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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 7666880" data-attributes="member: 1300">I've been running FG for years now. Depending on how you run D&D, it can be incredibly useful. But a lot of that usefulness is just the sum of many many little conveniences. At the table, I have to call out which player is next. Which I sometimes forget to do because I'm taking notes or prepping the next bad guy's actions and people sit around and get frustrated. In FG when one player/monster is done, the next player hears a bell ring. Ding! It's your turn! So nice.In a normal D&D game if my six players are fighting three orcs and five goblins (entirely plausible) and all 14 of those minis are moving around the board, keeping track of "which one did I attack last round?" can be a pain. Not, like, solving Bessel functions kind of pain, but it's friction, it adds up. In FG, the program keeps track of everyone's targets. It'll even draw little lines from attacker to target if you want, so you can see. It's very nice. In normal D&D if one player gives another a +2 to hit that lasts for three rounds, the second player has to remember the bonus (and he has to remember it three times) and then remember that it expires. Not so in FG! It will keep track of all that for you! As GM I can even turn on "automatic saving throws" in which case when the monsters are done, they'll all automatically roll saves and the system will remove those effects they successfully saved against.(I mostly ran 4E, FG2 is AMAZING for 4E.)In normal D&D the player has to tell me what AC he hit, and how much damage he did and often I'm still writing down the effects of what the previous player did so I have to say "Hold on" finish writing and then ask again. In FG, the player can roll to hit, find out if he hit, and roll damage and find out if the monster is dead or not, all without me having to do anything! So nice.It's just a lot of the bookkeeping which I don't consider to be core to the D&D experience, Fantasy Grounds cleans up. Some people like that friction, it "feels like D&D," but my players have had every experience inside FG they've had outside. Cheering when a player rolls that clutch critical, laughing when they fumble. Being amazed when a player tries something crazy and it works. I love Fantasy Grounds because of the way it simulates a tabletop, as opposed to just a battle-mat. I push handouts out to players and now they each have a copy and they can each make notes. Each player has a copy of the World Map, the Local Area Map, the Town, they all make notes about what happened and who they talked to and I can see them all.</blockquote>

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