Convince Me to Switch to Fantasy Grounds

[OverCriticalHit]

As mentioned elsewhere, D&D Beyond is run by yet another company, and that would require prices to rise in order to cover their licensing and operating costs. Really, this is something you should take up with Wizards of the Coast.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm definitely not blaming FG for the situation. It's just that essentially repeating the purchases on other platforms (and physical) gets pretty taxing. I doubt WotC would care what I had to say much, but I reckon with some imaginative thinking everyone would, as I said, come out ahead. For example, I'm personally not likely to go full bore on Beyond AND FG, but if there was an incentive to do so, I very probably would. That would be some sort of revenue on the other platform as opposed to none. But I obviously don't know all the intricacies involved or what it would mean in the larger picture.

[Valatar]

I'm keeping an eye on Foundry. As VTTs go it's a promising newcomer, isn't a perpetual subscription model, and supports third-party code, but only time will tell if it can catch up to FG's pretty commanding lead in ruleset support. Foundry also seems to be a team of one, so if the developer gets bored or something else comes up to make him wander off, it'll be dead from that moment on. FG at least has multiple developers who could step up if Doug dropped out, so it's a little less dependent on a single person.

[Marquis_de_Taigeis]

my VTT experience

Roll 20 - i have a little experience with Roll20, i went onto it to try and host a short campaign for a couple friends whilst we were socially distanced, before i set my game up i was jumped in as a player in a one-shot to test the mechanics from a player view. The GM had lots of PC options but i found the characters sheets to very fidgety to create a character,

When i went to run my game i found the following with Roll 20
I was not in a position to buy lots of modules to use for my players to create characters when we were all new to VTTs, and i already had all as physical copies. so having them create characters in game was no use at the basic free ruleset built in.
this was no problem as i had shared the PHB on dnd beyond so we used this for our character sheets for the first game day
I found map movement and creation to be clunky and not easy to use, this was when i found Astral VTT, which had a far nicer map builder built into its browser.

for the first session i was running tower of the stargazer from Lamentations of the flame princess
so from the start for all the VTTS i was having to put together the module material and maps in game from scratch.
I found The UI for FG was the best for collecting all the material in easy to access manner for quick referencing during play.

now for Fantasy ground

to run my game i am using unity. and since joining FG i have also become a player in a game on unity and on classic.

Pros for classic is token locking for managing movement in combats more efficiently for being able to apply reactions/opportunitys secrets.
Unity is great for its Line of sight functions.

I have found that using fantasy ground works the best if you have two monitors and run it windowed, but stretched across them so that the map and chat window are on in my preference the left monitor, whilst story, notes, combat tracker, character sheets are all on my right monitor

[jackkerouac]

I have found that using fantasy ground works the best if you have two monitors and run it windowed, but stretched across them so that the map and chat window are on in my preference the left monitor, whilst story, notes, combat tracker, character sheets are all on my right monitor

That's how I do, except reversed.

Haven't tried Roll20, but I did buy a copy of Foundry to check it out. Very well done, with a great UI and all the usual features of a modern VTT. You can even use video maps or animated images. Pretty cool. Since it is JavaScript and jason based, people can create extensions pretty easily. But once again, it is the automation. That's where FG kills the competition, despite their horrible, no-good UI.

To be fair, there is some automation in Foundry and their use of animation, LOS stuff (including their LOS behind the scenes builder) and great UI make it an ALMOST switch for me. Almost. Because at the end of the day, the automation keeps me coming back to FG.

[HywelPhillips]

Update: I've spent that last couple of days playing with Foundry VTT. In the spirit of my earlier posts on the other main contenders, here are my thoughts.

1) It's VERY pretty, and setting up that prettiness is quite easy. It's got really good line of sight, lighting, light emission from tokens, light sources with colours which interact with walls and can come on when a certain threshold of scene darkness is reached, with a "fade to day" and "fade to night" option. Great audio options too. Significantly prettier than Roll20, on a par with Astral. I'd say Astral is more "bright and high fantasy", Foundry more "gritty low fantasy" in default look-and-feel although obviously a lot will depend on your maps etc. Astral seems to have more options for map changes happening on the fly via triggers. Foundry makes it very easy to set up a beautiful lighting system.

2) Conversely, it's new, and although it has just moved to a commercial release, it's not really a version 1.0 yet. There's lots of niggles which will probably be ironed out in time but for example right now on a Mac, the full-frame toggle doesn't seem to do anything and the Mac OS top menu bar obscures the top of the Foundry VTT window. In the YouTube tutorial the guy copy-and-pastes the path to the directory where FVTT needs your assets, but on the Mac this text isn't selectable so I can't do likewise. Since this directory is in Library, which is a hidden system file by default, a non-techie Mac OS user will not actually be able to find it. Furthermore, the button which should pop out a system finder window for file selection doesn't work on Mac OS. Command-Z doesn't undo, despite the menu shortcut saying it should. You need CTRL-Z. CTRL-click doesn't work for some stuff, you need to Command-click.

3) Although these are minor things and will doubtless be fixed with time, it's symptomatic of fact that it's a solo-developer-plus-GitHub-community style of project. I would not want to be walking a technophobe or impatient player through it right now. Similarly, I wouldn't choose it to start as a DM right now, especially not as your first VTT (choose Roll20 for that, for sure, much though I love FG there's no denying that for running your first ever online game session, Roll20 is the best option).

4) The whole thing is very much set up by a hacker for other hackers to contribute to. This is a big strength - although the thing only commercially released like a week or two ago, there are a hundred plus extension modules, some of which are really useful (I particularly like the one which shows extra vital stats on a token like AC and passive perception when you select). Conversely, since most of these are being developed non-commercially, the odds of them being abandoned or becoming incompatible over time are in my experience quite high for projects like this. One of my main bits of advice for the developer would be to take some of the most important ones in-house as soon as possible.

5) There is some system support in there. More than Roll20, far less than Fantasy Grounds. You can at least get Foundry VTT to do some basic math and recordkeeping - specifically, it can apply rolled damage and healing, with options for half damage. (I'm speaking of 5e here, no idea what it is like for other rulesets). But conversely some very basic stuff is missing, like comparing hit rolls with AC to decide whether or not you hit.

6) Like all the VTTs other than FG, Foundry is at heart a map and token display system, not a roleplaying game system. There's only one sort of item which functions for everything a character can "have" - from spells through feats to swords and armour. You are responsible for any organisational system you put in. If it ends up support stuff like treasure parcels it'll probably do so via extension modules, not through the core system.

7) There's no map making, but once you've got the background JPG in (which was non-trivial, as the file button doesn't work on Mac OS!) the capabilities for handling grids, lighting, notes, etc. are really good.

8) It has hyperlinkable pin equivalents for notes (with options for many different icons which can be any colour you like - books, flames, chests, etc.. As I said, it does pretty extremely well). I don't think it quite has FG's ability to turn anything into a pin, and it certainly doesn't have anything like encounters with pre-placed tokens in the way FG does. As GM organisational tool I'd say it is a bit better than Roll20, with system extensions already providing more options. The way of managing the extensions is far better than anything roll20 has to offer BTW (they are treated as proper first-class citizens by Foundry, with load/unload more in the style of FG modules, but already half a dozen extensions were giving warnings that they might not be compatible with the release version of the software, which is not great for two-week-old software).

9) Its combat tracker is better than roll20 and Astral, but not on the same planet as FG. At least you can add a column for AC, but it doesn't do targeting, conditions, concentration, effects, etc..

10) It currently has no marketplace and no official 5e material outside the SRD. It doesn't support anything much in the way of character sheet automation for character generation and levelling up - for example, you have to calculate HP and AC by hand. This may come in time. There are demo adventures, but you have to fight through wikis full of not-yet-written pages to find them and I've not tried one yet. If you are homebrew all the way or want to enter everything by hand, or want pure SRD stuff, it's OK. Personally I'll wait until at least PHB and MM are supported in some official way. There *is* an extension to integrate with D&D Beyond, which is intriguing, but to use it you have to hack around with installing Chrome plus an extension, and a Foundry module, and subscribe to the author of the script's Patreon for quite a stiff monthly fee. TBH I am nervous of this not least because I'm not sure what the legal position is for taking Monster Manual entries from D&D Beyond and importing them into Foundry. Probably OK for personal use but I must say I'd be much happier with a proper licence agreement and marketplace purchases. I hope they will add this sooner rather than later because...

11) For the stuff that *IS* supported, the SRD, they have done a very nice job of presentation. Every spell has a pretty glowy icon, every weapon has a picture, the monsters that do have tokens (not all do) those tokens are very good, when the spells require a template to cast the integration of that into the VTT part is exemplary (you get a hovering template to click and lay down to show area of effect). Like I said, pretty.

12) I found myself doing a lot of mouse clicking compared with FG for running a sample combat (which I was just doing as DM). You click once to bring you attack up in the chat window. Then click to make an attack, then the DM adjudicates whether it hits, then click to roll damage, clicks to select targets, right click to bring up apply damage menu, click to apply. It'll probably flow fine when you have players doing most of that work, but I don't think running PCs vs 20 orcs and a thunder boar is going to go as smoothly as it did in FG.

13) There's a LOT of depth on the techie side. For example, it is explicitly set up so you can run it locally, or in the Cloud, or via a hosted provider. It's great that stuff is there, but it is at the level of unix hackery that you already know how to spin up cloud resources and install packages etc.. As I said, it clearly comes from a very techie hacker crowd and that shows. Getting your technophobe friend with an eight year old laptop onto it may prove more challenging than doing so on Roll20. As a result I wouldn't actually know how to start running it myself for my friends, as each of these setups is going to have its pitfalls. (You need port forwarding for local, for example, and just look at the FG forum for what agony that causes amongst less technical users!)

In conclusion -
Foundry is very interesting, very pretty, and has a much more standard UI that FG.
On the other hand it is a pre-version 1.0 release by a techie crowd more used to (and more interested in) hacking so it runs smoothly on various cloud providers or writing cool extensions than in figuring out how to get the PHB and Mines of Phandelver onto it, or sorting out the basic UI on Mac OS so a new GM who doesn't even know what a hidden system file is can import some assets.

It's got the beginnings of rpg system support with damage maths incorporated - ahead of Roll20 and Astral. As a GM support system the automation not there to compete with Fantasy Grounds yet.

If I wanted something pretty for player audio-visual experience I'd choose it over Astral right now. I prefer the look and feel. Also Astral's emphasis on dynamic map triggers and the like feels more like an beginning computer game development system than a system for running wide-ranging oh god what have the players done now roleplaying game. Foundry feels much more like a quick and pretty way to present traditional roleplaying resources like static maps to their best effect.

I can see why everyone is excited about Foundry.

For actually writing campaigns and running games, it doesn't come close to Fantasy Grounds. Especially without full 5e PHB.

Audiovisually, I'd say it is the one to beat for FGU.

But for functionality on the automation and game system side it is all the other way - Foundry really needs to implement 90% of what FGU provides on that side to interest me in switching. Right now it does maybe 5%.

Cheers, Hywel

[Three of Swords]

Update: I've spent that last couple of days playing with Foundry VTT. In the spirit of my earlier posts on the other main contenders, here are my thoughts.

<snip>

Another great synopsis! Once again, I can't argue w/ anything you've said.