18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

[Dr0W]

I don't want to derail the thread even more however, I do not think that's a good standard of putting items into the game or not as a function. Think of all the options people can or can't have at their table with choices and rules. Now see how many settings people would have to go through for obscure functions of these options.

Example would be like 5E Barbs have the option to rage. What if you made them rage every time as an effect on the first turn of combat. Sure you can make it an option to turn it off, but there is no rule that says it should happen the first turn of combat and it is 100% choice of the player (just as sneak attack is) if they want to do sneak attack or not. You say "well we should have option to turn it off" why would you put an option for something when there is no standard or rule for it?
I think it's much better to have it the other way as new players would be confused. In fact I think it should be the other way even if it were an option to be turned off and maybe an option to turn on. However, still there is no rule for sneak attack at all to be done every attack on your first attack. So why would a game system put this in as an option at all? I can see having it as an option that you can click on before doing your attack. (Which they have the code for it) I just don't see it as an option to force it even with an on off option as there is no rule at all for this.

If you use it as an example, everything should be optional. From AC calculation bonuses being added to the character automatically. We use automation to make the job easier, and if you're saying that automation makes it harder for newbies to understand the game, well... it's FG, it's really well automated.

Take Halfling's Lucky, as an example: It wouldn't hurt anyone to have it implemented by default. It's a rule that overrides a rolled 1, and if it does during play and the player really wants to fail he could just say "Hey, I want to fail it". On Foundry, all you have to do is check a box on the character and it's automated. On FG either you have an old extension that at one point was given for free, or you hop into DMS guild and buy this.

You want advantage and disadvantage being automatically calculated for your characters? The same, you look for a paid extension because for the life of me I've tried finding a free one on FG on forums and failed. But I can easily go to DMS guild, perhaps the new Forge and I'll find something I can purchase. Some of these are really specific, but some like Halfling's Lucky are really simples and should be part of the core product imho.

My point just being that: It's better to have something done and ready for use if you need, than not having it at all or the only way to have it is to pay more for it.

You say you're not a FGU fanboi, well, I am. I have written articles for FGU during its Kickstarter to have people coming this way (https://medium.com/rpgnoticias/fanta...r-e5fa54e53787 ), I have set up an youtube channel with tutorials, have translated rulesets to my native extension, and lastly I love running games on FG as I have done for over a decade.

All I want is that FGU should have the best things I can find on the neighbor's garden.

[MrDDT]

If you use it as an example, everything should be optional. From AC calculation bonuses being added to the character automatically. We use automation to make the job easier, and if you're saying that automation makes it harder for newbies to understand the game, well... it's FG, it's really well automated.

Take Halfling's Lucky, as an example: It wouldn't hurt anyone to have it implemented by default. It's a rule that overrides a rolled 1, and if it does during play and the player really wants to fail he could just say "Hey, I want to fail it". On Foundry, all you have to do is check a box on the character and it's automated. On FG either you have an old extension that at one point was given for free, or you hop into DMS guild and buy this.

You want advantage and disadvantage being automatically calculated for your characters? The same, you look for a paid extension because for the life of me I've tried finding a free one on FG on forums and failed. But I can easily go to DMS guild, perhaps the new Forge and I'll find something I can purchase. Some of these are really specific, but some like Halfling's Lucky are really simples and should be part of the core product imho.

My point just being that: It's better to have something done and ready for use if you need, than not having it at all or the only way to have it is to pay more for it.

You say you're not a FGU fanboi, well, I am. I have written articles for FGU during its Kickstarter to have people coming this way (https://medium.com/rpgnoticias/fanta...r-e5fa54e53787 ), I have set up an youtube channel with tutorials, have translated rulesets to my native extension, and lastly I love running games on FG as I have done for over a decade.

All I want is that FGU should have the best things I can find on the neighbor's garden.

Halfling Luck is one I think should be put in, as the rule is that it rerolls it always and it's out of the norm to say no.
Sneak Attack is not like this, its a choice to use it or not. Its a resource. It uses a resource.

[HywelPhillips]

This thread is getting a bit more heated than I'd intended (but perhaps not more than I could have anticipated).

The point I was trying to make about extensions is that there is nothing magical about the Foundry volunteer community writing free extensions, nor about the FG volunteer community writing free extensions.

The reason why a bunch of previously-free FG extensions for things like Halfling Luck are now defunct is because that's ALWAYS what happens to volunteer code in coding communities. FG has simply had a lot more years for people to have kids, get jobs, retire, move away, or whatever.

Foundry has had 12 months, and as someone else pointed out higher in the thread, the majority of modules on there are already falling mildly behind the update schedule. Leave it a decade or more (IIRC FG dates back to 2004?) and a whole lot of those free extensions will fall behind and become useless.

This is not a comment on Foundry vs. FG. It is a comment on community-generated code vs. code supported by a commercial provider.

The vast majority of the automation features of Fantasy Grounds today come from the core product. Sneak attack is automatable within FG to the extent that you can apply an effect to add the dice to your damage roll, and FG will keep track of the to-hit rolls, AC, critical damage, resistances, etc.. That's something you can do within the core product. And it is something that SmiteWorks works very hard to ensure keeps working with every change they make to the base program. Halfling Luck can't be automated with base FG but honestly I've never had a player who is slow to spot they can re-roll a natural 1. It's a quality of life feature; the core product tracks HP, temp hits, crits, damage, AC, resistance, saving throws, half damage on made saves, etc.. And a commercial company is fixing it with each release to make sure it works.

I'm also in favour of moving more and more of these things into the core product with time. Halfling luck certainly could be and probably should be.

The core product of Foundry today, if I understand correctly, doesn't do any of that automation. The extension which does stuff to do with sneak attack has to sit on top of the one that handles to hit rolls, damage and the like. My experience is the more of these things you need stacked up in a house of cards, the more likely something somewhere is to have the developer drop out and convert the whole stack into the towering-edifice of software that no-one dares to touch. If one of the ones near the bottom of the stack goes, everything above it suddenly stops working.

Some software communities manage to overcome this tendency to entropy. In my experience paying people (even modest amounts) tends to help- whether that's paying someone to buy the Automatic Halfling Luck extension on DMSGuild/FG Forge or paying someone on Patreon to develop the code that slurps the D&D Beyond content into Foundry.

It's not infallible, but it does tend to slow down the entropy. Which is why adventures that people purchased from SmiteWorks 10 years ago can still be run today.

I hope the Foundry community will be one of the vibrant ones that staves this off for a long time. My concern is that they may well learn about software entropy by painful experience! Free is great; working is better.

Since I am lucky enough to be at the stage of life where I have enough money to get by but very little spare time or patience with crumbling software stacks after a decade and more in the trenches running software for large science experiments, my personal preference is to pay and get 80% of the automation, then pay a bit more to smooth the edges where I feel things are useful. Hence FG as my platform of choice as a GM and I don't mind in the least paying for extensions that I use - indeed, happy to pay for the convenience of automated downloads via the Forge even for extensions I already bought via DMs Guild.

That balance will be quite different for you if you are time-rich, or don't mind a bit of software stack maintenance, or are not lucky enough to be in the position of not really having to care whether an extension is free or costs a few bucks. In which case Foundry is probably right up your street.

And if you just want something relatively simple to get started with and don't want to be doing anything more complicated that it absolutely has to be, and have a GM who will take up the slack, Roll20 will be exactly what you need.

Cheers, Hywel

[Ulric]

This thread is getting a bit more heated than I'd intended (but perhaps not more than I could have anticipated).

The point I was trying to make about extensions is that there is nothing magical about the Foundry volunteer community writing free extensions, nor about the FG volunteer community writing free extensions.

The reason why a bunch of previously-free FG extensions for things like Halfling Luck are now defunct is because that's ALWAYS what happens to volunteer code in coding communities. FG has simply had a lot more years for people to have kids, get jobs, retire, move away, or whatever.

Foundry has had 12 months, and as someone else pointed out higher in the thread, the majority of modules on there are already falling mildly behind the update schedule. Leave it a decade or more (IIRC FG dates back to 2004?) and a whole lot of those free extensions will fall behind and become useless.

This is not a comment on Foundry vs. FG. It is a comment on community-generated code vs. code supported by a commercial provider.

The vast majority of the automation features of Fantasy Grounds today come from the core product. Sneak attack is automatable within FG to the extent that you can apply an effect to add the dice to your damage roll, and FG will keep track of the to-hit rolls, AC, critical damage, resistances, etc.. That's something you can do within the core product. And it is something that SmiteWorks works very hard to ensure keeps working with every change they make to the base program. Halfling Luck can't be automated with base FG but honestly I've never had a player who is slow to spot they can re-roll a natural 1. It's a quality of life feature; the core product tracks HP, temp hits, crits, damage, AC, resistance, saving throws, half damage on made saves, etc.. And a commercial company is fixing it with each release to make sure it works.

I'm also in favour of moving more and more of these things into the core product with time. Halfling luck certainly could be and probably should be.

The core product of Foundry today, if I understand correctly, doesn't do any of that automation. The extension which does stuff to do with sneak attack has to sit on top of the one that handles to hit rolls, damage and the like. My experience is the more of these things you need stacked up in a house of cards, the more likely something somewhere is to have the developer drop out and convert the whole stack into the towering-edifice of software that no-one dares to touch. If one of the ones near the bottom of the stack goes, everything above it suddenly stops working.

Some software communities manage to overcome this tendency to entropy. In my experience paying people (even modest amounts) tends to help- whether that's paying someone to buy the Automatic Halfling Luck extension on DMSGuild/FG Forge or paying someone on Patreon to develop the code that slurps the D&D Beyond content into Foundry.

It's not infallible, but it does tend to slow down the entropy. Which is why adventures that people purchased from SmiteWorks 10 years ago can still be run today.

I hope the Foundry community will be one of the vibrant ones that staves this off for a long time. My concern is that they may well learn about software entropy by painful experience! Free is great; working is better.

Since I am lucky enough to be at the stage of life where I have enough money to get by but very little spare time or patience with crumbling software stacks after a decade and more in the trenches running software for large science experiments, my personal preference is to pay and get 80% of the automation, then pay a bit more to smooth the edges where I feel things are useful. Hence FG as my platform of choice as a GM and I don't mind in the least paying for extensions that I use - indeed, happy to pay for the convenience of automated downloads via the Forge even for extensions I already bought via DMs Guild.

That balance will be quite different for you if you are time-rich, or don't mind a bit of software stack maintenance, or are not lucky enough to be in the position of not really having to care whether an extension is free or costs a few bucks. In which case Foundry is probably right up your street.

And if you just want something relatively simple to get started with and don't want to be doing anything more complicated that it absolutely has to be, and have a GM who will take up the slack, Roll20 will be exactly what you need.

Cheers, Hywel

You and I are of the same mind. Thank you for writing it all down for me!

[Springroll]

I've used all three VTT platforms and for me (it's objective after all), Foundry is the least attractive, yes it's beautiful and slick, but it's also not intuitive or easy to get to grips with, the modules are all over the place and I spend more time getting to understand what to do as a GM than actually playing, Roll20 is the easiest to get into and plays closest to a regular tabletop, map, tokens, dice and is by far the easier one to find players for, especially if you're looking for a less popular game (ie. not 5e). And FGU is my choice if I can find players But for 5e we also have Shard which in my opinion is one of the cleanest VTT's out there.

[HywelPhillips]

I agree, Shard has a nice interface especially on the player side. I've poked around in it but not actually run a live game with it, how is it to run stuff?

I didn't investigate it further for three reasons, one a bit trivial, one major one and one really fundamental.

1) It only has manual fog of war and no lighting (at least it did when I messed around with it). Since the major competitors do have those and I like the way they allow automation of what players can see, darkvison, etc. and I think they make playing more immersive and pretty, it would have had to have a lot of other things in its favour. That's the trivial one.

2) Limited automation. Unless I'm being really dumb, it doesn't even compare hit rolls to AC. I think that's understandable for a system-neutral VTT trying to make it possible to support a wide range of systems, but when one system is all you've got I really want more system support than that. That's the major one.

3) It's a 5E-only platform... which doesn't have 5E on it. No PHB, no MM, no Xanathar's, no Tasha's. With the best will in the world, Kobold Press books are not a substitute for the actual core 5E books. I have to wonder at the business thinking behind launching a game-specific platform which doesn't allow you to purchase and use the core rulebooks of that game.


What I think it shows is that creating a VTT is actually not that hard. Small teams or even solo developers can make a Roll20-ish platform for shared modules, maps, tokens, etc.. There are probably a dozen more such platforms available, or in eternal beta, or popping up on Kickstarter.

Making a successful one requires a lot of elements outside the core software which few of these smaller platforms really seem to have devoted enough thought to. Astral has partnership with DriveThruRPG, Shard has Kobold Press and a few others but that's simply not as good as being able to use the core 5E books on the platform. Especially not if you are a 5E-only platform!

It may well be that WOTC/Hasbro aren't handing out any more licences in advance of their own entrance into VTTs, which is shitty news for everyone else but a perfectly understandable business decision from their end I suppose.

But if that's going to be a fact of business life, I think you need to work really, really hard to get compelling content onto your platform, not least because I suspect that revenue stream is really important for your company survival. It's going to be the content that draws people to the platform to some extent too. Shard have done what they can here but to be honest I think that without the PHB and other core books, it is dead in the water.

Cheers, Hywel

[Nylanfs]

Coming from a long time person with experience in the RPG coding, WotC has NEVER been able to make decent D&D software. Mastertools anyone, even with eTools they had to hire CMP to come in and fix and make it workable.

Now with D&D ACTUALLY beginning to show up on Hasbro's bottom line they might get some support from some of Hasbro's other computer oriented dept's so that might change. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

[Weissrolf]

Pathfinder 2 on Foundry depends less on modules (extensions) than DnD 5e, because they incorporate many things directly into their core PF2 game system (ruleset). This ensures that more moving parts work together, albeit at the slight cost of the community calling the PF2 system out (more or less seriously) of swallowing up external modules.

[celestian]

Thanks for these write ups, very well done.

One of the things I liked about Foundry was they use JavaScript and HTML templates. The benefit of that is you now open the door to hundreds of thousands of coders that know that language. I believe it is still (JavaScript) the most popular programming language world wide. I had hopes that FGU would change it's customization mechanics during early days of FGU talks but, unfortunately that didn't happen.

You are right, there are a zillion mods for Foundry. I play in a game that a friend runs but he only has a couple (Dice so nice and a couple more). I found the hiccups related to the modules to be on par with how I've experienced in FG... that said, I don't play 5e.

On the topic of other systems. I did some initial work writing an AD&D/OSRIC system for my friend in Foundry and was able to knock out the basics in a month or so. Mainly because the flexibility of their system (and docs on javascript/html are readily available). I did run into some issues that caused me grief (I wanted to nest objects but the way they store items it's not possible so you have to build a index list of items within the item... but that causes issues on export/import/modules). I cannot overstate how easy it was to develop for ... compared to my experiences in FG, particularly UI.

One thing I noticed (and you mentioned it) is that automation isn't a prevalent in the Foundry verse. I am honestly not sure why other than the fact the main dev isn't a big fan of it (my perception, not his words). When I was working on the system for my friend it was a bit odd that no one had the functionality built into the rulesets that let the players "damage" a target like you can in FG. It took a little digging but I figured out how to make it work and various other systems how I wanted them but it is not uncommon to find rulesets that make all data changes through the DM...

On the development side I love Foundry. I would kill to be able to use html templating in FGU for UI. It's VERY easy to develop for... but their core is still young and they are updating often. Meaning, you have to keep updating to maintain parity with the new changes.

The upside to new startups like Foundry is it keeps pressure on Smiteworks to keep updating and improving. I feel at times its a bit to slow for my tastes but im an impatient soul I look forward to seeing what all these guys do to keep apace with each other. For automation and D&D content right now there is no challenger, FGU is it. Lets hope we can see some of the features (like integrated Sound) from the Foundry show up in FGU down the road.

[Weissrolf]

Foundry is so open to modifications that one guy even created a module that improved both the visuals and performance of Foundry's lighting system, using better algorithms and WebAssembly instead of JavaScript!

Foundry's next version (V9) will incorporate the algorithms used by the mod developer, but based on pure JavaScript for better compatibility. The mod itself will likely stay somewhat better performing because of that, but using WebAssembly breaks compatibility with other mods that make use of the lighting system. So Foundry tries to include as much as possible of the goods without including the bads.

Overall I am very astounded that Foundry can be modded on such a deep level and the community as a whole (including paying customers) surely benefit from it.