The best VTT is a giant, free, infinite, Canva whiteboard

Friendship with VTTs ended, Canva is now my best friend

I had a brief stint as a paid DM for online D&D 5e amid a very long stint of being a brick-and-mortar, home game, in-person D&D 5e DM. Online GMing in 2021 made me loathe online gaming generally. I would justify this by prevaricating endlessly about in-person gathering and the irreplaceable alchemy of real human contact.

On reflection, I really just hated, hated using a VTT. I realize now, as I took on a big life shift that requires me to move gaming online even with my local friends, that most of what I hate about gaming online is loading up modules, learning a new interface, integrated dice rollers and video, snapping grids, monster databases, all that shit. Even the simple stuff like Owlbear Rodeo was too much obnoxious overhead — setting up a room, dropping in a map, setting up a grid for locking tokens, and on, and on, and on.

In person, I could create brilliant pen-and-paper environments with giant sticky notes, printed maps, flip charts, vinyl play mats, and artsy handouts. It took me a while to figure out that what I needed to do this digitally was software I use nearly every day at my 9-to-5 job.

What is Canva?

Canva is best known as a software that lets basically anyone make simple designs for print and digital media. More and more, they’re also a go-to for experienced designers to throw little images together with a more lightweight kit than Adobe or Affinity.

What almost nobody uses it for is live online tabletop roleplaying.

How do you use it as a VTT?

Canva’s mighty underused feature is called Canva whiteboard. It’s a simple drag-and-drop environment where you can throw down any images, fields, shapes, text, icons, whatever you need, with no boundaries. You can drop in any image you like, edit it, crop it, scale it, and lock it.

Instead of maps, you can just drop in an image of a map and slide tokens around on top. You can drop in an image of a character sheet and just write, adding little sticky notes wherever you need.

All of these features are totally free, without limit to how many images you can upload, how many boards you can make, or how many people you can share the boards with. The table is always open for anyone to access, even if they don’t have a Canva account.

My players are having a blast with Canva. They drop in character art, landscape photos, visual references, sticky notes with important conditions or character notes, and little image cards that have special abilities. They even have fun hiding tiny little text Easter eggs for other players in very small type, discoverable on a close zoom.

Sure, it’s not good if you really need to lock a highly specific set of permissions for each player’s visibility, player-by-player. It’s not good if you’re playing a game with elaborate dice macros and built-in character sheets. It’s not good if you’re worried about players sabotaging the table in your off-hours (though you can always make a backup). It’s not good if you need a VTT to have things like automated fog of war and grid-snapping. None of these are problems I personally have, so I’m in heaven.

Canva VTT Tips

• Reference pages: I keep a region of the whiteboard with screenshots of key game pages and rules reference, and keep an entirely separate GM board with lots of notes, dungeon maps, and adventure outlines.

• Player materials: Not only are all character sheets on the whiteboard (locked image, editable text boxes over each field), but also retainers, stats for mounts, full magic item entries, special ability text, and other reference images about their backstory. Let your players drop in whatever they need to flesh out their space.

• Font and visual references: Make the whiteboard thematic! Change the font to be genre-appropriate, drop in borders, images, backgrounds, and art that gives a sense of mood and landscape.

• GM Board: I keep an entirely separate second whiteboard open that only I have access to, where I lay out all of the GM material I don’t necessarily want players to have. For something like Public Access, I just screenshot the adventure pages of each active mystery and put them all on one big spread. You could do this with pamphlet modules, Mythic Bastionland Omens, etc.

• Back-ups: A whiteboard can have multiple pages. Since I like to keep everything on one page, I end each session by duplicating the main page, locking the duplicate, and putting the date on it as a backup in case anything goes wrong on the main board.

And on that note, what about Google Docs?

A bunch of us hopped online to spontaneously play What Dust Remains after Vincent Baker spent a few weeks hyping it in interviews. It’s a storytelling game played out with prompts and a deck of cards. At first, an industrious player started taking notes of our progress in Google Docs.

After half an hour, we were just playing the game in Google Docs. All of our prompt answers became notes, and each prompt we dealt with became a screenshot. With four people working in a doc, you get lots of storytelling done. I know lots of people have been running more narrative games out of Google Sheets for character keepers for a long while, but I think even very trad games can benefit from using giant online whiteboards as VTTs.

Recently, at PAX Unplugged, my buddy Hexed Press Todd and I walked the floor, looking at these wild multimedia booths for elaborate VTTs and virtual reality experiments. The booth for Foundry looked like something out of last week’s Game Awards. For a certain type of player, this style of highly programmed play has promise and appeal. Baby, I’m running in the other direction.

Notes

• Check out this livestream Todd and I did! I gave some tips on running Mythic Bastionland. It’s a long rambling conversation, but maybe you’ll like it.

• The last YouTube video I made was 2025 TTRPG predictions. Maybe I should go back and revisit those predictions, given the year is over and that video was so popular.