DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
Free game content; Nope, not true, their is free game content for numerous game systems (D&D 1e, 3, 3.5, 5e, PF, Savage World, etc) available for free on their community forums and some for 5E on the DMsGuild. It is, admittedly, only a tiny fraction of what is available world-wide.
As for free content that is behing a "gate", maybe you mean the D&D Basic Rules & the 5E SRD? I know at one time they were not distributed with the free license of FG, but that is no longer true, and hasn't been for some time.
I have no idea how much free content is available for Roll20 other than the 5E SRD and 5E Basic Rules. What else is there?
The only free content that concerns me is official rulesets. I'm not interested in fancruft, and I'm not interested in having to manually import readily available open source content into a system I am paying for.
https://roll20.net/compendium/
Yes Roll 20 you can play and GM completely for free. In that use case, Roll20 is cheaper, no doubt, no argument. But, you have severe limitation on a free Roll20 account (storage size, feature access, sharing content between campaigns, etc) And content you buy can only be shred to ONE campaign. But you can play and GM no doubt.
If we're talking about average use cases, which you appear to be keen on, the average user is never going to hit these limits.
Your argument seems to be that you get less for the money you opt to spend on Roll20 than you do for the money you opt to spend on FG. This is only logical -- FG has an upfront buy-in comparable to an enterprise application, while Roll20 does not.
Now, on FG, for $4/month or $39 one-time you get a license that has no feature limitations (you can share your purchased content in an unlimited number of campaigns, you can customize the ruleset and most anything else. The only limit is that if you host/run a game, all your players also need a standard or ultimate license.
So, just so we're clear, the actual cost of a Standard license is $20/month or $156, spread across a group of five.
So, if you are going to spend money on a license, either the Plus, Pro, Standard or Ultimate; FG is the same price or cheaper after 10 months.
If you are going to spend money on a license.
I'm cutting all this filler about licensed paid content, and you should thank me, because the real message here is that it's shocking FG charges as much as Roll20 does for licensed content on top of their base cost.
If you are familiar with FG, and understand how to use the combat tracker, effects and PC actions, so much of the book keeping is take care of for you that combat is a fast, really fast.
Honest question: does it speed up your game prep? Do you spend less time preparing per session using FG than you would running live?