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Battlegrounds or Fantasygrounds?

Which do you prefer as a VTT?

  • Battlegrounds

    Votes: 2 22.2%
  • Fantasy Grounds

    Votes: 7 77.8%

  • Poll closed .

IronWolf

blank
I am also going to add MapTool as a write-in candidate. It is a very versatile VTT, has excellent video tutorials to get you up to speed and supports a myriad of systems with frameworks or can easily be adapted to any system even without a framework. Oh, and it is free and runs on multiple platforms.

With all that said, of the two choices you listed, if I am not allowed to choose MapTool, then I vote Fantasy Grounds. I hear good things about it frequently and they seem to have an active player base (less important though if you have a group ready to play).
 

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Treebore

First Post
There really isn't much difference between FB, BG or Maptools, for that matter, in terms of what they can do for you. The biggest differences are:

Interface. Which one do you find easiest to use and figure out.

Cosmetics. Which one do you think looks prettiest. I think Fantasy Grounds wins here.

Price. Which one are you AND your players willing to pay for.


Maptools is free and gets the job done, and even has a few, free, frameworks for some popular games.

The others? I haven't looked at Battle Grounds in a long time, but Fantasy Grounds charges you money for everything. Every Framework, every pre made adventure, so you can end up sinking a lot of money into it. Unless you get into building your own.

So whats most important to you and your other participants? Interface? How pretty it looks? Price? They all can run the same games, as far as I know. They even have card decks for things like SW and Aces and Eights. I don't know if any of them have poker chips, though. Made those up myself.
 

Treebore

First Post
I am biased, since I am one of the owners and developers for Fantasy Grounds, but here is why I think it will fit your needs best.

While it supports play for any game system, there are fully customized and licensed rulesets for both Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu available. Each of these each have a ton of additional licensed products. You can always manually input stats and so forth for a given Savage Worlds or CoC adventure module if you have them, but it is nice that you also have an option to buy a fully pre-made and 100% converted version for a very large number of them.

The full SRD for D&D 3.5 is also included and the rules are supported for both 3.5 /Pathfinder and 4E out of the box if you don't mind entering in stuff not in the 3.5 or PF SRDs. Finally, there are a number of 3.5/PF compatible modules available from a couple different companies, such as Expeditious Retreat Press, White Haired Man and Malhavoc Press (Monte Cook's own company.) Disclaimer: There is a new conversion from Malhavoc Press, but the others we have available are some of the earliest conversions available and not quite as nice or easy to install as the latest. New conversions (from 2009 on) have simple installers and don't require you to follow a README.txt that tells you where you need to put everything.

The community is very active, as I expect is true for MapTools. They've made a large number of rulesets available as well. The major limitation here (for Maptools and FG) is that due to legal restrictions, they simply cannot contain all the actual imagery and content that they could if they were a licensed product. By taking an active approach to license products and paying royalties to publishers, we think this helps the gaming community over the long term more so than a collection of only freely distributed content. Our 23,000+ licensed users seem to agree.

I know I am going to come across sounding like I am knocking Fantasy Grounds, but here is why I do not buy FG, or BG.

You talk about licensing. Well, I already own a ton of adventures. So I have already paid my dues, so to speak, to all the gaming publishers. So when I want to run something I either scan in the relevant maps, or use the PDF copies I have of the relevant adventure. Or, I use all the tile products I have bought, and in many cases scanned, because a PDF version was not available. So between all of the resources I already paid for, I can put together my own modules, built precisely how I want them built. Then with some sets of Campaign Macros, I can easily make the rolls I need for monsters and NPC's.

So sure, if someone has money to burn, buy Fantasy Grounds, or Battlegrounds, pay you guys to save people some time. I don't have money to burn, so I build my own stuff. My gaming group does not have money to burn, so we play Maptools. This way, I burn all my money on RPG companies and the print/PDF products they produce. Which is my licensing.

So thats why I go with Maptools. I find it easy, gets the job done, and lets me have money to spend on other gaming stuff.

But if I had money to burn, and didn't have or want to take the time to create my own Macros and set up my own adventures, and wanted everything to look as pretty as possible, I'd invest in Fantasy Grounds, or maybe Battlegrounds. But as it is, Maptools allows me to do what I want, and for free. Plus its licensed. Since I use stuff I bought legally, and for personal use.
 

ShinHakkaider

Adventurer
The only reason that I'm not a supporter of Fantasy Grounds is because there is no native OSX support for it. Otherwise id be all over it in heartbeat.

As such I have a licsenced copy of d20Pro and have tinkered a bit with MapTools. I can't really say that I'm a fan of MapTools due to the interface and it's not all that user friendly. That said if you really want to hunker down and get into the guts of a VTT to get it to do exactly what you need it to do? Then MapTools is definitely the product for you.

D20 pro allows me to import monsters and characters from HeroLab directly into it and with a little tweaking I'm good to go. So yeah, if you're looking for something that runs natively in OSX and can import things from HeroLab for easy use in the VTT? D20Pro.

Since we're ignoring the perimeters of the original request and all.
 

Treebore

First Post
The only reason that I'm not a supporter of Fantasy Grounds is because there is no native OSX support for it. Otherwise id be all over it in heartbeat.

As such I have a licsenced copy of d20Pro and have tinkered a bit with MapTools. I can't really say that I'm a fan of MapTools due to the interface and it's not all that user friendly. That said if you really want to hunker down and get into the guts of a VTT to get it to do exactly what you need it to do? Then MapTools is definitely the product for you.

D20 pro allows me to import monsters and characters from HeroLab directly into it and with a little tweaking I'm good to go. So yeah, if you're looking for something that runs natively in OSX and can import things from HeroLab for easy use in the VTT? D20Pro.

Since we're ignoring the perimeters of the original request and all.

Yeah, I remember finding Maptools a little on the challenging side, but once I remembered [1d20+8] and remembered how to find the button to create new macros, I was able to go hog wild. FG and BG are essentially the same as well. Maybe the fact that they look prettier makes it seem like their interface is easier. Never looked into importing Hero Lab. Wonder how hard it is to learn to do the tweaking necessary?
 

Treebore

First Post
Doesn't BG and FG both have free trial versions? I am pretty certain they do, or at least did, because I remember playing around with both of them for free.
 

smiteworks

Explorer
FG does have a free trial version.

Some other responses to earlier comments. FG has supported hex and square based grids on maps for about a year I believe. This can be toggled on an image by image basis, in case you have a mix over overland and indoor maps.

Over the summer, we also added support for importing characters from HeroLabs for 3.5 and 4E.

Getting everything into the tool is probably similar for each of the major VTTs, but building modules is something we've invested a lot of time on. You really only need to work with xml and scripts if you want to build your own ruleset or support for a new game.

Each of the screenshots I linked earlier were add-ons you could buy. None of that content displayed would have to be entered at all. Take a look at the attached image for another example of what sort of thing you'd get with a purchased D20 module. Typically, all the included maps have shortcuts pre-linked to individual story elements (displayed as push-pins.) These hide away and are displayed and made clickable by holding CTRL. If you are building any of your own stories or adventures, you'd just download an image from the web and put it in your campaign image folder and then drag and drop your story elements to the map where you want it linked.
 

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