and the amount of reworking I’ve had to do has just convinced me to just copy a similar class or subclass and then add and delete the options I want to see.

When you are creating classes and subclasses, if you name a feature something similar to a feature you already have saved, there is a lightbulb icon that you can click, which shows you all of the similarly named rules elements, which you can click on to import that into the current class. This is handy for something like making a front-line fighting class that you want to give the class the fighting style feature that many of them get, or when you want to give a class an ability from another class in a subclass.

The modeling features are very robust, but in some cases, they are also very specific. You can easily just drop in a description of what the ability does, but you can also link in everything that the ability does and apply those effects, if you add all the bells and whistles. You can do more complicated things, like having a class feature that lets you pick three specialized class features, each one working in a slightly different way.

You can also create custom versions of classes, swapping out abilities that you want to change, but when you still want that class to count as the class you are modifying. One thing to keep in mind is that if you do something like this, you may want to save this as a separate class with a distinct name, even if it’s something like Fighter (House Ruled), because if you save any changes to a rules element, when there are updates to those classes, they won’t populate. You still won’t automatically get them in your custom class, but if you’re using the standard fighter in another game you play in, and you are only using your custom fighter in one of multiple campaigns you are running, the standard fighter will get updated regularly.

One of the best features that Shard had doesn’t work anymore, and that’s the import function from D&D Beyond. At one point in time, you could post a link to your D&D Beyond character, and Shard could look at your character and convert it over to working in Shard. Some features didn’t work perfectly, but it did an amazing job of bringing most of the functionality over, including copying the classes, subclasses, feats, spells, or species that aren’t present in Shard. You still needed to own those things on D&D Beyond, but once you have that character set up, you could bring it over with very little difficulty, and even be able to level the character up with those options. Unfortunately, the 2024 implementation on D&D Beyond has broken this function.

Shard Tabletop has created a number of rules packages that emulate some of the subclasses from Xanathar’s, or Tasha’s, for example, but you need to connect a few dots and rename some things, since they don’t bring in information directly from those sources.

Campaign Setup

Another series of customizations you can make is to allow very specific things into your campaign. This is extremely powerful compared to some options that you can use to customize campaign options on other platforms. D&D Beyond never seems to filter out exactly what you want to filter out, and Roll20 can exclude or include an entire source, but you can’t go into the individual options in the book and restrict specific spells or feats, for example.

Shard has multiple ways to customize information that appears in your campaign. Extensions are broad sets of rules, which might include or exclude a few things that aren’t meant to work with that implementation. For example, the 5e SRD might be one extension, Esper Genesis might be another, and Black Flag RD may be another. If you directly modify an extension, you can customize your campaign, but as with classes above, that keeps the extension from getting updated when updates are released. Which means if you’re going to be tweaking things, you may want to make a copy of the extension and give it a unique name.

Once you add that into your campaign, your extension has a number of packages, the best example of which are all the rules bundled into a specific product. You can exclude any of these packages, but if you like some of the options from that package, you can also set preferred or restricted content. When you do this, you can restrict that handful of spells you really don’t like from that one book that you want to include, for example.

If you’re obsessive like me, you can also do things like adding unique languages to the Extension or remove languages that you don’t want to be available in the game. Are you, like me, annoyed that Ignan, Auran, Aquan, and Terran are all just dialects of Primordial? Then you can remove Primordial as an option. If you add an ancient language that was just recently rediscovered, you can add those in as well.

There are a few options that live in all of the Extensions, even if they aren’t a default in that set of rules. For example, you can turn on Luck from the Black Flag RD versus Inspiration in the 2014 5e SRD.

Going back to my playtest examples, it’s really easy to restrict options in a playtest campaign so that you are testing the material with a closed set of options, rather than throwing everything official and third party at your playtest at the same time.

Ongoing Adventures

When I was setting up my testbeds in Shard, I didn’t fully understand the assumed way to utilize this function. I just opened a map, added tokens to the map, and then ran the combat. For the published adventures, you open a blank book. You can detail whatever notes you need to have to run your game, and then you add the map to the book. On the map, you can then pin encounters to the map.

When you click on the pinned encounters, you can start running the encounter. In addition to what you can do when you just add tokens to a map that you’ve imported, building an encounter lets you add inactive participants that you can activate, for example if there is a possibility for reinforcements to show up. Additionally, you can add treasure packets to the pinned encounter, which you can reveal once the PCs interact with where that treasure is located, and the treasure can be automatically distributed across all the PCs when you end the encounter. You can also assign XP at the end of the encounter based on the monsters you have added to the encounter, and within the encounters, you can also add additional XP amounts detached from the creatures in the encounter.

Most of the spells have an icon attached to them that lets you drop a token on the map showing the spell’s area of effect, but the GM can also drop templates of different sizes on the map. These have their own icon to click on, rather than sorting through artwork to find the templates, although if you have special artwork for your tokens, you’ll need to pull those out of your artwork normally.

There is an area where you can click on to start the encounter, and all the creatures the GM has added to the map will automatically roll their initiative and line up. The PCs can all roll their initiative themselves, and then they slot into the encounter in order. If you click on the spell you are casting, the initiative tracker will keep track of how long the spell has been in effect, as well as if it requires concentration. That’s extremely handy as a reminder. Additionally, whenever you have a condition, your token has an icon attached to it, and you’ll see the name of the condition by your character’s name. It’s also really easy to assign custom conditions, which can be handy for on-the-fly narrative elements you want to make sure to track.

Making Characters

If you’re making a character from inside the campaign, the campaign options will limit what you can use for that PC. If you build a PC outside of the campaign, you won’t have those items restricted, but the GM has to allow the character to join the campaign. So, if you want to make sure you’re not using something that your group has already agreed to exclude, you want to make sure to go into the campaign you have access to first, then create the character from there.

What’s very interesting is how Shard has implemented the Tales of the Valiant rules. When you first create the character, you get a dropdown asking for what ruleset you are using, the 5e SRD or the Black Flag RD. Regardless of if you pick the 2014 5e SRD or the Black Flag RD, you have a few decision options that lets you pull in things from either ruleset. For example:

• You can choose either Race or Lineage and Heritage
• You can choose 5e SRD backgrounds or Black Flag RD, which gives you a talent.
• You can pick a class from either ruleset, for example, the 5e SRD Cleric or the Black Flag RD Cleric
• Subclasses are attached to the class, meaning you can’t pick subclasses that aren’t designed for that version of the class to use with that class.

Because you get feats or talents based on when those come up in your class progression, which one you have access to will be based on the class you picked, but if you picked the Black Flag RD background and then picked the 5e SRD class, you could still pick up a single talent that is related to the background.

If you’re making a 2014 5e SRD character, and you pick a species that is from a source that still assigns character ability boosts, you have the option to change your ability score boosts to whatever ability scores you want. If you picked the Black Flag RD, you get the slightly larger standard array or point buy option, but if you then use a 5e SRD species with that, you get the +1/+2 from that option, so if you are going to mix and match, makes sure you know all of the interactions that are going on.

In addition to customizing the rules, if you have one of the subscriptions, you can make some modifications to your character sheet. Everything will stay in the same place no matter how you modify it, but you can change things like the background color, whether outline elements are rounded or squared, and change what color the fonts are based on themes. You can also upload artwork that you can use as background to your character sheet as well.

There is a section for “heroic abilities,” which is a collection of special abilities that a character may pick up as part of a campaign, rather than as part of character progression. There is also an icon for shape changing which lets you replace your stat block while you are transformed, as well as a section of the character sheet where you can assign companions or other NPCs the PCs may have access to in the campaign.

Practical Experience

In our Heroes of Hovel’s Way campaign, Chris has created custom subclasses for us, as well as building out companions and NPCs. Ang and I both have the companion characters assigned to our character sheets, where we can click on them and bring up their stats, when we need to run them in class. We’ve also got a custom spell added into the campaign as well. Ang and I have added custom dice for our characters, as well as using custom tokens.

Every ability I’ve used so far that gets reset on a short or long rest has reset on that rest. When rolling for attack damage, you can reroll individual dice that are displayed. I’m playing a paladin, so I can click on a box to add in my smite damage when I burn a spell slot. The GM can hover over a token and assign damage based on a list of recent rolls.

I did some customization for my Tales of the Valiant game, which I’m running in the Thrones and Bones setting. For example, I swapped around some of the languages, and I restricted some of the lineages and heritages that are available. In the notes section of the characters, I could post how they arrived at the beginning of the adventure we were playing. Because I had more players than the adventure assumes, I added a few extra characters to an encounter, and it took virtually no effort to do so. It’s also been easy to navigate the adventure using the index for the book that appears next to where the page information appears.

Before we settled on Thrones and Bones for our game, I was adding in additional Kobold Press material that hasn’t appeared on the site yet, like the Tales of the Valiant options available in Campaign Builder: Castles and Crowns. I didn’t get stumped too often as I was adding the lineages, heritages, or subclasses that appear in that book.

For someone that spends hours thinking about what dials to turn and what new material from various products to include in a campaign, I love to add bits and pieces as I have ideas about what I would like to do with those new widgets. I used to write fairly detailed campaign documents spelling out what was and wasn’t going to be used in the campaign, sometimes explaining how some of the books we wanted to use were on the table, but some specific options inside it are off limits. I can focus a lot more on other topics like theme, lines and veils, and people and locations the PCs want to include in the game.

A Note on Finding What You Want

Most functions that interact with images have an internet search associated with it. If you look for a token for a monster, you can use a single click to search the web based on the name of the game object. For example, I imported Strahd’s stat block as a test, and it was very easy to find an image of Strahd. It was also very easy to find alternate artwork of a swarm of bats, which I could switch to when Strahd changes form.

I could also find general map terrain easily using simple search terms. If you find terrain images you can create a grid at whatever scale you want, and if you have a gridded map, there is a template you can use to measure the size of your grid that resizes the map based on that template and where you line it up.

All this works well, and if you’re not running a professional game, or raising money for your actual play based on streaming your videos, its probably not a problem. That said, there are tons of resources for maps in the Marketplace, as well as frames and token images. It’s also worth noting that all of the 5e SRD creatures have assigned images that are pretty functional as well.

What I’m Really Enjoying

There are a number of functions I really like on Shard that make it very attractive to use to run a 5e SRD based game.

• Customizing available character options
• Easily modified standard content
• Subscription options if you want access to Kobold Press material
• Powerful import tools for monster and spell stat blocks
• Easy to modify encounters
• Quick transition into initiative
• Damage and conditions are easily applied
• Easy to interact with rerolls that interact with dice pools
• Can save customized game elements to be used persistently
• Highly customizable character sheet appearance
• Automatically assign treasure and XP
• Can save completed encounters to a journal to be referenced later
• Ability to create a custom ruleset from multiple options
• Can upload sounds and play them during encounters
• Developers active on the Discord and quick to respond not just to bugs, but modeling questions

What I Wish I Didn’t Have to Contend With

There are still some aspects of the VTT that I’m not particularly deft at navigating, and there are some things I wish were available or worked differently.

• No official D&D support
• Limited 3rd party 5e SRD support
• Learning curve to understand some of the terminology in the ruleset
• It’s easy to pull spells or monsters from a different ruleset than intended
• Limited tools for controlling sound clips, outside of manually starting and stopping
• No 3-D capability, which makes it look a little less shiny than other VTTs
• No dynamic lighting, so all visibility on maps must be done manually
• Easy to accidentally mass delete items from your personalize content (ask me how I know)
• Its easy to accidentally mark artwork as a different type of artwork, locking it out of what you want to use it for (for example, marking something as a background instead of a map)
• The map and encounter building tools work well, but you need to understand books and how adventures are structured to utilize it

Final Thoughts

 I said a long time ago that a VTT built for a specific RPG is going to be better for running that game than one that tries to accommodate multiple, potentially very different game systems. Shard is a proof of concept of that statement. 

I’m really impressed with what I can do with Shard. I said a long time ago that a VTT built for a specific RPG is going to be better for running that game than one that tries to accommodate multiple, potentially very different game systems. Shard is a proof of concept of that statement. Like a lot of robust toolsets, there are times you can get lost in the options, but I feel more like it’s a matter of understanding terminology instead of learning a structure that is overly cumbersome.

I would love to see more 3rd party 5e SRD companies convert material for this VTT. I realize that takes time and effort, but I feel like the people at Shard understand how to implement what appears in these supplements better than some other VTTs that sometimes feel like they are snowed under trying to get a large number of systems and supplements to play nice in their system.

If you want a 5e VTT that lets you pick up and go, I can almost recommend Shard, but that’s going to depend on what products you want available in your campaign. If you want to engage with Kobold Press material, you’re solid. If you’re a fan of some of the other 3rd party 5e SRD companies that have been gaining momentum over the last few years, or you really want official D&D content, I don’t know if the ease of use in game will offset time you need to take to set things up, even if you can set things up exactly the way you want them. But if you’re the type of person that has a favorite font, and you know exactly how big you want your cells to be in a spreadsheet, and you have default conditional formatting you like to apply, I think this is going to be something that will be very rewarding (it’s me, I’m talking about me).