Need an honest opinion - B/X or BECMI (Roll20 vs Fantasy Grounds)

Hey, all,

I'm looking for an honest, unbiased opinion before starting up a short campaign. The basic situation is this. I am planning to run the orange version of Palace of the Silver Princess for my usual Pathfinder group when we finish the adventure path we are currently on. (Rise of the Runelords, currently on Chapter 5) We play twice every week here on Fantasy Grounds, and my inclination was to run Palace of the Silver Pricess here as well.

So, I had a look at the AD&D ruleset, but there is so much stuff in there that isn't in D&D Basic, plus the character sheet doesn't look at all like what my friends and I remember from "back in the day", and playing this is as much about nostalgia as it is about playing the game. After that, I looked at Labyrinth Lord (with the Beckham extension), Damned's Basic Dungeon, OSRIC... pretty much everything I could find that was mentioned here on the forums.

The one that came the closest to an authentic B/X or BECMI experience, from what I could tell, was Labyrinth Lord with the Beckham extension. However, that still had some pretty significant issues that I couldn't seem to resolve. For one, the window for imported maps seemed to only allow me to make the window a certain maximum size, which didn't even fill up the space in the middle of the UI. Also, although I was able to assign tokens to enemies, it didn't seem to work with characters. The whole thing struck me as a bit of a work in progress, if I'm honest.

That takes me to the crux of my question. You see, I also run a D&D 5e campaign at school (I'm a middle school teacher), and I use Roll20 for the club, since it is free for the kids and doesn't require any software to be installed. Most of you are probably also quite familiar with Roll20 and know that it is, in many ways, an inferior product to Fantasy Grounds, but in this case, I'm kind of wondering if it might suit my needs. The "Moldvay" character sheet on Roll20 does quite a lot of automation and even looks roughly like the character sheets from D&D Basic. In every way, it strikes me as the better option, except for one thing, I like Fantasy Grounds better.

Keeping in mind that I am building this thing from scratch, inputting all of the data for every monster, creating every map (as the ones in the PDF are too low-res), etc., am I just going to be better off doing this on Roll20, or is there a better Fantasy Grounds based solution that I am missing?

Thanks so much for your time. I very much appreciate any advice you can provide.

Well, there's this series of what looks like B/X play from the Digital Dungeon Master (Dave from Smiteworks) - https://youtu.be/wJ8b2-c15dc not sure if this helps or not (I don't know its an actual ruleset or if its available if it is).

Yeah, I had a look at this YouTube video from the Digital Dungeon Master:

https://youtu.be/SCdSkUAROZk

It is part of a series describing how to set up a BECMI game on Fantasy Grounds. At first I was heartened by the existence of this video, but it quickly became apparent to me that the whole series is hours long. Basically, it explains how you can create a BECMI experience in Fantasy Grounds, since you can't actually download an extension and Smiteworks isn't able to provide one either.

I just don't have the time to sit down and do that on top of transferring that entire module to whatever VTT I decide to use. It's a good idea, but I think it ultimately would be too much work. I'd never finish.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion, though!