Recent content by Torgaard

I thought 4E was brilliant in many ways. There were many things me and my players loved about it, but try as we might to be creative enough to break out of its combat that played like a board game, we just couldn't. The realization that we'd stopped seeing combat as a creative...

Heh, there ya go - my experience is a mirror image (pun totally intended!) of yours. Encounter Library's videos were a godsend, and the Foundry Knowledge Base is definitely helpful, but I kept wanting to jump to a wiki (or something) for answers to specific "situational" questions and - maybe...

Ya, we've used Fantasy Grounds for going on what - almost 10 years? We've recently started playing around with Foundry VTT while waiting for Fantasy Grounds Unity to stabilize. Just kinda thought Foundry looked cool so, we figured we just play around with it a little. Fantasy Grounds is near and...

Ya, I frequently tell players at my table, "No published adventure is safe from my edits!" I've never met a module/adventure published by TSR/WotC that I didn't heavily modify. I typically enjoy the story, the theme, the backgrounds, and the flavor of various personalities and locales (even...

My favorite House Rules at my table: Homebrew - Homebrew itself is my favorite House Rule. I have endless amounts of Homebrew classes, subclasses, feats, spells, and backgrounds at my table. Every class has at least twenty subclasses available to them, some considerably more. Any reasonable...

I may be in the minority, but I kinda like it that way. Though I give it little thought. I'll take whatever comes down the pipe; it all works for me. My perceptions of how WotC handles the Realms is probably different from alotta folks. I guess the "why" comes down a few things: I've never...

This. Neither I as a DM, nor any of my players really care too much for "balance". Balance is two-dimensional and boring. It's a real buzzkill for any party. Balance is always all, "Nyahh - you can't do that. Nobody can be better than anyone else, or do anything exceptionally well!" Balance...

This. The database is nice, the interface is great, I think it's well designed, etc. But that alone won't do much for me. Me and my players have all that info at our fingertips via the source material (the books or on Fantasy Grounds). The character/NPC builder, if it's robust enough, will...

Well, I'm happy to report that non-sequential initiative was a huge hit at my table! After the dust settled on the first fight, the talk at the table was that it might the most epic fight of the campaign, thanks to the new system. They were jabbering excitedly about it for quite awhile...

Proposed this non-sequential initiative style to my (Fantasy Grounds) table last week, and after a media blitz where I outlined how I see it working (I plan on keeping the spirit of Hemlock's outline, but will be modifying it there and there), wrote up an exhaustively detailed example of how an...

My ideal party size for my campaigns is 4 players + DM (me). I cancel if 1 player can't make it. For the 30 years I've DM'd; dem's dah rules, all of which I make very clear before we start a campaign and again at Session Zero. I don't want to risk that the rest of the party dies as a result of...

Due to my group being far too spread out for pen-n-paper sessions, we have been a strictly Fantasy Grounds game for quite awhile now. My pre-session rituals are pretty consistently: Eat Something - Gotta have food for my body and my brain (which I keep inside my body) so that neither of them...

5 out of 5 rating for Fantasy Grounds I'd demo'd all the products that were out there three years ago when I was first shopping for a virtual tabletop, and I'd take every new product for a spin to this day. Pound-for-pound, none can match Fantasy Grounds. The Combat Tracker in Fantasy Grounds...

That being said, I pretty much keep my table up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for my players. I guess I've never really noticed an impact on any other programs I run at the same time. I'll play MMO's like ESO, SWtOR, stuff like that, and they seem to run just fine. Though I do have a reasonably...

I whipped up alternate versions of the first two dungeon crawls in Lost Mine of Phandelver, which you can snag HERE. I've also started cranking away at Hoard of the Dragon Queen maps, which can be found HERE. I use Devin Night's and Raymond Gaustandes tokens. Some of Raymond's come with the...