D&D 5E Do you find Fantasy Grounds just too much of an investment?

[Prism]

We really like that Roll20 is browser based, and with the API scripts you can generate sheets and spells with automated macros. There's a little checking to make sure the macros work right, but it's basically all done for you.

I agree, however, that Roll20 is not good for organizing campaign notes. I mean, it's really really piss poor at it.

Yeah I agree, although Roll20 is technically free, I can't imagine the pain of using it (having to do everything manually and having no character vault) without paying the subscription. For casual use I guess free it ok, but we only lasted for a few weeks before one of us paid up for the sub.

You mean there's no legal pdf of the Monster Manual. That is true.

Legally, however, there is the free DM's Basic Rules PDF which has a lot of monsters, and there are the various free PDFs for each of the adventure books with bunches of monsters in there too.

And not legally, well, we don't discuss those things here because it would offend Eric's grandma.

The thing is, that to do exactly the same thing for 5e in Fantasy Grounds it costs a single one off fee of $2.99 and for that you get all of the free content from the basic rules, all pre imported in, macros and scripts done, plus tokens. If you want to go the copy paste route for free adventures from pdf, it is a bit more involved but that is also possible and free. All this content can be shared with the players as the DM sees fit.

One downside comes back to the lack of it being purely web based. In Roll20 a player can join the game when the DM is not there and view/update their character (maybe create a few macros). This can save some time in session. To do the same in Fantasy Grounds the DM has to leave the software running on their PC so we can connect and update characters. Our DM tends to do this the night before we play for a few hours (usually get an IM saying 'game up' or similar).

Then finally we get to the elephant in the room. You cannot legally get any of the other D&D 5e content in digital format. So you cannot legally make any real use of the Roll20 API's to make character generation or monster importing easier. So you have to manually type it all in yourself and that's a total pita. The only legal way of doing this is to use Fantasy Grounds and since they have to pay wizards for the content and then also do a load of work themselves to do all the importing for you (and often add additional content too), they tend to charge an amount that some people are unhappy with - hence the reason for this thread. The trouble is there is no other decent option.

So, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are both pretty cheap for what they do and are about the same price at $10 per month for the DM and free for the players. Fantasy Grounds charges $2.99 once to import all of the free 5e content with zero effort and Roll20 lets you do this with scripts with some small effort. The big prices start to come in if you want any of the other official content. What we really need is a bit more competition though so ideally if you could buy the official content through Roll20 then pricing might drop a little. Or if the books were made available as official pdfs then you could copy and paste using scripts into Roll20 (unlikely to happen anytime soon it seems).

I'd also like to see a combo package for buying books and digital but I can't see how that would work unless you buy both from the same source.

 

[SavageCole]

My tastes are heavily skewed toward live in-person games, but I have dabbled recently with VTT. I've played a few sessions of both roll20 and FG2, and enjoyed them both. As a player, roll20 seemed choppier and more limited by the DM's lack of skill and experience manipulating the tool. In our FG2 games, DM was equally inexperienced but I guess since so much is available off the shell and easier to run, the experience has been much higher quality. I feel my experience with roll20 may be tainted by a mediocre pilot in the DM chair, but I prefer FG2.

It's not cheap, but it's not absurd either. Would it be nice is WOTC negotiated a discount for those who bought dead-tree versions (by essentially waiving/reducing their royalty on the FG module purchase)? Not worth the bother. People need to stop being so cheap and be willing to pay people fairly for their work.

 

[Mercule]

I might, possibly play on online game, but my current game is live. I don't actually mind paying for a quality product to help me manage my game, though. Does FG allow things like printing of character sheets, an initiative tracker and/or combat manager that could be used with off-line dice, etc.?

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

I was on the fence until I dug a little deeper. Simply too much of an investment, both financially and in time to learn and master. Pass.

 

[jrowland]

I am DMing a FG game right now. Me and 3 players.

Cost: $150 for Ultimate license + $50 PHB + $35 PotA = $235
That comes to $58.75 each. Total. For the life of the campaign. We only play about 2-3 hours a week. This could easily last a year. We all decided that the cost was justified for a years entertainment with friends. I've spent more on a video game I stopped playing after a month, or a date night at the movies.

It's not an investment. Investments have a return. You neither get a return or a loss. Its a consumption. Here we are consuming entertainment so you have to gauge where your entertainment budget is going. In our case, it means foregoing one Triple AAA release video game for greater entertainment.

here's where it gets even better: After PotA, we spend another $35 ($8.75 each) for the next adventure next year. Total. For the life of the campaign.

For things like SCAG, it's a personal decision. I won't contribute, but if the 3 players want to pitch in for it, I won't cry. I have a hard back copy and can make characters with it without the digital version if I so choose. Those sorts of things are optional.

It's an easy choice for my hard earned money and easy on my entertainment budget.

 

[kylania]

We had a group that was all set to use roll20 when I reminded them about Fantasy Grounds. Since I had already spent the money on the full suite of 5E FG products I offered to show the group character creation for comparison sake. The DM that was going to run it didn't have anything yet.

It took approximately two minutes of trying out Fantasy Grounds for every player in the group to completely abandon roll20 and ask where to paypal the DM so we could all switch to Fantasy Grounds. It's that good from a player perspective. This is the second existing roll20 group I've been part of that has converted over to FG because it's just that much better.

 

[LordEntrails]

<snip>

I've considered FG because I like how well the adventures are integrated, but when you add up the cost for the MM online and the one I bought it gets expensive and all I'm gaining is tokens.

<snip>

But you're not only gaining tokens. You are gaining drag and drop functionality.
Personally, I don't buy hardcovers anymore. They just sit on the shelf. I just buy the FG version and I've had no problems doing that. But, if you've already bought the hardcover, and you don't want to buy the FG version, then go to the FG forums and learn about the community Par5e project, you can create your own FG version from your hardcover MM (or PHB or DMG, or...)

 

[LordEntrails]

If I could use the Fantasy Grounds version offline like a PDF then that would be fine, but you can't.

Huh? Maybe "offline" isn't the word you are looking for. I use my FG versions of the PHB and MM when I am offline all the time. Yes I have to startup FG, but that's doesn't mean I have to be connected to the internet. I run FG when I'm sitting on an airplane at 30k ft... (and not connected to the plane's wifi.)

 

[LordEntrails]

I think the price is solid, except for the port-forwarding thing. If you are on some sort of shared environment (like dorms, apartments, condos, etc.) where an intervening network element hoses your ability to assign port forwarding you can't host a game at all.

Checkout LogMeIn, that's what I use when I've got a network element trying to prevent me from playing.

 

[velkkor]

As someone who paid for a mentor-level subscription to roll20 for some time it was pretty easy for me to make the change to Fantasy Grounds. This was my breakdown:

• Cost of program. This was pretty straightforward, as I'd easily paid several hundred dollars to Roll20 over the course of my subscription. I planned on continuing using VTT (my RPGing friends are scattered around the country now) so paying for the Ultimate license on FG was an easy choice (or rather, upgrading my standard license to Ultimate during the Steam summer sale).
• Cost of content. This initially turned me off (as it turns off others), however after spending about 10 hours putting things in manually I was more than happy to just pay for the PHB and MM in Fantasy Grounds. It is 100% possible to do everything yourself, but the learning curve is high and my time is valuable. The PHB is also available to any of my players during the session, so they don't need to purchase it themselves (actually my players don't need to purchase anything at all). I spent hours and hours and hours and hours scanning and cropping things to use in my Roll20 games. I have no problem paying for content on FG, especially when you get *more* content than you get in the books. DM and player versions of maps alone is worth it to me. Rather than paying $30-$40 for a module, then going to the artist's site and paying another $20 or more for digital versions of the maps (or spending time in Photoshop making my own player version) I can spend the $30 or $40 for the FG version of the module and have those maps already.
• Tracking of items during play. This was the #1 reason I switched from Roll20 to Fantasy Grounds. Fantasy Grounds does an outstanding job of tracking effects, conditions, etc "under the hood," automating things that had historically been a pain to keep track of in Roll20. An example I used for a friend:
  
  I have an encounter with a green dragon. In the Combat Tracker I have entries for the players and for the dragon. Under the dragon's entry I have all the abilities listed, including the breath attack and the saving throw information. I'm able to drag the saving throw to the player (or players) and FG automatically rolls the saving throw for them and remembers the results. Then I target the players and drag the breath weapon attack to them and it automatically applies the proper damage to the characters depending on if they succeeded or failed the saving throw. When the next round comes and it's the dragon's turn in the initiative order a d6 will automatically roll to determine if the breath weapon gets recharged or not, staying grayed out if not or becoming available if so.
  
  Things like that are particularly useful in games like 4e where you have tons of character powers that are tracked on use (once per day, once per short rest, etc) as you don't have to think about that sort of thing anymore.
• Prep time. I'd like to say that I got quicker at prep time in Roll20 as time went on, and FG took about a week or two for me to acclimate myself to how it does things, but I can honestly say that the amount of time it takes me to get things prepped (to my personal liking) in FG is quite a bit less than the time it took me to do things in Roll20. Gridding maps is much easier for me in FG, and in the time I'd spend prepping for one session in FG I can prep 3-4 sessions in FG.

Fantasy Grounds is not for everybody, certainly. One of the previous posters mentioned that they use Roll20 essentially for a map and dice roller, and if that's all you need then FG is way overkill. It's pretty, but still overkill.

If you're on a shared network (many university networks, some apartment buildings, etc) or have poor internet connectivity (satellite, wireless) then Fantasy Grounds will be a chore for you if you're a DM (if it works at all). Unlike Roll20--where all players just connect to their website--the DM in Fantasy Grounds is hosting the connection. This requires you to either be able to forward/open the proper ports on your router/firewall or use a VPN solution such as Hamachi. This may be beyond the technical capabilities of many players (though there are some folks on the Fantasy Grounds forums that help users with this on a daily basis), but still can understandably turn people off.

For me, it was a great decision and I don't think I'd ever go back to Roll20. I certainly have nothing against Roll20, as they were there for me for a long time and what they've done with a web interface is nothing short of amazing. Unfortunately my needs outgrew them, and especially once Smiteworks got the official D&D license then I really had little choice.