18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

[Valyar]

One of the reasons Foundry VTT seems to be blossoming is the open nature of the platform and the programming languages it employs (which is also curse, not just blessing). Remove all the add-ons and the base platform is bland. Also more than half of the functionalities come from external developers, which is bad.

I can't accept a product that makes a GM to run 20-100 (yes) extensions to play and manage campaign at adequate levels when in Fantasy Grounds I don't need any, just 3-4 for convenience. And not to mention - MAP EDITOR!!!

[HywelPhillips]

I've always tried to use audio-visual resources when running games - 30 years ago I had a slide projector rigged up to show photos to set the scene, did handouts and made mix-tapes as the soundtrack to various campaigns.

I've never been all that big on map and mini or tokens, apart from a few campaigns where the focus was on tactical combat where the system really demanded it. I usually prefer theatre of the the mind for that. My preferences as a player were similar.

However, I've found online gaming changes the equation for me considerably.

As Weissrolf says, the biggest change in the experience is the stilted, one-at-a-time nature of voice/video interactions during online games. This means that players can't be having whispered conversations with each other while the GM is dealing with the active player in the same way. It wrecks round-table PC discussions to such an extent that "planning sessions" are no longer viable the way we used to run and enjoy them. Someone (and in my experience that overwhelmingly becomes the GM) has to "run the Zoom meeting" making sure everyone gets invited to speak in turn, gets a decent share of the spotlight, etc..

In some ways tactical combat is a whole lot easier to run via VTT than a talky theatre of mind round-table talking session. The technology can support you, rather than putting strict limits on you.

It takes advantage of the fact that players are staring at a screen to put relevant stuff on that screen for them to look at. They can plan out their moves, make deductions, look at the map decoration and invent cool things to do with that crate there, and so on. I think this plays to the strengths of VTTs, so it is no wonder that people are pushing the software in that direction. From there is a natural progression to show meaningful information like health bars and effects icons, put down map markers for stuff that's on fire, and then a small step to animating that. After all, the common shared space is no longer the physical tabletop and the room you're in with your buddies. It's not your character sheet - only you are looking at that. It's the map that's the portal onto the shared world.

So I make much much heavier use of maps on VTTs that I ever did offline. A really good map can spare you hundreds of words of exposition, which is economical when the most precious resource is "voice time" on the voice chat channel. It helps stops people's attention wandering to the other tab with twitter open in it. I customise maps much more, for which I love FGUs new toolkit. I use handouts less, because the map is doing a lot of the shared world-building that I'd previously have relied on an evocative photo or drawing to do.

A good token can remove the need to display the artwork for a newly encountered person, and use of subtle visual hints can let players "do" things like perception rolls and discovery by themselves without taking up too much "voice time" by simply allowing the player to notice things on the map. Scouting missions become more involving for the group rather than less if party vision is turned on. I don't need to tell them to stop because their familiar has flown into a room with a giant ogre in it - they can see it.

For sure there is a danger of tying down the imagination too much and becoming more like a static-coded computer game. There's a balance to be struck, which is one of the reasons I emphasised how automatically the extra AV pretties can be done in my platform reviews above. If the GM has to stop the action, leading to dead "voice time" while they trigger a cool visual, that's bad for me. But if as part of the narration of a lightning bolt going off you hear crackling lightning sound effects automatically triggered over the background music by Syrinscape chat trigger, with no chat dead time, that's good for me.

So I'm in favour of things like the FGU map effects because of the way they let players interact with the setting information for free, without taking up precious chat time. For example one of my campaigns has the PC's chasing down rifts in space and time to close them. I use a subtle bit of the water effect to indicate this. Near big rifts, the effect is unmistakable. If I want to subtly hint at it, I apply a very mild version of the effect over the relevant part of the map, and maybe add some low alpha sparkly pulsing lights. The players pick up almost subconsciously that there's something weird going on in that one particular bedroom of the house just by moving their tokens around and exploring. For sure it's all backed up with descriptions and the usual GM communications, but as a way of dropping hints and rewarding player engagement with their FGU window rather than their twitter window, I find it really useful.

I'm skeptical about 3D not because of the technology or the computer-game-ness or even the performance but because I've just a little experience of how much more work it is to populate 3D realms with resources and build a scene. There's a reason why computer game companies have to have entire teams to build levels or make the 3D characters. I can see the appeal of a 3D simulation of being around a tabletop with miniature figures and an infinite supply of virtual Dwarf Forge scenery I guess. But personally I am trying to get drawn in to the game environment, not the emulation-of-sitting-around-a-table environment.

I'd like to see how VTTs can push in this direction of drawing us in to the game environment in a different way from the way computer games do it. One of the things I really want to get my groups experimenting with is the real-time use of typed chat to try to replace the table-whispers. It's worked really well in a couple of one-shots I played, where it was player-led. I wonder if there is a way to encourage more use of it as the GM?

Cheers, Hywel

[Weissrolf]

At least for systems/rulesets - PF2 in my case - having a community of enthusiasts code and enter data leads to faster turnaround times and maybe even better product quality (less strain on single authors). Their main motivation is "I want to play that, too" and some "this is something I am proud of producing". Of course both system/rulesets and content preparation are not free, but these volunteering enthusiast pay for end-users in time and effort. Some offer Patrons, like the author of PdfToFoundry (which I became a member of) and some explicitly don't want money (like the PF2 folks).

And a group of people deciding on both priorities and interpretation of rules (for automation) eases the situation of the whole system userbase being dependent on the goodwill of a single person, like with those FG rulesets that are maintained by a single person.

I use 23 extensions on FG and 88 modules on Foundry (some of which are shared libraries), with many of those being features I want/like, not necessarily what is needed to play. The PF2 system needs less addons than other systems and tends to "eat" the most important ones for better compatibility and support. 6 of my Foundry modules are updated to use features of the next major Foundry update. 3 modules are "outdated" for the current version already, but after testing all my modules I find these to still be working (v.8.9, v9 might be different).

Knowing that Foundry is still v0.x software and innovating left and right I am not too bothered by the whole modules situation yet.

[toastsniffer187]

All I was saying is we have the unity engine if you read the original post about what makes the other tables good we could have that too. We shouldnt have any competition over here because we can have it all on the unity engine. Especially for the price that is charged per ultimate lic......For example dice skins/effects. They could hire 1 guy to code and put those in the store and the sales from that alone would cover his salary and then some. Our community shouldnt be shrinking right now. And it is frustrating seeing half the games posted are people sniping players off from our community to other VTTs. The Foundry being the biggest and that goes unmoderated.

[similarly]

Hywel, that's an excellent explanation. I've also made a LOT of maps since coming back to D&D. For my last campaign, I'd mapped out 41 locations, some with more than a dozen levels. I experimented with lighting, and experimented with effects (like making water move, etc.). Some of my players were on VERY slow connections with computers that couldn't handle some of the maps, but that was a hardware problem, and not a problem with FGU.

As well, I made a bunch of images of characters, items etc., but got scolded by an older player for not doing more describing, lol.

For voice, I use discord, but it would be NICE if FGU had a built-in system that included a whisper mode. It would also be cool if it included a built-in voice changer, lol. I'm not great at voices. There's a chatroom app that amplifies voices as you come near the person in the virtual environment, and silences the voice as you move away. That would be cool for in-game communication. All the GM to hear everybody, but in-character voice depends on location. You could have three buttons: in character, out of character, and private. Think I'll suggest that!

[Kelrugem]

They could hire 1 guy to code

SmiteWorks searches already for some new people, posted here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/home/...ortunities.php

that is already from some weeks ago, and the positions are still not filled (even months?). So, it is seemingly not so easy to simply find someone doing something. There are a lot of different tasks SmiteWorks need to do as a small company, and as others already said other things had higher priority Of course more employees can help to solve all the tasks faster or do more projects simultaneously, but as I said, it is not like that the posted positions are filled in just a couple of days. You should not forget that we are speaking about a niche product of a niche hobby

[Weissrolf]

Fantasy Grounds is an advanced system on an outdated frame-work. Foundry is a growing system on a modern frame-work.

When the most modern PCs are continuously bogged down by FG displaying a simple table of text then that is what pushes people away, though, not some animated effects on top of the bog.

[Valyar]

Fantasy Grounds is an advanced system on an outdated frame-work. Foundry is a growing system on a modern frame-work.

When the most modern PCs are continuously bogged down by FG displaying a simple table of text then that is what pushes people away, though, not some animated effects on top of the bog.

Outdated framework is Unity engine or the XML/LUA codebase for rulesets?

[YAKO SOMEDAKY]

I agree with what was said by the toastsniffer187.
We have a powerful tool called UNITY and with it we could make FANTASY GROUNDS much better and for that I believe that YES, we should look to other tools aimed at our target audience, which is the RPG PLAYER, who wants agility to conduct their adventures but at the same time want to give wings to your imagination and make them real through AUDIOVISUAL RESOURCES, I know that many will talk about THEATER OF THE MIND, but that sounds like laziness to me.
Some will mention about the LICENSING that SMITEWORKS has on many products, but we know that not all LICENSED PRODUCTS receive the same attention, offering "MEDIOCRE" PRODUCTS and there is also the fact that most do not care if it is OFFICIAL or NOT.
WE (At least the vast majority) want these features that give a SPECIAL TOUCH to their TABLES and more than that we want AGILITY in the PROGRAM we use (FANTASY GROUNDS) and when I refer to AGILITY I don't just mean with AUTOMATIONS but also when loading the GAME TABLE, AGILITY when presenting something without LOCKS during NARRATIVE.
Anyway, this is MY VISION about what happens, about what I saw that attracts PEOPLE to the other PLATFORMS.

[Weissrolf]

Outdated framework is Unity engine or the XML/LUA codebase for rulesets?

Outdated frame-work seems to be especially the code-basis/implementation of FG itself. Again, it is not even able to display a table of text without bogging down the most modern of computers. It does not matter at this point whether this is a limitation of Unity + Lua 5.1 or a limitation of what SW codes on top of this, it does not work well either way.

When you run a Porsche in 1st gear on an acre then driving the Porsche doesn't move you any faster than driving a Trabant.