Dungeons and Dragons

Just sounds like a headache, and you KNOW their tools are going to be clunky as shit

That's been my biggest struggle as well. I can spend way too much time finding the right map for an encounter, only to never actually use it.

The other option is building the encounters around the map, but a lot of the maps I find don't 'inspire' me a whole lot, or aren't thematically relevant to what I want to run (this dwarf king's tomb looks cool, but I'd want at least a few other rooms in this dungeon, with other encounters. And my players are on a quest to kill a dragon, not a dwarf king)

I almost prefer a minimalistic tool; just a basic map that I can draw up quickly, basic tokens for enemies, and just flesh out my descriptions more.

i’d you’re gonna do a 3d map, dungeon alchemist is the way to go. that’s what i’ve been using. it’s pretty versatile and gets frequent content updates. nice looking maps in 2 or 3 dimensions.

Like... we switched to meeting on discord and I scribbled out updates to the 'table' in paint. none of the VTT's were flexible enough for the homebrews I was cooking up, though.

Our group uses Roll20 character sheets on tablets around the table, they're really handy for managing all the buffs and math (Pathfinder 1e). Still rolling dice and using minis. That's the right level of digital stuff for me.

I tried virtual tabletops in 2020 but I just didn't enjoy it the same way. Little things that don't matter while you're sitting round a physical table with your friends, like waiting while other players take their turns in combat encounters, suddenly play out very differently when you're sitting at home on your own and can easily get distracted by your phone or TV without appearing rude. The players all just felt a lot less connected to what was going on in the game.

My group meets infrequently anyway and will often fill a whole day with the equivalent of multiple sessions when we do meet up, but when we played online during Covid we found it hard-going just getting through a two hour session.

We're all spread out across our city and getting together for in-person games was always a pain. Pre-pandemic we played maybe once a month on average, though our games usually ended up being at least 4-8 hours at a time. Since the pandemic when we switched over to online, we're playing weekly in a consistently 2hr game. I actually prefer how it is now, I like the smaller chunks of time and I like not having to always drive over to others' houses. It does take a bit more prep work for whomever is GMing, since alot of us tend towards battlemaps, but we've also done a bit of theatre of the mind as well.

I honestly don't care to go back to live games, maybe it'd be fine for one-off substitutions of our normal weekly games, but with kids it's a huge hassle to organize for those long games and honestly, I just don't know that I have the patience to hang around that long for games anymore. The other people I game with tend to be horrible about timing and will setup ridiculously long combat encounters, such that we're spending a full 6 hours on a combat session because they thought us going up against like 30 guys would be a quick fight. And of course the enemies NEVER run away, they will always fight to the last man for the vaguest of reasons.

I just wish there were better ways to find players for your in person game.

"Community second"? That's very optimistic. Personally, I can't recall the last time WotC considered their community anything more than a source of backlash (and rightfully so, with their history).