For a social hobby I mostly play TTRPGs nowadays, and I mostly play them online since it's quite hard to find a group IRL. Especially for me, in a (yet) foreign environment with a common tongue that I'm not (yet) proficient in.

Which is not an excuse not to play, of course. And it brings up a choice of a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) software. I've tried maybe not many, but at least a few of them VTTs out there, starting from MapTool. When involved in sessions of another GM and my good friend whom I met already abroad, we even used Miro in place of VTT (since essentially Miro IS a VTT, only a more generic one). It worked smooth, and I almost liked it.

Eventually I stopped my search on a Virtual Table called PlanarAlly, and here is why.

^ a virtual room for a Traveller RPG game, outlined in PlanarAlly

Almost all the necessary things. That includes:

• PA is a self-hosted solution. Its server can be built/spawned on a RaspberryPi. I mean, on a RPi-3! E.g. Foundry already supports RPi-s only from the fourth.

• PA is free & open-source. And I like being in full control with my creativity tools (looking at you again, Foundry).

• PA's client works in a browser. Not only that, but its sole developer puts extra effort to have a good support for tablets and even less conventional devices for tabletop RPG gaming.

• It has internal dice-roller with all 6 kinds of polyhedral dice. A deck of cards would be nice to have too. And maybe a dedicated procentile.

• It supports drawings. Not as sophisticated as Miro's, but the base primitive shapes are there, supported also as overlays for "spells". It fits. And probably does not use plenty of resources.

• Align-to-grid feature for imported maps. It's super useful!

• Creation and use of tokens is quick and straightforward.

• Dynamic lighting is supported too, and is already quite advanced.

• Recent update of a note taking feature brought support for Markdown.

• A paranoid GM like me will be happy to find an "export" feature for backing up and re-using their campaign room content.

^ "Doom of the Savage Kings" scenario prepared with use of Dynamic Lighting

All the things not necessary, e.g.

• PA doesn't have internal voice support. I doubt that it is required from VTT since most likely talking will be offloaded to an external tool.

• PA doesn't implement programmable macro buttons for users. That helps not to turn a RP-session into a push-button game. Priorities first.

• Also, there's no interactive character sheet by default Mind the "Markdown notes" feature from above: all one needs for charsheets most of the time is a bunch of formatted tables. PA's notes can render them.

• PA doesn't render "3D-accelerated weather effects" and such. That would help creating immersion, but so does a good story.

As it looks to me, PA implements almost everything I need and does not include things that I don't need. Which is a sign of a good design.