Which is better for tabletop-online? Klooge or Fantasy Grounds?

[Emirikol]

Nice reviews. I have some questions about our specific house rules. How easy would it be for me to use these couple of house rules:

1. Attack roll of one. Weapon possibly destroyed but critical hit on monster.
2. Attack roll of two. Dex check DC 15 or weapon dropped 10 feet in random direction
3. Action points
4. No massive damage: maximum damage to a PC cannot take them below negative 9 from any given enemy in one round.
5. Is adding new feats and spells easy?
6. We increased all threat ranges by ONE in our game. Would that be hard to do?

Easy?

Hard?

Jay

 

[heruca]

Garrion, if you have a little time, I'd love to get some feedback from you on the Battlegrounds forums. Not many people have experience with 3 or more virtual tabletop programs, so I think you could provide some interesting perspective and valuable advice. And perhaps you can help ensure that I add whatever mechanics would be needed to support The Riddle of Steel.

 

[Hussar]

I would point out that the latest release of OpenRPG, 1.7.0 (still dev version) allows local hosting of image files. It's clunky, but it does work.

Also, with Photobucket accounts being free an a 1 meg limit on images, you can host pretty much anything you want there.

 

[grot]

Interesting I just stumbled on this thread. I went through all this testing int he last few weeks and ended up using Klooge. I'ts by no means perfect, but here's why:

1: Absolutely positively had to be cross-platform. FG was visually the most appealing choice, but one look at their system requirements meant I couldn't even consider it.

2: I REALLY love the demo of battleground rpg, but had several issues once I started playing with it across the network. Most importantly, I simply couldn't keep it running for more than 5 minutes without either the client or the server crapping out. Tried it on no less than 4 different machines. I might be an outlier, but it simply wouldn't stay up. Second, a good solid fog of war system turned out to be something I really, really wanted, but didn't realize.

3: OpenRPG, while cool, and cheap, just didn't seem as cool once I'd done half an hour with a buddy on Klooge. The ability to fire off sound effects, images, links, etc.. and really really fine tune the fog of war across multiple maps. It's just the coolest.

So it ended up being Klooge. By no means perfect, and lots of room for basic interface improvement, but it gets the job done.

An interesting thing I realized once I started playing with it. If you put out of your mind all the issues of D20 and just think about the bare bones - it's a phenomenally powerfull little tool. You could easily play ASL with it if both people knew what they were doing, and the ability to integrate and drop - well - anything - on a map, makes it really flexible.

I'm gonna play around with it, but I think you could pretty much scan in ANY boardgame, make some icons, and be playing in no time flat.

 

[heruca]

2: I REALLY love the demo of battleground rpg, but had several issues once I started playing with it across the network. Most importantly, I simply couldn't keep it running for more than 5 minutes without either the client or the server crapping out. Tried it on no less than 4 different machines. I might be an outlier, but it simply wouldn't stay up.

Sorry to hear it wasn't working for you. If you'd posted on the support forums, I might have been able to help you get it running. No one else is reporting network issues with any of the latest versions, so it might be some third-party software that's interfering, or perhaps your network settings needed tweaking.

 

[grot]

Sorry, I'm really not badmouthing - I love the simplicity of the system, and in all honestly I will likely be buying it when it's gold, stable, and runs on the mac and PC systems I've got around without any real problems (I'm a whore for RPG tools).

I did read the forums, and some of the crash issues were addressed (zone alarm, some of the connect/disconnect issues, sound queing, etc) but to be honest, I wanted to get up and running on something by the end of the month for a game, so it didn't seem like I was going to be able to work on it.

The coolest features by far are/will be the lightsource based animated fog of war stuff. Alas, we were never able to get that working with any level of speed or consistency even on the lan, but I can see the potential.

One thing I did want to ask was whether there is or will be a way to move without the grid. It was one thing that kind of turned me off right away. I know DnD has moved towards a grid system over the years, but I'm not a fan. My tabletop games are always laid out on real minis terrain, and movement is measured. No grids. Not ahuge deal, just curious.

 

[heruca]

This weekend I should be releasing a version that can be unlocked, so that folks who have pre-ordered it can start using it in actual games. It's not technically v1.0, but it's darn close. I'm about a week away from officially releasing v1.0.

I'll be adding the capability to have units move freely (not snap to grid) just as soon as I add a measuring tool (for range calculation when no grid is in use). This will bring with it the ability to move tokens by clicking and dragging, instead of just using the movement hotkeys.

 

[grot]

Cool beans. Looking forward to it.

 

[The Hound]

Has anyone tried GhostOrb? I believe their program resides on their server instead of being peer to peer, and it is supposed to have built in voice chat. Their website has been saying they are in Beta Testing with the final release "coming soon" for over a year now.

 

[BlueDrake]

I voted FG w/Teamspeak, but only because FG w/Skype wasn't an option. I've been using the software for nearly 2 years now and have been very happy with it. Updates are pretty frequent and it's moving in a very positive direction.