Fantasy Grounds Drops Prices For Electronic D&D Books

Azzy · Aug 7, 2017

Good news!

Morrus · Aug 7, 2017

Peter Saumur said:
As of yet. We won't know how far they can get with automation, in terms of running a campaign, since they haven't released any digital ones yet. I imagine you will be able to roll dice at some point. They might not go the "digital battlemap" route but it will be 85% of the way there with everything else; DM and Player side.

Fair enough. I’ve never used a VTT, so I’m far from an expert on the subject.

Peter Saumur · Aug 7, 2017

fantasmamore said:
You cannot use any type of handheld device to access FG, even if you own a mac you have to use a third-party program since it's a windows app. FG does not have a character creator (although you can use "library items" to create one instead of having to write and calculate everything from scratch). DDB on the other hand doesn't have the ability to import and share maps, use fog of war and I cannot see how people could use it to play an adventure (as it is right now).
So, yes, they do both allow you to access the same content (player's handbook, monster manual etc) but in completely different ways...

Also both limit "free usage" - Albeit, Beyond limits you to 6 characters/account using only the basic SRD.
FG, you can make as many as you want - just can't print them out in a pretty format, even with that XML to PDF that someone cobbled together.

jgsugden · Aug 7, 2017

Morrus said:
I think you're reversing FG's side-benefits with its core usage. That's a bit like saying my speakers have a side-benefit of being surrounded by a car, making Lexus' main competition Bose.

Core usage depends upon the user. Again, a lot of people are primarily interested in the online books and look at the other features of each of these sites as things they might use. I'm not saying the majority, but enough that you can be sure Beyond is discussed by people in FG a lot.

Peter Saumur · Aug 7, 2017

I think there will be several tiers of users for Beyond. You will have:

The Digital DM - has the books but also wants the digital versions for quick, searchable reference.
The Digital PC - wants a digital character sheet to track stats on their phone.
The Digital PC Builders - wants to build/test/min-max characters and print them out; either as PDF or paper copy.

This is assuming what they have now is everything we can expect.

LordEntrails · Aug 7, 2017

Great News.

No doubt WotC has been receptive to efforts by both SmiteWorks and DDB to allow lower pricing. And it has now paid off for us gamers

IMO, I will say some of the comparisons or critiques in this thread are a bit inaccurate. Such as printing pretty character sheets, because this is simple subjective and there are multiple ways of printing characters from FG. And again imo, FG works fine as a character creator, it just isn't a character manager, and I do see a distinction between such.

Anyway, I'm happy to see WotC adapting to new markets. Doug certainly seems to be one of the key influencers on some of these changes and they all seem like they are of benefit to the gamers and the industry as a whole.

Myrdin Potter · Aug 7, 2017

Fantasy Grounds is an ok character creator for 5e, but bad if you want to go back and change things. It is fine if you don't change your mind and it handles leveling up and you can have all the WoTC content available and there even is a module on DMs Guild that gives you some access to all the Unearthed Arcana play test material. Beyond is far more robust if all you want to do is make characters.

FG has no ability to run the program and access your content from anything but some form of a PC. You can use Windows or a Windows emulator on MacOS and Linux and if all you are doing is using it as a reference look-up, you can use a Microsoft Surface or other tablet-like laptops and it works. You can share your materials with players that are connected to you, so the players can use the DM's Player's Handbook.

The thing is, Fantasy Grounds is a full on VTT and runs much more than 5e. For actually running a game, the automation handles a lot of the bookkeeping and does almost all of the typical combat calculations for you, including tracking initiative and spell duration (you still need to remember to do concentration checks when you take damage). It displays maps, has tokens, can share images (and it has all the art from the WoTC books). You can create adventures inside of it (map creation needs to be done in a third party application). Third party extensions to the main program add syrinscape integration, alternative skins for the program, location databases, much much more. FG has a very extensive third party publisher content store for 5e and you can even buy content for FG on DMs Guild.

With the exception of the access via an app on Beyond (which is not released yet and may just be a re-skinned web browser), for the same or lower cost of the content, you can do a lot more than on Beyond. If you want to share the materials, FG and Beyond require a subscription. FG allows a one time license purchase as well for either $40 (everyone needs to have this license) or $150 (if the DM has this, the players do not need to pay for their own license when connected to that DM). They have frequent sales and prices are often 15% to 25% lower for licenses and you can both upgrade and you can try it via subscription with a money back guarantee.

I think the initial user interface of Roll20 is more appealing, and their map displaying is more modern than FG, but they simply do not have the content that FG has. The only other digital platform that matches Beyond right now is Fantasy Grounds and they were the first to have all of the the WoTC books available.

Finally, Smiteworks and Doug Davison were the first 3rd party VTT to crack open the market for licensing content. Without that initial commitment, the other licenses would have been much more difficult.

Celestian · Aug 7, 2017

Peter Saumur said:
As of yet. We won't know how far they can get with automation, in terms of running a campaign, since they haven't released any digital ones yet. I imagine you will be able to roll dice at some point. They might not go the "digital battlemap" route but it will be 85% of the way there with everything else; DM and Player side.

There is a lot more to a VTT than just rolling dice, specially with FG.

Beyond and VTTs just not the same.

Peter Saumur · Aug 7, 2017

LordEntrails said:
Great News.

No doubt WotC has been receptive to efforts by both SmiteWorks and DDB to allow lower pricing. And it has now paid off for us gamers

IMO, I will say some of the comparisons or critiques in this thread are a bit inaccurate. Such as printing pretty character sheets, because this is simple subjective and there are multiple ways of printing characters from FG. And again imo, FG works fine as a character creator, it just isn't a character manager, and I do see a distinction between such.

Anyway, I'm happy to see WotC adapting to new markets. Doug certainly seems to be one of the key influencers on some of these changes and they all seem like they are of benefit to the gamers and the industry as a whole.

Do tell. I know only of one way and that was using the online tool to convert XML to PDF.

LordEntrails · Aug 7, 2017

Let me add for those of you who aren't familiar or might stumble across this thread in a month or more's time, FG is constantly being enhanced. So any comparisons you read are probably out of date.

For instance, in [MENTION=6843593]Myrdin Potter[/MENTION]'s example above (which is very well done), concentration checks are handled manually right now, but in the next version that will be out probably before GenCon, they will be handled automatically.

FG, and it's capabilities aren't static, and I think that's one reason the community is so positive.