D&D 5E (2014) Interesting review of Fantasy Grounds software posted on reddit

[epithet]

It's more than one guy, I think there are now 4 of them. One thing I appreciate about Smite Works and Fantasy Grounds is that the developers are active participants in the Fantasy Grounds forums, seeking, reading, and responding to user input to improve the product.

 

[smiteworks]

There are two of us who work full-time on it and we have another developer that we've made an official part of the team. Apart from that, we employ around 30 commissioned community developers as well. Those folks do anything from simple adventure conversions to full blown ruleset development for us and we pay out commissions to them each quarter. There are other community developers as well, but they don't work on the "official" items.

 

[Blue]

I've been a player in a game for several months. The DM has whatever super-ultimate license that allows us to connect to him and play with the free version, though all characters and such stay on his server, I can't create a character or anything until I connect.

I haven't had resource hog issues. The only "hog" is screen real estate. I've got it across 1 and 2/3 large monitors (the remaining 3rd is our skype or hangout video chat), and it's tough to fit character sheet, combat tracker, party tracker, notes, and either map or images. Finally shrunk the UI to 80% (option before connecting) and undocked the chat window so I could resize that and it's good enough.

I like it but it still feels like an early product. My DM had to create lay-on-hands, smites at various levels, channel divinity for Oath of Ancients and a bunch of other stuff just for my character in order to have automatically working versions. Still can't figure out how to automate my 6th level aura giving +Chr to saves vs. spells. But it looks like there is a community that's coming up with some things, not sure how active.

Other negatives where I needed to create a whole second character sheet (more screen space!) for my Find Steed warhorse with barding to let me run him. And we still have issues with targeting occasionally because it's so easy to forget. We leveled up mid session and characters that edited their level from 5 to 6 were still level 5 characters though they said 6 (!!), while users that opened the classes from the library and dragged it onto their character were automatically and properly leveled up.

But for all that, it's smooth enough and gets out of the way of playing. We're having fun using it.

I have used MapTools, but that didn't have any rules support. I haven't used Roll20 to compare. But I'm happy with it and will continue to use it.

 

[epithet]

It is important to note that this isn't intended to be a fully automated D&D game--it's got a lot of automation built into it, but almost all of it can be adjusted, customised, or toggled on-and-off. This is a program designed to let you play your tabletop RPG (D&D, Pathfinder, etc.) across the vast distances of the internet (whether that's on the other side of the world, or the other side of the coffee table.)

What that means is that you can choose whether to apply bonuses to hit manually to the roll, for example, or apply an effect to the character that applies it automatically. Either way works just fine, both ways are easy to do, but you have the flexibility to play the game in a style that is your own.

 

[Mistwell]

I'd also like a set of drawing tools (colored pencil besides black please)

Wow. That should be a high priority. It's simple and very high utility for the user.

 

[Hussar]

There have been times when I forgot to resize a map, and the program basically ground to a halt. I use large maps that are 100 pixels to a 5' square, which work just fine, but when you load up a hi-res image (250 pixels per square high-def png, for example,) you're gonna have a bad time. As I understand it, the program only uses one processor core in its current iteration, but the version they're building on the Unity platform will be multi-thread, multi-processor capable.

Looking forward to that.

This is an issue with all VTT programs. If you start bombing giant image files, your VTT will go kerblooie. It's not just the processor speeds, it's the speed of the slowest connection to the group.

 

[Hussar]

Wow. That should be a high priority. It's simple and very high utility for the user.

And the drawing tools should damn well be player usable too. As a player, if I draw on the map, it doesn't show up for other players. That's terrible. I should be able to drop note tags on the map, if nothing else.

 

[Nylanfs]

The problem is that the code base is more than 12 years old. It's being re-written in Unity to address a lot of the issues though.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Wow. That should be a high priority. It's simple and very high utility for the user.

Especially now in the age of things like Microsoft Surface and the pens you write directly onto the tablet with. They work great. If only the drawing tool for FG had more options!

 

[Psikerlord#]

What is this Unity engine upgrade thing that is coming? Any info on that?