Basic UI Challenges with TaleSpire..?
- Overall impression
Very impressed — I'm hoping to use this for my kids' and friends' D&D instead of tabletop miniatures, and I'd happily pay more if it were super easy and super fast to use (minis cost a bomb - like hundreds!). The problem is the basic UI and controls feel pretty janky for a first-time user, even though many deeper features are excellent.
What's working brilliantly
Movement, teleporting, rulers, atmosphere, terrain, items, and monster search are all beautifully done and genuinely intuitive.
Core UI / control issues
- No intuitive control menus. There's no clear, discoverable menu showing what the controls actually are — you're left hunting for them.
- Selecting and deleting is very un-Mac-like. Escape to delete, instead of Delete or Backspace? That's unexpected (and took me ages to find!) — why not just delete like every other app?
- 3D select mode is unclear. For larger areas I need it, but it's not obvious how to enter or exit the mode (then hit Escape?). I genuinely can't find the select cube area either.
- Toggle cutbox is inconsistent. Sometimes it works, other times it seems to select some very odd shape that's no longer the box — not sure what's happening there.
- F1–F10 shortcuts don't suit Mac. Most Mac keyboards don't really have or use function keys, so why not map to other intuitive keys? Very few seem mapped anyway, so there's plenty of room.
- Right-click to have one monster attack another is unreliable. Could "A" for Attack be an alternative?
Solo-DM use case feels like an afterthought
I just want to drag around a bunch of characters and monsters myself as DM (and I guarantee the other kids would all try to use it if they could do the same!) — no remote players joining. Simple things aren't clear for this workflow. If features like Vision Limits only work when remote players are connected, that's a massive miss — solo DM is exactly when I'm prepping and learning the tool, and exactly when I need to see what players would see. Solo DMs and small in-person groups around one screen are probably a huge chunk of your potential audience.
Fog of war / line of sight / lighting
I'm told creature-to-creature LoS is already automatic, and that Hide Volumes plus the newer Vision Limits toggle are the current tools — but I literally can't find either of them in the UI! If those are the headline features for hiding the world from players, they need to be front and centre, not buried behind GM-mode toggles and tiny unlabelled icons. Discoverability here is zero for a new user. And if Vision Limits genuinely requires connected remote players to do anything, then it's invisible to me as a solo DM — which is back to the previous point: solo DM has been treated as an edge case when it should be the default onboarding scenario.
Beyond that, there's a bigger gap: there's no dynamic, per-creature vision based on light. Foundry (despite being massively more complex overall) gives you per-token sight radii, torches/lanterns as light sources that move with the mini, ambient map lighting, and time-of-day toggles, plus fog that reveals as tokens explore.
For most of us running kids' games, the dream feature is something like:
- A board-level lighting preset: outdoor daylight / evening / night / indoor (dim) / dungeon (dark)
- Each creature sees N squares by default, extended if they're carrying or near a light source (torch, lantern, spell)
- Fog auto-reveals as the party moves; explored-but-not-currently-visible areas stay dimly visible (classic FoW)
At its simplest, the rule could be: each character sees N spaces, unless they or someone nearby has a light source. Hide Volumes and Vision Limits could remain as the advanced/manual tools for GMs who want fine control, but the default experience should be one-click. This feels like it should be a P1 feature.
Suggestions
- Ship a ready-to-go sample Campaign with example Boards — it would massively help new users see how everything is meant to fit together.
- Make ease of entry as simple as possible.
- Make keys as intuitive as possible, with easy Mac key-bindings.
- Make core GM tools (Hide Volumes, Vision Limits, fog/lighting, 3D/cube select) discoverable — clearly labelled, in an obvious menu, not hidden behind unmarked icons.
- Treat solo-DM as a first-class mode, not an afterthought — every player-facing feature (Vision Limits especially) should have a "preview as player" equivalent that works without anyone else connected.
