18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry
Hi All,
Like many of us I went online for my gaming in the first COVID lockdown about 18 months ago.
I started with Roll20 because it seemed to have the lowest barrier to entry. I picked up Fantasy Grounds Unity and Foundry pretty much as they launched.
I wrote up some mini-reviews a year or so ago, but a lot has changed on each platform in that time so I thought it might be time to update my thoughts on the various platforms.
For context I play two weekly games on Roll20 still, play in one "beta test" game with a GM polishing stuff up for his pro games on Foundry, and run all my own games (two or three a week) on Fantasy Grounds. If you are new to VTTs and especially if you are new to running games rather than playing them on VTTs, I hope this post will be of some use.
The majority of my experience especially as a player is with 5E; your mileage may vary for different rulesets.
First up:
Roll20- The Good
Roll20 has changed the least over the last 18 months. To be fair that is in part because it already delivered its mission statement pretty well - it's the easiest of the platforms to get going on.
As a player TBH Roll20 delivers the vast majority of what you need, so long as your GM puts in the work to set it all up for you. It has a full-featured character sheet for 5E with an excellent charactermancer for automating character generation and levelling up. It's not quite as slick and D&D Beyond, but it's still clear enough for relative newbies to level their characters up unassisted. Most player tasks are now handled with automation without having to delve into the unsupported Wild West of Roll20 Macros; you'll get a tick box to add your barbarian's damage when they are raging or your rogue's sneak attack, you can add bless and guidance pretty easily so long as you and the GM know what you are doing. You can add boxes to the character sheet to help you keep track of everything from session to session, like the hours left on a soul coin powering a vehicle in Descent to Avernus or the number of uses of your healing light power left that day.
You can buy all the D&D rules on there, and their marketplace has plenty of other rules systems with reasonable implementations on the players' side, and there are acceptable community character sheets for pretty much every system out there.
In terms of maps and tokens it lets you import external files for maps, add grids and lighting and line of sight. It's relatively simple and functional, but if you want Roll20 to understand your game system AT ALL you have to start adding macros, and that rapidly degenerates into a world-class mess of unsupported rumours and hearsay. Even something as simple as showing token health bars requires the GM to adjust settings accordingly, because the maps-and-tokens part of Roll20 by design is intended to be system neutral.
It can play background music for you but only from a static playlist.
It has no map-making tools internally and a simple four-map-layers model (map&background, objects&tokens, GM info, walls for dynamic lighting). As with much else on Roll20, it is minimal by design and system-neutral.
It has pretty video effects for spell effects but by default the GM has to activate those by hand.
It's looking-for-game calendar system is simple and good and since it has a critical mass of players, genuinely useful for making contact with people and finding games to play.
Where Roll20 really scores is its simplicity and low barrier to entry. If you are new to online play and don't have an existing group it's pretty easy to recommend as the one that will get you going most quickly- buy the D&D Starter Bundle for $80, find your way around the Icespire Peak module and the Player's Handbook, and you can be running a game by Saturday.
It runs in the browser, which means players don't need to install anything. It's performance is pretty good, although mobile versions are still in development and I wouldn't hold your breath. Again, nice low barrier to entry. The game is always up so players can check out their character sheets etc. between sessions. On the downside, it's out of your control. For a while they had a lot of server issues and sometimes it was plain not possible to log in or it was very laggy for reasons unrelated to your own machines. But that seems to have improved a lot recently, it has been months since I had a disrupted session.
Roll20 - The Bad
It has built in voice and video. Which plain DOES NOT WORK. I have never once been in a group that has persisted in trying to use it past the first week; in one-offs there is ALWAYS someone who can't connect. Everyone switches to Skype, Zoom, Teams or (the vast majority) Discord. Don't believe the sales pitch, avoid heartache and start on Discord instead.
On the GM's side it is a whole ton of work to run games this way. It's organisational tools for GMs are very primitive- essentially just a flat list of maps you have to flick between by hand. You can copy and paste groups of tokens from one map to another, but there's basically no organisational structure there to help you out at all. Running pre-written modules which you've purchased is... OK. But the moment you want to start customising stuff and making notes, it does nothing to help. Most GM's I play with run stuff with the physical game book by their side and post-it notes. Which feels primitive beyond belief to me given that there is a computer sitting RIGHT THERE and computers are great at that sort of thing.
The system-neutral nature of the maps and tokens means that the GM has to do all the work of book-keeping, from comparing an attack roll to AC through doing all the math for hit points for NPCs. Players can do it for their characters but some GM's handle that too, which is plain masochistic as far as I'm concerned. Compare two numbers to see if one is bigger, then handle hit point subtraction... by hand... when there is a computer sitting RIGHT THERE?
I got annoyed with running games that way after only a few weeks. I'm impressed by the stamina of the GMs I play with who still run everything that way - personally I want a whole lot more of the drudge work and organisational work to be handled by the VTT.
Roll20 macros are powerful and one improvement they have made is a better section for finding useful scripts and improved documentation. Ironically, given the low barrier to entry on the player side, I find the barrier to entry the highest of the three when it comes to adding automation and macros/extensions. Want to give tokens a red/green/amber aura to track HP, rather than relying on the bar? You can, but you'll still be combing forum posts to find them or trying to figure out how they work. For example, on the front page of their recommended scripts is
"TrackerJacker -- Graphical turnorder tracker, as well as status/condition marker tracking". The entire documentation for that reads:
TrackerJacker is a cousin to TurnMarker made by The Aaron. Its logic however is quite different, and more rigid in function to simplify the most common use-cases. Like TurnMarker, it uses a graphic image that follows beneath tokens to indicate who's turn it is. The only animation TrackerJacker supports is the spinning graphic which is on by default (to disable it you'd need to edit a simple script flag). The real function however of TrackerJacker' is to track statuses and durations with an easily accessible graphical interface that's intuitive.
Any the wiser? Me neither. Oh, and it was last changed in 2015 and I noticed at the bottom it was in Category: Discontinued API Scripts. Which suggests maybe it should be moved from the list of recommended scripts on the introductory page, do you think? This is symptomatic of everything in Roll20 that gets at all technical. It's still a mess, even if somewhat improved from 18 months ago.
They are developing things, but the pace of change is glacially slow compared with FG or Foundry.
You are limited by server space which is a pain and which ends up mandating a paid subscription for the GM. Dynamic lighting requires a paid subscription from the GM. API scripts and macros require the top-level subscription. It doesn't take long for this to add up to more than the purchase price of Foundry or FG. Everything on their marketplace is a bit more expensive than on other platforms, too.
WHAT I THINK IT IS GOOD FOR
Getting going today and running a commercial module for your friends by the weekend
Running a rules-light system, stuff with a lot of theatre of mind, running low-level 5E D&D where the recordkeeping overhead is tolerable
Running an ancient or obscure indie rules system where the GM does all the work like they do at the tabletop - you'll probably find a decent community character sheet already on there
Running commercial modules with little to no homebrew input
Finding players
Low barrier to entry for players, too
It's the lowest common denominator, in a sense. I know plenty of people who are perfectly happy with it and use other things (Discord, D&D Beyond, paper notes, Google Docs, Dungeondraft) to supplement its shortcomings. I have a soft spot for it as it was my entry into VTTs and I've played some absolutely super campaigns in it. But running them? It's not for me.
WHAT I THINK IT IS REALLY NOT GOOD FOR
Homebrew campaigns
Organising your material as the GM
Crunch-heavy systems
High-level D&D or stuff with lots of combatants. At 10th level, battles take up entire 4 hour sessions and OMG the work for the GM to track all the conditions! Those little token markers in the corner only go so far.
Integrated audio-visual experience - it's all on the GM to trigger stuff by hand
Using extensive external assets (maps etc) because of the server space
Long-term it's very likely the most expensive option