Fantasy Grounds Is Going Free To Play

Fantasy Grounds, the Virtual Tabletop (VTT) which launched over 20 years ago in 2004, has always been a premium option for VTT users. That is--until today! Because, effective immediately, Fantasy Grounds is free to use.

Previously an FG license cost $50, and then you had to buy the games and other modules you wanted to use with it. As of today, all users can host and join unlimited games with no purchase or subscription.

The software itself is free, although of course the marketplace contains a massive quantity of official licensed content, and add-ons like art, maps, tokens, and digital dice. Officially licensed material includes Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and more, with over 50 game systems and more than 3,000 products.

There's also a new 'Online Reader'--a web-based compendium which enables you to access your Fantasy Grounds library from your browser.

 

[Hussar]

I've been critical of Fantasy grounds for a number of reasons, but, customer service certainly isn't one of them. Problems that I've had have been professionally and quickly fixed and they have very kindly taken my very non-technical brain and led me step by step to solutions. When I was running FG on a router that did not support port forwarding, they took me by the hand and set me up with Hamachi (yes, that's going back a few years) and made it work. So, yeah, from that end, Smiteworks and FG have been absolutely great.

My complaints have largely stemmed from a few issues - lack of tabbed windows still continues to baffle me, particularly when after running a couple of encounters, I then have to spend several minutes on house keeping, closing windows, resizing stuff, and I have players who are constantly missing things because one window is covering another window. I now have a monster sized screen, but, one of my players runs on a 14 inch laptop and it's not a great experience. The absolutely primitive font controls in the chat drive me to distraction as well. If I make the text large enough for my poor eyes to read, everything else is so big that it makes the program hard to use. Twenty years and I still can't change the font or font size in chat. :grr:

By the same token, I've been using FG for over ten years now, so, while my complaints sound like major issues, obviously they aren't too big of a deal. Just proud nail type stuff that makes me grind my teeth from time to time.

Overall? Yeah, I'd recommend FG. I've used FG and Roll20 recently, and I'd still give the nod to FG.

 

[Reynard]

The point is that a desktop application is inherently more performant and more secure than a browser app. Even when an app has a viable browser based version (take Discord, Zoom or MS Teams as examples) it usually warns you that downloading the app will give you a better experience. As for security, do not forget that VTTs are typically software that runs third party scripts. Keeping them away from the tool where most of us input credit card details should sound like a wise choice, not a limitation.

So while you may perceive the browser solution as better, moving FGU to a browser based implementation, which is feasible as Unity does run in browsers with a proprietary plugin, might in fact be a bad idea.

As for the availability on mobile devices, which someone mentioned, please note that no VTT has a mobile implementation atm. Ten or fifteen years ago there were attempts to port MapTools or Roll20 to a mobile app, but they all aborted. It seems quite obvious to me that mobile devices cannot support the UI of a virtual tabletop. They are simply too small. Prove me wrong if you can, but all such attempts have failed so far.

I am very happy with FGU as a desktop tool. But I have run into real people in the real world that would not use it because you have to load it like a program, rather than run it through a browser. My point was simply that reducing price is not the only barrier.

 

[Cergorach]

The point is that a desktop application is inherently more performant and more secure than a browser app.

That's not true. An app is as good as the code/developer is, and many, many desktop application developers make horribly inefficient applications that are a pain to run. On the other hand, there are web apps that are more performant then equivalent desktop apps. Of course you can say that if you look at the same quality code... But we never look at the same quality code, developers have different preferences and skill dependencies, so it's often comparing apples with oranges and just look at whatever instances of software (local or web) fits best with your needs at that particular moment.

What you seem to forget that webservers can do stuff that your local client would otherwise be doing.

Think of the computer game equivalent: We all had seen how well Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal ran on PCs, even old hardware, expectations where that this would also be the case for Doom: The Dark Ages, it wasn't. Where I can run Doom Eternal on a handheld Steam Deck at very high settings, I need something dedicated that consumes x10 the power to run it at similar settings. Both developed by the same developers, one is very efficient, the other isn't. As a sidenote: I could run Doom The Dark Ages in a browser via GFN where it runs on a server and consumes very little power on the web client...

 

[Eyes of Nine]

That $50 buy-in was a significant blocker for me, a person who is not confident in their technical ability to get the thing to actually work. This may switch me from R20 - although to be fair, I've spent an additional $200+ on getting the 5e books into R20.

 

[Zaukrie]

I'm not sure when the last time you used Fantasy Grounds would be, but the UI visuals have undergone a fairly extensive overhaul in the last year or so, and we have released some UI interaction improvements (such as removing radial menus) in that time and are actively working on more. I'm well-versed in what makes modern interfaces tick and am working to incorporate those elements into the application.

It might still not be to your preference, but I wanted to confirm that we have started taking and will continue to take steps to put the idea that the UI is dated to rest in the coming days. It's been a persistent byline for a few years, but we're working on changing the tide, have taken strides already, and we've seen positive feedback on the new direction. We've still got work to do and are committed to getting it done.

I have not used it in the last year, so that's good to hear! And I will be checking out it again. There were things I liked, but I can't see leaving foundry at this point, but we'll see.

 

[smiteworks]

While on the issue of licenses. You guys are the only VTT with license for D&D Classics/AD&D! That is amazing. Any plans for license for 3.5 or even 4e materials?

This is something I long to do. I make a pitch for this to Wizards of the Coast at least once or twice a year. They are probably sick of hearing it from me. We include a ruleset for 3.5E and 4E with the app. It just doesn't have any real data. To be fair, community members could create and share all the game data only for anything and everything in 3.5E (and even 4E to some degree) today on the FG Forge if they wanted. I still want official content support though, and I will continue to push for it regularly.

 

[Nylanfs]

We include a ruleset for 3.5E and 4E with the app. It just doesn't have any real data. To be fair, community members could create and share all the game data only for anything and everything in 3.5E (and even 4E to some degree) today on the FG Forge if they wanted. I still want official content support though, and I will continue to push for it regularly.

You DO have the SRD data in there for 3e/35e, Pathfinder, & 4e (limited as it is for 4e though).

 

[Vael]

I'm really trying to stay with IRL play currently ... while online play saved my sanity during the pandemic, I had so missed the tactile nature of RPGs and being at the table that now that I can play in person ... I don't really want to fight tech to play RPGs.

That said ... I've always been on the hunt for something to take me off Roll20, but the price point for FG was a non-starter for me. Now it's back in consideration, though I'm also looking at others.