Which VTT is the bee's knees?

Fantasy Grounds

Roll20

Epic Table

Etc.


Which VTT is currently the preferred product? Explain your answer.

I see that Fantasy Grounds "supports" the 5th Edition D&D rules. What does that mean, exactly? Do any of the other VTTs "support" some ruleset or other?

What would be required to play, say, 1st edition, or Basic, etc. using these products?
 

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Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
FG and Roll20 are both official D&D licensees. FG has been for a few years, Roll20 became one last year.

They also support many other games, of course.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app
 



I use roll20.

It's let me keep my old group together and get back in touch with one of the guys I first started playing D&D with. So big props there. It has chat/voice/video which is nice though every now and then it acts up so we have to wind up turning that off and using something like google hangouts.

There's a good deal of documentation on how to program your character sheet and macros. However, there are still times where you are going to need to use your google-fu to find the solution to what you want to do.

Things like dynamic lighting (what your PCs actually can see) are a premium. However, I think it's definitely worth it when your PCs get lost in your dungeon and have to figure out how to get back out.

The way the maps are set up and created on roll20 is great when you know that your players are going to the dungeon and the players are on board with going to the dungeon. I find that improvisation is hard to do with the map tools.

So, in the end, I've had some good experiences but it doesn't hold up to actually sitting around the table with each other. :\
 

Blue

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
I've played a 5e campaign using Fantasy Ground. It shows a lot of potential and is about 70% towards realizing it. It's got a nice powerful language and it does so much nicely to take the load off the DM. Things would just work most of the time. And taking the load off the DM was even more for published adventures where you could already have everything in. It's good for the rest as well - images, shared notes that any player can update, etc.

On the other hand, it's expensive, has a steeper learning curve then it should for some things, and a lot of the mechanics you could buy and have the text but the mechanical part wasn't coded when I played. And some of the things would need a language expansion to code correctly. For example, it couldn't handle a paladin aura to automatically add +CHR to ally saves within 10', nor could it specify if damage was from magic for my oath of the ancients 7th level aura. So those always took DM modifications, often to back off half of auto-applied damage to some PCs. Which was confusing because you needed to know where it would handle everything and where it wouldn't and you needed to manually audit the process.

I haven't used Roll20, but it was talked about as the superior option for rules back when we were playing 4e online using maptools. We handled all the mechanics ourselves, but even there things like the fog of war for what each player could see with Roll20 was really tempting.
 

bgbarcus

Explorer
I've seen Fantasy Ground used in online games and I've run a game in Roll20 for the last several years. Bet you can guess which I'd recommend.

It is worth spending some time with a free Roll20 account. You won't get the best features but you'll get a chance to look it over. A one-month subscription should be enough to learn if it is worth the money.

I don't know if FG has a similar trial option. If it does, I'd suggest trying it out too. They are different enough that I suspect you will find a strong preference for one over the other.
 

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