#burstmail

That's the lovely lady Ms. Christine! She is a magic cat.

I LOVED HER SHE WAS SO CUTE I wish she was playable instead of Grandpa

Her realizing how the dream was erasing her disability and in turn her history and connection with bird grandpa was one of the most compelling parts of the event to me

Oh yea no problem! PREAMBLE: To all non-anons: please check out Hardcaptor Sakuga: Full Metal Petticoat! It's avaliable for free on itch.io here, and has a unique combat system, fitting and inspirational artwork, and some of the best random tables I've seen in a TTRPG. If you're interested in a non-pbta magical girl game with a bit more focus on the magical fights of it all, I highly recommend it over its contemporaries! So, Hardcaptor Sakuga is still a WIP game (though work has been paused on it for some time now), so it doesn't have any native VTT support anywhere. For our simplicity, we just ended up using a gameless roll20 client (i.e., there's no actual character sheets on roll20 itself, just a gameboard everygone can interact with) to handle dice, armor tokens, and imp/youma/kijo statblock information. Roll20 has its issues, and you could probably mirror my setup in your VTT of choice, but it was what I was familiar with so it's what I went with.

For character sheets, each player has just been using this fanmade google sheet in their own tab which is linked on the games itch.io page! Your players just need to make their own copy of it to edit it and put their character info on it. To go into more detail about how I actually end up running the game itself...

I basically set up a TCG-style playmat on roll20 itself wherein everyone can place their dice and everyone can see the enemies dice pool and each players dice pool. (ignore the anontomo-shaped graffiti, hehe!) Each dice is set-up as it's own token on the roll20 page itself and all the players can drag and drop them once they've rolled their dice, aligning to the grid in their little player square areas.

To set up a dice like this that your players can drag, just hit the create character button on your game-less roll20 client:

Set up the character settings like this, and you and your players should be able to drag the dice onto the map as needed (you can put your dice in their own folder for convenience, if you want). NOTE: The GM will be able to move all the dice on the board, but other players can only move the dice they've placed, not the dice their fellow players have placed. This usually isn't a big issue unless you're sharing dice via a feature like some of the Knight's abilities. Then, your players can place dice on the map when they've rolled the dice for the turn and everyone can see all the dice as if they were playing at a table together (and honestly, probably easier than trying to look at small dice across a table). You can do this same thing for guard tokens as well! A couple notes on this: the game does suggest each person using their own colored dice: you can totally do this with roll20 as well, but I have 5 player characters and we were originally just going to do a oneshot, so I didn't bother making 30 different colored dice for each value. If you have less players (I'd suggest the 3-4 the game suggests for easier encounter balancing), you can totally just recolor the dice and make a different dice token for each value from 1-6 for each player! For the dice themselves, I just seperated some dice I found on a stock photo website. Here's a link if you would like to use them!

As well, dragging each die on one by one as the GM does take a long time if you have an enemy with a large dice pool - but honestly, not much longer than rolling initiative individually for 5+ enemies in any dragon-like ttrpg.

An average players hand after the Roll Phase is usually going to look like this (the orange tokens being the magical girl's Guard Tokens)

This is what an average enemies dice pool might look like, in this case a hypothetical dice pool for an enemy with 2 dice per player character. I usually group dice of the same value into columns together for easier readability.

Once players spend their dice to remove dice from the enemies pool, or at the End Phase if they have any unused dice left over, you can just delete them from the board until the players roll their next dice in the next Roll Phase. One last thing about dice: Occasionally, there's a mechanic that will tell you to 'flip' a dice. Obviously you can't do that with a PNG, but its pretty simple to do: Just remember how each opposite side of the dice corresponds. For d6s, a 1 flips to a 6, a 2 flips to a 5, and a 3 flips to a 4, and vice versa. They always add together to 7! For clocks, as you can see in the full image, I just drew them in the empty space on the gameboard! As the game goes on and we start more clocks, I might have to make them smaller... For enemy information, I just copy-paste from my notes into a handout!

(a monster my players never actually fought because the Tempest rolled an antimagic field as soon as it appeared)

That's just about everything I do! I think the game is actually very easily adaptable to VTT play if you just get over the hurdle of setting up the gameboard (it took me about 2 hours, but that involved creating the dice assets and figuring out how I wanted to organize everything myself, if you're following my guide it shouldn't take you as long.) If you want to mirror my gameboard exactly, here's the page details. The GM playmat is 7 x 15 squares and each player mat is 3 x 6 squares.