Physical Minis on a Digital Tabletop

I'm happy to say that we've recently realized a long standing dream of mine: to be able to play D&D using physical minis and dice on a digital tabletop.  This is a write-up describing the set up, in case it helps others considering something similar.

Here's a picture of the set up in gaming mode:

...and here it is in normal dining table form:

The key components:

1. A television laying flat to display the maps on.
   
2. A table with built-in storage to hide the TV when not playing.
   
3. Software that makes it easy to display the maps and manage encounters.
   

The Television - 43" Hisense A6H

With a TV, you need some way to level it and some plexiglass to protect the screen.  I went with a case from digitaltabletops.com for around $525, as they seem to make it their business and are clear about which TVs they're sure their case works with.  I would give them a 4/5:

1. Definitely accomplishes the primary goal of leveling the TV and protecting it, and it looks pretty good.
   
2. There's some minor cosmetic gouges in the wood that are hard to notice unless you are looking.
3. There was not enough protection during shipping and two of the corner legs were broken off.  I was able to super-glue the pieces back together.
4. There's a minor gap of a few millimeters between the screen and the plexiglass due to the lower bezel of the TV.  I can understand how that's impractical to eliminate this gap in a case meant to accommodate a variety of TVs.  You can still easily tell which square a mini is in.
   

The TV is a 43" Hisense A6H.  It's relatively cheap at $240.  It's the largest size that fits horizontally inside a wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table with player desks on each side.  It has wider than average viewing angles, which is more important for our use case than typical TV usage.  It doesn't have a raised bezel on the top or sides, only the bottom, so there's not much of a gap between the plexiglass and the screen.  It's 4K, which seems good considering how close people will be viewing it.  It has Chromecast built-in, which can be handy for casting the maps from Chrome without needing to use an HDMI cable, but I've found that our network connectivity is not robust enough to avoid video compression artifacts.

Its main downsides of not being bright enough for usage in the sun or not having dark enough blacks for usage in the dark aren't relevant for our use case of playing in the evening with the lights on.

Alternatives considered

1. The Frame TV from Samsung is more expensive ($700 for an old version) and has worse viewing angles.  But it lays flat, so you don't need a case to level it, though you might want to raise the TV up a bit.  Since the plexiglass doesn't have to integrate with a case, you can make sure that it's completely flush with the screen to minimize the gap.  Not having seen this set up in person, I don't know if I would have preferred this over what I have now.
   
2. A projector is smaller and completely eliminates the gap between minis and the picture.  But it's difficult to get a bright picture in a lit room, casts shadows, and the light fixture in our dining room prevents us from ceiling mounting it.  It'd also be a pain to bust it out and put it away again. 
   

The Table - Wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table

The table is a medium wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table in rustic elm.  It's one of those gaming tables with removable leaves and a vault to store ongoing board games, puzzles, and other similar things.  For example, a television.  My family is very happy with the table. It's beautiful, very solid, and perfect for this use case.  There's plenty of reviews and videos about this table, so I'm going to avoid going over well-covered features and instead focus on some of the points that are specifically relevant for why we chose it, more subtle considerations, or things that surprised me.

1. The table is 31" high, which is higher than the standard dining table height of 28-30".  Since it's listed on their site, it shouldn't be a surprise.  What surprised me is how much the additional inch bothers me.  You generally want the surface to be at elbow height or lower.  It's probably the thing I like the least about the table, but lowering it would risk the table getting in the way of bigger people's legs.  It's just the cost of having a 4.5" gaming vault, which is needed to fit the TV case with a height of 4".  We just plan on getting used to it.
   
2. I specifically got this over some similar tables due to its leaves system being water resistant to spills with its magnet, groove, and gasket system.  I didn't want a liquid spill to immediately soak the TV.  Some tables deal with this by having a single piece of wood instead, but that's pretty hefty.  And it's actually pretty convenient to lift just the end topper up like a lid to access the insides.
3. Some people have reported warping of the topper leaves over time, especially on wide tables.  If it warps within the first few weeks, Wyrmwood would definitely cover replacement, but I was concerned about it in the long term.  So, we got the finger-jointed topper leaves which should be more resistant to warping as it is glued together from multiple pieces of wood.  While I don't prefer the look, my wife does, and it was cheaper.
   
4. Our wood choice has knots that were unfilled for us.  We would have preferred them being filled with clear epoxy.  Some people have been complaining that theirs were filled with non-matching wood filler, so I don't know what is standard practice for them.
5. The magnets on the topper leaves trigger the sleep behavior of my wife's laptop.  So, she has to be careful of her laptop placement.

Table Layout

This part is likely not relevant to most people, but it's the part I spent the most time planning around.  It's figuring out the table layout.

Since our primary use case for using the gaming vault is D&D, we had the issue of needing to provide a surface for people's character sheets, laptops, and so on.  Some of the options we discarded:

1. Doing this in the vault did not seem very comfortable.
2. The table edge is not wide enough by itself.
3. Wyrmwood sells player desks for this purpose, but we didn't want the table to be any longer to fit in the room.  So while we could use player desks along the width of the table, we couldn't along the length.
   
4. Wyrmwood also sells hobby vaults that could help, and having two hobby vaults on each end of the table would do the trick, but they reduce the overall capacity of the table--making us unable to store the player desks in the table when not in use.

What I really wanted was to be able to keep some of the topper leaves on at the end.  But the way they stay in place is with rubber studs intended to be at the corners of the table, so they only stay in place when all the topper leaves are installed and are quite loose otherwise.

So, what I ended up doing was putting some cabinet bumpers on the sides of the player desks and using the player desks to stop the toppers from moving.  It's still not extremely secure this way--with enough force, the player desks can be moved sideways--but in practice it works just fine with our group.  Others have suggested just using cabinet liners.

 

I did get one hobby vault for the DM.  But so far, we haven't really needed to access the inside of it in the middle of a game. And it turns out if you leave two toppers on both sides of the table, the player desks with furniture bumpers fit in the middle pretty much perfectly resulting in all of the toppers being very secure:

 

This also gives more storage space overall.  The downside would be inability to access this storage while stuff is on the toppers, as you'd have to lift it up vs sliding the hobby vault lid forward, and the increased height compared to just using the hobby vault.  We'll be evaluating which set up we prefer.

Software - Foundry VTT

Foundry VTT is pay $50 once software, which I prefer over subscriptions.  Since my use case is playing locally, I don't need a hosting service.  Foundry seems very popular and has a great variety of third-party content and modules, some of which make hybrid play with physical minis on a TV very easy.  The key ones for me were:

1. Lock View -- Easily size the grid to physical 1" squares on the TV and lock the view so that token movement doesn't trigger panning near the edges.
2. Monk's Active Display -- Hide unnecessary UI elements.

One of the things that I like to do when I run games is to play music and sound effects, but it gets hectic to manage.  Foundry supports automatically playing music when switching to a scene, and a module called Automated Animations supports automatically playing a matching sound when you roll an attack or cast a spell.  JB2A is a module that can supply the animations and on their Discord is a link to a bunch of sounds.

Alternatives considered

I play Level Up Advanced 5th Edition (A5E) rather than D&D straight, and it turns out Foundry has gaming system support for it that seems already pretty complete and has active development.  I hadn't realized that when I bought Foundry, but for that reason alone it's going to be hard to beat.  But here were my thoughts on other options prior to buying Foundry:

1. Arkenforge.  I actually bought it when it went on sale since it's explicitly made for in-person play.  However, having the option for remote play is nice and Foundry just has a lot more support in pre-made content and modules.  I also preferred the Foundry UI over Arkenforge.
2. Roll20.  During the pandemic and after the DM of one of my groups moved, Roll20 was what he ran and I deeply appreciated being able to continue playing.  But it was always a little flaky and its advanced features require a subscription.
   
3. Fantasy Grounds.  I haven't actually tried this one, but did look into it since I've been hearing about it over the years.  But it seems general impression I get is that it doesn't seem to be improving as quickly as Foundry.
4. Maptool.  This was my first VTT that I used over 20 years ago, but as it never comes up as a recommendation I figured it had been superseded.