Prism
Explorer
We really like that Roll20 is browser based, and with the API scripts you can generate sheets and spells with automated macros. There's a little checking to make sure the macros work right, but it's basically all done for you.
I agree, however, that Roll20 is not good for organizing campaign notes. I mean, it's really really piss poor at it.
Yeah I agree, although Roll20 is technically free, I can't imagine the pain of using it (having to do everything manually and having no character vault) without paying the subscription. For casual use I guess free it ok, but we only lasted for a few weeks before one of us paid up for the sub.
You mean there's no legal pdf of the Monster Manual. That is true.
Legally, however, there is the free DM's Basic Rules PDF which has a lot of monsters, and there are the various free PDFs for each of the adventure books with bunches of monsters in there too.
And not legally, well, we don't discuss those things here because it would offend Eric's grandma.
The thing is, that to do exactly the same thing for 5e in Fantasy Grounds it costs a single one off fee of $2.99 and for that you get all of the free content from the basic rules, all pre imported in, macros and scripts done, plus tokens. If you want to go the copy paste route for free adventures from pdf, it is a bit more involved but that is also possible and free. All this content can be shared with the players as the DM sees fit.
One downside comes back to the lack of it being purely web based. In Roll20 a player can join the game when the DM is not there and view/update their character (maybe create a few macros). This can save some time in session. To do the same in Fantasy Grounds the DM has to leave the software running on their PC so we can connect and update characters. Our DM tends to do this the night before we play for a few hours (usually get an IM saying 'game up' or similar).
Then finally we get to the elephant in the room. You cannot legally get any of the other D&D 5e content in digital format. So you cannot legally make any real use of the Roll20 API's to make character generation or monster importing easier. So you have to manually type it all in yourself and that's a total pita. The only legal way of doing this is to use Fantasy Grounds and since they have to pay wizards for the content and then also do a load of work themselves to do all the importing for you (and often add additional content too), they tend to charge an amount that some people are unhappy with - hence the reason for this thread. The trouble is there is no other decent option.
So, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are both pretty cheap for what they do and are about the same price at $10 per month for the DM and free for the players. Fantasy Grounds charges $2.99 once to import all of the free 5e content with zero effort and Roll20 lets you do this with scripts with some small effort. The big prices start to come in if you want any of the other official content. What we really need is a bit more competition though so ideally if you could buy the official content through Roll20 then pricing might drop a little. Or if the books were made available as official pdfs then you could copy and paste using scripts into Roll20 (unlikely to happen anytime soon it seems).
I'd also like to see a combo package for buying books and digital but I can't see how that would work unless you buy both from the same source.