A Descent into Despair Campaign

[peterb]

Yes, this is a thread for my game to be open about various CoC and Chaosium issues. I certaily could move this to a competitor's website, but wanted to be open and honest with FG2 ...

If you comment publicly expect public comments...

""Feature" of FG. Probably won't change. Never bothered either me or my players."

Just because it doesn't bother your group doesn't mean it doesn't bother other people. Quite frankly, I wasn't asking for input from your group, unless they also happen to play in mine.

If you comment publicly expect public comments...

"Fixed in the BRP ruleset."

Gee that's great, golf clap, but it isn't fixed in the CoC ruleset, hence the purpose of my player polls.

Frankly, with that attitude of yours we don't need you around here - really we don't.

"FG is a character sheet centric product. The design goal is not primarily to be good at doing maps. Maps are best done outside FG."

Huh???!!??? I make maps outside FG and NEVER said that FG should make maps, the mapping tools (MASKING) is clunky. Maptools allows characters to have line of sight, ligthing ranges, etc. in FG2 I have to sit around carving out masked areas and ALL players can see what everyone sees, not just necessarily what they can see from their particular position.

As I said FG is a character sheet centric product. The design goal is not primarily to be good at doing maps. Map handling is not FG's thing. The competitors obviously puts a lot effort in doing maps well, but again - that's not the thing about FG. FG is not about automating a RPG or supposed to be map centric. And I think that's fairly obvious when you compare the demos of the alternatives...

"I really don't understand this issue. We don't have any problems with the inventory. You can't drag and drop data, no ruleset can. You can add it but you will need separate tables for the inventory and for other items."

This could be a user error (very possible) or you don't actually own the CoC ruleset, but I have not seen a way in the CoC ruleset to display inventory costs to the players so they can pull up the inventory and buy things. I have uploaded some of this manually. However, if there is a built-in way for players to see the inventory list, then please explain how you got it to work. Show us.

You need to share the Utility module. That module is intended for both players and GMs.

"I've also looked into the macro language. It's no match for LUA. Maptools uses a proprietary macro language, that is (IMHO) really clunky to use. "

It's just another language to me, but not everyone has work with decades of programming languages/scripts like applesoft basic, Perl, Pascal, PL/1, Fortran, Assembler, Cobol, Java, VB, yadda yadda. No issue there for me.

And why do you assume that I don't make my assessment from the same kind of experience?

"IMHO the CoC ruleset for FG has The best VTT support on the market. Klooges is unmaintained and wont't run on the latest version and the MapTools framework is a performance hog that only offers a fraction of the features of FG."

Exactly what features does the CoC ruleset have?
1. Some of the rule book cut and pasted into the ruleset, not edited and at least at this point no way for my players to see inventory.
2. A pretty background image
3. Pretty icons
4. Character generator info (to date) can't ben made inside FG2 nor is that (currently known) an importer for character design
5. No additional content from the rule book, not even decent maps
6. The Crooked Manse module has only part of of the module, and for $6 nothing was added (like nice maps) and it amounts to about 3 hours of play and was just done with cut and paste that I can do in about 15 minutes. now.
7. The other two modules don't appear to be complete products, just an adventure. I'll have to dig into them in more detail.

Well, a comment to your point # 4: FG has never to my knowledge been asserted as a character generator.

Good luck with MapTools. I would be surprised if you (and your players) will get the same gaming experience out of it as one can with FG, but if you do - good for you.

[Noelle]

Hey Aracon its me Noelle and I would love to be in your CoC Campaigns please add me to friends

[Foen]

@Aracon

Just tried to reply to your PM, but your mailbox is full so I've included my response below.

What I meant was that because you made the ruleset for Cthulhu, you could re-package that ruleset's modules with the color maps in addition to Chaosium.

I cannot repackage anything, because I work on projects approved by SW and Chaosium. Just because I have done some stuff on CoC doesn't mean I can ignore proper IP/approval processes.

Also, it would be really nice to have the Cthulhu ruleset upgraded with some of the BRP features.... or an easy way to make BRP work for Cthulhu.

BRP *does* work with CoC campaigns. If you edit the CoC campaign.xml file and change "CallOfCthulhu" to "Basic Roleplaying", you should find it loads in BRP (please back up your campaign first). If you also install the Eldritch Horror extension, your new BRP campaign will also be able to access the CoC reference materials and modules. Of course, you need to have a legitimate copy of the CoC ruleset to do that (which you do).

Foen

[tenkar]

Damn, cool info Foen. I might have to give this a shake.