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.
   

Summary of Differences between Level Up 5E and Original 5E

These are just some notes I took when trying to figure out the differences between Level Up Advanced 5E (A5E) and original D&D 5E (O5E).  They aren't necessarily complete or particularly organized, and I'll probably update this later.

1. Race has been divided into Heritage (biological) and Culture (where you were raised). 
2. Ability attribute bonuses are based upon your Background instead of either Heritage or Culture.  In O5E they were in race. This mostly means A5E characters should use A5E backgrounds and O5E characters should stick with O5E backgrounds.
   
3. Destiny  define your character's primary motivation and gives more structure to how to gain Inspiration and spend Inspiration.  There is also a Fulfillment Feature where you gain a special ability upon reaching your destiny.  Inspiration is also in O5E officially for good roleplay, particularly if it's not in a way advantageous to the party, but in practice DMs rarely grant it and all it often allows for is advantage.
4. Expertise is not just double your proficiency bonus.  Instead, it is a bonus die that starts at 1d4 and if you have stacking sources of expertise, they increase the die size.  There are more sources of expertise than in O5E.
   
1. Flanking is an optional rule in 5E.  In A5E, it's a default rule that grants expertise to the attack roll.
2. Characters get skill specialties that grant expertise (e.g. specializing in flattery grants expertise to Persuasion checks when appropriate)
   
5. Culture and Engineering are two new skills.
   
6. Classes are different.  Some of them have changed names, but even the ones that have the same name are different.
   
1. Monk -> Adept
2. Barbarian -> Berserker
3. Paladin -> Herald
   
4. Marshal is a 4E warlord
5. Rangers don't get spellcasting by default and have more exploration features than most classes.
   
7. In general, they wanted to make martial characters have more interesting options than just move and attack, so they all have maneuvers that require Exertion to use and a pool of Exertion that refreshes typically on short rests.  Think of them like martial spells.
8. It's also noted that martial classes are supposed to have more out of combat utility than they used to.
9. Exploration is a more emphasized pillar in A5E compared to O5E.
1. There are more rules about journeying and activities characters can take while doing so.
   
2. Food and water are abstracted away into Supplies.
3. Fatigue replaces Exhaustion.
4. If you gain more than 1 level of Fatigue, normal rest becomes insufficient to restore it and you need to find a Haven (known safe place) to get good rest to reduce Fatigue by 1 each long rest.
   
5. Strife is the mental equivalent to Fatigue.
   
10. Criticals
1. There are criticals with saves now
2. There are also criticals with ability checks
   
11. Combat
1. There are critical failures and successes with saves now.
2. When healed from 0 or fewer hit points, you gain a level of Fatigue.
3. Attacking from above gives you an expertise die.  (I have the higher ground!)
4. You can use a bonus action to fight "back-to-back" with an adjacent ally.  Your passive perception increases by 2 until start of your next turn or either of you move.  You cannot be flanked.
5. Dragging an ally uses your reaction and movement costs are tripled.  It still provokes attacks of opportunity.
6. Pulling from below -- if you are 5 feet below your target and not smaller than the target and you aren't grappled or restrained, gain an expertise die on strength checks and saving throws made against it.
7. Press the attack -- before you take the attack action, you can use a bonus action to designate one creature within your reach not already the target of a press the attack action.  Until the beginning of your next turn, melee attacks against that creature gain an expertise die, unless you have disadvantage.  Target can use its reaction to Fall Back.
8. There's Sprint in addition to Dash.  If you are unencumbered and not wearing heavy armor, speed quadruples.  If  encumbered, then triples.  Must be a straight line.  Can only sprint for number of turns equal to Con mod for free.  Otherwise, constitution (athletics) check with DC 10+ 1 per previous check.  Failure gains level of Fatigue.  This fatigue goes away after one minute of not sprinting.  You can't sprint if you have Fatigue.
9. Basic Maneuvers instead of making an attack: disarm, grapple, knockdown, overrun, or shove.
10. If you have the Extra Attack feature, the bonus action for an extra attack with the off-hand weapon allows for two attacks instead of just one.
11. Massive damage rules -- if you get knocked to 0 or below and the hit dealt 20 + 3xLvl or more damage, make a DC 15 con save or die instantly.  If you succeed, you get one level of Fatigue and Strife.
12. Taking damage when at 0 hit points can be an extra failed death save, level fatigue, or level of strife, attacker's choice (or just DM's choice if there is no attacker)
13. You can convert a critical hit against you into a normal hit at the cost of using your reaction and suffering one fatigue level.  Or sacrificing your shield.  Fatigue gained during the combat only takes effect after combat is over.
14. There's a Doomed condition where minor healing isn't sufficient to heal from imminent death.  7 or more levels of fatigue is one way to get Doomed.
    
12. There are rules for Strongholds as another way to spend your gold.  They always count as Havens.
    
13. There are rules for Followers.  They They feel more like contractors to me.  Another way to spend gold, 1-time fee.
14. Feats
1. There are new feats.  Some old feats have changed.  Some have been renamed.
2. There are multiclass feats.
   
3. There are feats that have prerequisites.
   
15. Spells
1. Just because a spell has the same name doesn't mean it's the same spell.  E.g. fireball has been nerfed to actually follow the spell power guidelines.  In O5E, it's actually overpowered due to its iconic status.
16. There's some rules for actions characters can take between adventures during their downtime, including training or modifying their spells.
17. There's an official Prestige system.

You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, piano solo, arr. David Dinh

So, there's the music sheets site that I'm subscribed to called MuseScore.  I got an email from them on Dec. 8 with holiday music suggestions and this arrangement of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" by David Dinh caught my attention.  I've been obsessing over it to get it presentable by Christmas, and while it's a bit on the sloppy side, I'm pretty happy to get this far after two weeks!

Little Red Riding Hood by Rachmaninoff

I've been working on this piece since the Kapustin Toccatina.  While I could improve upon this take, I'm thinking of moving on to other pieces.  I might try for a better recording later, in which case I'll replace the one here.  This piece has a lot of fast jumping chords that just take a lot of repetition to get the muscle memory right.

Rachmaninoff originally didn't give this piece a title as evocative as "Little Red Riding Hood", but decided to reveal his inspiration later after others wanted to arrange it for instruments other than piano.  Listening to it, I feel like Little Red Riding Hood just gets caught and eaten by the Wolf.

Leon learning to ride a bike

At work, if I find myself explaining a topic multiple times, I decide to write it down on wiki so that I can give a quick summary and then just link to the wiki for more details.  Lately, I've been finding myself relating the same story multiple times, so I figure I'd go with the same strategy outside of work.

This is going to be about how Leon learned to ride a pedal bike, without training wheels, at age three and a half.  I think I didn't know how to ride a bike without training wheels until I was eight or something.

Current best practice regarding teaching kids how to ride a bike goes something like this:

1. The hardest part of riding a bike is the balancing and steering, which actually has nothing to do with pedaling and can be done safely and early with a balance bike, which is pretty much a bike without pedals or brakes and depends solely on a person's feet.
   
   We got Leon a balance bike (a Strider) at age 2.  He mostly walked around with it rather than actually balancing or coasting until he was 3 or so.  The best way to learn coasting is to find a gentle downhill incline.
   
   
2. Kids that use balance bikes are used to being able to move their feet forward and backward and thus have a hard time dealing with coaster brakes (i.e. a brake that engages by pedaling backwards).  So, a balance bike kid should switch to a bike without coaster brakes.
   
   Because the CPSC requires bikes below a certain size have coaster brakes, it can be tricky to find a small bike with hand brakes and no coaster brake.  The Woom 2 comes with a coaster brake due to the CPSC requirement, but the company sells a freewheel kit for cheap because they believe the CPSC requirement to be outdated.  We bought a used Woom 2 that still had the coaster brake and Leon did indeed have a lot of trouble not accidentally engaging the brake.  So we bought the freewheel kit and it worked out a lot better.
   
   
3. It can be very helpful to remove the pedals from the bike at first to treat it as a balance bike with hand brakes.  Most balance bikes don't have hand brakes, so this means that the kid is learning one thing at a time, in this case, using the hand brake.
   
   We definitely did this for Leon and had him get used to balancing on the new bike going down hills and learning to use the hand brake.
   
   
4. There is no training wheels step, because learning how to balance and steer was dealt with in step 1.  I think it took roughly a month or two for Leon to learn to use the pedal bike.
   

 Some other miscellaneous tips:

1. Personally, I recommend biking gloves in addition to a helmet both because kids usually find them cool and I want to minimize the chance of an injury putting a kid off of wanting to learn how to ride.  You are way more likely to fall on onto your hands than head, though of course the head is more important to protect.
   
   
2. A lot of kids bikes are very heavy and thus may be less fun to use.  Woom makes some pretty quality kids bikes.  They aren't cheap, but they're also reasonably easy to buy used and sell for around the same cost.
   

Since I really enjoy cycling, I really wanted to maximize the chance of Leon enjoying it and having family cycling trips.  I'm happy to say that he does enjoy his time on the bike and that he learned way earlier than I did.

Here's a video for the first time Leon managed to pedal on the bike for more than a few seconds!

March 23, 2022: Three piano recordings

There's not really any reason why anyone would be following my blog, but hey!  I figure I might as well post some recordings I've made playing various pieces on the piano.

This first one is called "Let the living beware!" by Yu-Peng Cheng, arranged by ChaconneScott and Jasper Hu.  It's from a video game that I play called Genshin Impact and is the theme music Hu Tao, a young girl that is also the director for a funeral parlor and tries to drum up sales by offering buy a coffin, get one free.  Very Halloween themed.

 

From the same game and composer is "Ruu's Song", this time arranged by CC Music.  Ruu is a child of priest in ghost form on an isolated island who was the only friend of the local god, a thunderbird.  This was his song to the god.

The last one is an old favorite of mine that I played in high school.  "Diabolic Suggestion" by Sergei Prokofiev.  It's a very fun and evocative piece that uses both the lowest note and the highest note in the piano.  And possibly every note between, but I haven't checked.

New Digital Piano: Kawai Novus NV5

I recently bought a new digital piano: a Kawai Novus NV5.  Since I've found other people's thoughts online very useful, I figured I'd write about it in the hope that it may help others.

First, a bit of background.

 I started taking piano lessons at age six and played actively up through high school, with the most time on a Yamaha C1 baby grand.  In college, I stopped taking lessons, bought a Yamaha P-140, and would play once in a while; but not to the point of studying any new pieces.  After college, I played almost none at all and the piano sat in its case for long periods of time.  That had been the situation for more than fifteen years.

Some months ago, I was watching an anime about piano called Forest of Piano.  Its intro contains Chopin's Etude in C Major, Op. 10, No. 1, which is a piece I've performed before.  It was just repeatedly reminding me that, hey, I can do that!  (Well, sort of.  My execution was never as clean.)  Why was I just watching some fictional character enjoying piano instead of playing myself?  It really started getting to me.

So, I set up my old Yamaha P-140 again and picked a piece that was reasonably challenging and sounded cool to me; more on the piece later.  While practicing, I found that some of the keys would once in a while fail to reset, the speakers would sometimes crackle, the cheap stand I had was a bit shaky, and the pedal would move around if I wasn't careful.  I promised myself that if learned the piece pretty well and thought I'd enjoy playing more that I'd look into getting a new piano.  Still digital, due to needing to practice quietly often.

Months later, here we are.

I originally thought that I'd get either a Kawai CA-79 or CA-99 due to people's praises about their great action, mimicking that of a grand piano's.  Of course, one should always actually try out a piano before committing, so I went to Prosser's Piano & Organ to check them out.  I decided I liked Kawai's sound signature more than Yamaha's and the action was pretty nice, though still notably fake.  However, I found that the speakers of the models on the floor were disappointingly buzzy for certain notes and that the key texture was distracting.  While I'd probably get used to the texture, I was pretty sure the sound would just keep on bothering me.  I didn't know if it issue was just the specific pianos at the store, but I didn't want to risk buying a new one and discovering that it had the same issue.  The vibrations from the sound board of the CA-99 were fun, though.

Since I was at the store anyway, I figured I'd try some of the other pianos out.  One of them was the Novus NV5.  I had read that the NV5 had the same speaker and sound board set up as the CA-99 and that the main difference was just that the NV5 has real upright action, so I wasn't expecting it to overcome my dislike of the buzzing.  But I ended up being really surprised!

It sounded very convincingly to me like a real piano.  I'm sure there are many people who would be able to immediately tell the difference, and I think it benefited from being upright shaped due to uprights sounding somewhat boxy in general, but the distinction from a real piano was pretty subtle to me.  It certainly did not have the buzzy quality that the CA-79 and CA-99 in the store had.  I don't know if the comparison would be generally true across other NV5's and CA-x9s.

And of course, the action felt like a real piano, notably the bounce back on repeated notes for the piece I had worked on.  Playing the NV5 was just so much fun and brought a smile to my face.  I ended up playing various things and performing various tests for a few hours across two different days before discussing with my wife and buying it.  Because the NV5S was coming out, I was able to buy the one on the floor and avoid any risk of a different one having buzzing speaker issues.

Some of my notes and comparisons:

• My Yamaha P-140 is of course somewhere between 15 and 20 years old and was much cheaper than the NV5, but besides some of of the more obvious advantages, some unexpected differences for me were:
• The timbre difference between soft and loud was more pronounced for me in the NV5.  I really enjoyed playing softly on the NV5, whereas on the P-140 it felt a lot more like just turning the volume down.
• The NV5 has sympathetic resonance and the P-140 does not and it was a pretty noticeable difference.
• The action of the NV5, at what I thought was the same volume, seemed a little heavier than the P-140, CA-79, CA-99
• I had read that the action made the piano play more loudly with headphones on, and while that is true, it was a pretty small difference and I can't imagine it bothering my family any more so than my P-140.  So far, that has held true.
  
• There was also a Novus NV10 at the store.  While having a real grand piano action was great, the sound was definitely clearly artificial to me and didn't elicit the same marvelous illusion of playing on a real piano for me.  It was better than the CA-79 and CA-99 at the store, though.  I also did not like how it looked as much, so the net effect was just that I did not enjoy it as much as the NV5, which was a pleasant surprise for my wallet.
• A common consideration that comes up in regards to the NV5 is that due to it having a real upright piano action, it includes a notable disadvantage of an upright: the key needs to reset at least some before being played again, or else it will not sound.  This limits how fast a note can repeat and may limit other techniques that depend on the key not being fully reset (less fast repeated pianissimo maybe?  I can't say that I've ever intentionally depended on this other than for very fast repetition).  On this point:
• I would indeed sometimes hit dead notes on the pieces I played, but this was due to poor technique on my part and not because the piece ran into the limitations of an upright action.
• Compared to a K300 Aures in the store, very fast repeated notes would actually "blur" unnaturally on the NV5 in a way that I don't think a real piano would ever do while still sounding mostly distinct on the K300.  But this was at a speed beyond any piece I've ever had to play.  It would probably make playing something like the Scarlatti Sonata in D minor  K. 141 harder, though, if it's even possible.
  
• The key does not have to completely reset on either the NV5 nor K300 to sound, but it actually did have to reset further on the NV5 than the K300 to sound.  So, the K300 is actually somewhat better than the NV5 in this regard.
• I decided that, while this limitation was unfortunate, I'd be okay avoiding pieces that can't be played on an upright.  At some point you just need a real grand piano to play certain pieces; I've seen avant garde stuff where the pianist reaches into the piano to pluck the strings.  On the positive side, I tend to like playing on random pianos and this would allow me to practice avoiding technique that cause dead notes on real uprights.
  
• I did not spend a lot of time on the K300 Aures, but the action felt the same to me, other than what I've noted above.
• The NV5 does not support note-off velocity, but I've never played that subtly in my life and don't anticipate doing so in the future.
• After the piano was delivered, there was sometimes rattling near the touch screen that was not present at the store, which was very disappointing.  Eventually, I figured out that pressing in on the cabinet above the touch pad stopped it.

 I've been playing and enjoying the piano somewhere between 1-2 hours a day for the past few weeks.  Here's a video of me playing Nikolai Kapustin's Etude No. 3: Toccatina, Op. 40 on the piano, which was the piece I decided I had to learn before considering buying something new.  This was just a quick recording I made since my parents asked me to send them one, so the execution is not the cleanest and you can hear my kid in the background at times, but it does show that the piano does not have issue with repeated notes at that tempo.