Battlegrounds or Fantasygrounds?

[Ahzad]

I know this subject comes up from time to time, but a buddy and I have been looking over VTT's. It seems to be coming down to Battlegrounds or Fantasy Grounds and I thought I would ask the community if you would care to give your thoughts, experiences on the two.

I should mention we would be playing a variety of games on it D&D, Savage Worlds, Call Cthulhu, Spycraft/FantasyCraft.

Thanks.

 

[Oryan77]

You may kick me in the head for this, but seriously, Maptool is what you should use.

I started using it last year and it is amazing. The technical support it gets on the RPTools forums is great. If you really get into using it, you can customize so many features of it and add a lot of really neat macros that people have made for the program (animated doors, teleport pads, trees & roofs that turn transparent (or invisible) when a token goes "under it", disguise a token to appear as another token, etc, etc). You probably can even find frameworks already made specifically for the game you want to play.

 

[Maccwar]

Maptool +1

 

[Agamon]

Since the OP said they've been looking over VTTs already, I'm sure he knows about MT. The question is FG v BG.

Personally, I haven't tried Battlegrounds, so I can't compare, but I've been pretty happy with Fantasy Grounds as a VTT for 3e, Pathfinder and Savage Worlds.

And as an aside, yeah, I like it better than Maptool, but MT is free, and that's pretty sweet for what it does.

 

[Mercutio01]

I've only used Battlegrounds and MapTool, so I can't compare them to FantasyGrounds. Battlegrounds is nice, easy, and quick. The developer is active, and I've known of him and his work for years via the Dundjinni forums. If I could convince friends to get BG licenses, I'd use it more often.

MapTool is also nice, easy, and quick. There are some things I'd like to see change, and supposedly there is work going on for version 2.0, and therefore a freeze on all changes to the 1.3 version. MapTool is free, which is the biggest selling factor for the people I game with, and it just works without much of a hassle at all.

Heruca (the BG developer) has a nice breakdown of the VTTs on the BG website, and he's usually pretty forthright about the different programs out there.

 

[Oryan77]

The question is FG v BG.

Really? I could have sworn that this was a thread all about Maptool.

I'm not sure why me trying to be helpful would make you feel the need to basically tell me to, "shut up."

I assumed they did their research about MT. Do I know that for sure though? Do I know what kind of info they got if they did do research on MT? Will it kill anyone if I mentioned something other than FG or BG? I thought I could mention a few things about MT that they may not have been aware of. I would have appreciated any extra feedback if I had started this thread even if I already knew about it.

I did a ton of research on all of the various VTT software when I was making my own decision. I didn't even know MT could do half the crap that it does until after I made my decision to use it (the features I mentioned are not advertised on any review sites). Which made me appreciate my choice even more. I figured I'd mention this to the OP in case it was helpful.

But hey, if you want to ensure that they not get everything that they may like to get from their VTT setup, then keep at it.

 

[Agamon]

Yikes, I didn't mean to touch a nerve and never inferred that anyone should shut up. I just saw two answers that didn't follow the question and followed up with what I thought the OP wanted. My bad.

 

[OnlineDM]

I'm also going to vote for MapTool as a write-in candidate.

 

[smiteworks]

I am biased, since I am one of the owners and developers for Fantasy Grounds, but here is why I think it will fit your needs best.

While it supports play for any game system, there are fully customized and licensed rulesets for both Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu available. Each of these each have a ton of additional licensed products. You can always manually input stats and so forth for a given Savage Worlds or CoC adventure module if you have them, but it is nice that you also have an option to buy a fully pre-made and 100% converted version for a very large number of them.

The full SRD for D&D 3.5 is also included and the rules are supported for both 3.5 /Pathfinder and 4E out of the box if you don't mind entering in stuff not in the 3.5 or PF SRDs. Finally, there are a number of 3.5/PF compatible modules available from a couple different companies, such as Expeditious Retreat Press, White Haired Man and Malhavoc Press (Monte Cook's own company.) Disclaimer: There is a new conversion from Malhavoc Press, but the others we have available are some of the earliest conversions available and not quite as nice or easy to install as the latest. New conversions (from 2009 on) have simple installers and don't require you to follow a README.txt that tells you where you need to put everything.

The community is very active, as I expect is true for MapTools. They've made a large number of rulesets available as well. The major limitation here (for Maptools and FG) is that due to legal restrictions, they simply cannot contain all the actual imagery and content that they could if they were a licensed product. By taking an active approach to license products and paying royalties to publishers, we think this helps the gaming community over the long term more so than a collection of only freely distributed content. Our 23,000+ licensed users seem to agree.

 

[pming]

Hiya.

I own both. My 2¢ is this: If FG has the "frameworks" for the games you will be playing, it wins. If FG is missing some of the "frameworks" for the games you will be playing, it looses, so go with BG.

I find FG's 'interface' to be much more pleasing on the eye for long periods of time, and being able to chance the general color tone of everything ("day", "night", "campfire", "underground", iirc), can really help relieve eye-straine as well as promote a certain 'feeling' for encounters and areas. What I find the all time BIGGEST pain in the rear with FG is that, unless you are a programmer or have weeks to learn how to use xml...you pretty much *can't* add any new game system framework, or seriously tweak the ones you do have to fit your house rules. There was a rumor floating around (havn't checked on it in about a year) of someone doing a "GUI" for a tool that would allow someone with little knowledge of programming/xml to basically 'build' his own rule set or at least tweak the ones we do have...but so far, to my knowledge, this has been just wishful thinking.

Battlegrounds is just an all-around great VTT. It has options that make it very versitile for just about any game system out there...square or hex grid. Last time I checked FG was "square grid only". Battlegrounds also seems to be able to impliment user requests and changes much faster than FG can/does. I'm not keen on BG's dice stuff, but you can get used to it. So, if you have a lot of other games not 'covered' by FG, Battlegrounds is the way to go.

As for MapTool...it's nice. I do like it quite a bit, but there's just something about it that feels..."cold" to me. I can't put my finger on it. *shrug*

^_^

Paul L. Ming