Klooge and Fantasy Grounds

[kenc]

It is not my intention to start any kind of debate on which is better. I have tried both demos and they both seem like fine programs.

Let me tell you about the group who will be using it and please give me any feed back on the experience you have had with either of these programs.

The group will consist of some World of Warcraft friends. Some with a lot of experience with table top gaming and some with none. I will DM and I have many years sitting at the table. Most of us have full time jobs or are full time students so something that takes a lot of time to learn or prep for will not be embraced.

The demos were lacking in one key aspect, they did not allow me to create a campaign from scratch to get a feel for how easy it was and more important how well they supported ‘on the fly’ maps and encounters.

So please give me your experiences with either Klooge or Fantasy Grounds.

 

[DMFTodd]

The big advantage with Klooge is that you have a full character sheet and then all of your dice rolls are based off that character sheet. So you character sheet has an equipment section where you enter your weapon, attack value, and damage value. During the game, you bring up the dice roller and just click the weapon to make an attack roll or click the damage to make a damage roll. Same for saves, skills, ability checks, etc. This makes the actual game play very fast and, if you're willing to setup the character sheet, the beginners can play without having to know anything about D&D at all. Klooge has a lot more advanced features like that if you want to take the trouble of setting them up.

Prepping for a game does take some work for the DM. You have to scan in whatever map you want, get a picture for your monster if you want those, etc. The setup seems equally difficult in klooge or FantasyGrounds, I don't see an advantage. Klooge does have capable import/export functions so that you can share data entry chores with others. Don't know if FG has that or not.

 

[heruca]

Kenc,

Is there some reason you are limiting yourself to just those two programs as viable options? Or are they simply the only two you are aware of? (There are around 30 such programs, in case you didn't know)

Klooge is the only one I've ever bought, but it has a steep learning curve IMO. I never once got to use it in a real game session.

What game system are you planning on running? That could affect your decision.

 

[Aeolius]

If you have any players using Macs, then Klooge is your answer; Fantasy Grounds only runs under Windows.

 

[kenc]

Kenc,

Is there some reason you are limiting yourself to just those two programs as viable options? Or are they simply the only two you are aware of? (There are around 30 such programs, in case you didn't know)

Klooge is the only one I've ever bought, but it has a steep learning curve IMO. I never once got to use it in a real game session.

What game system are you planning on running? That could affect your decision.

Those are the only two I am aware of.. well except for OpenRpg which seemed a good program just not as polished and looked much harder to use and the one in your sig which I will check out.

We will be running D20 D&D 3.5 with some talk of an Ebberon campaign.

I would love to have other options, if you have some names I will google them.

Thanks

 

[heruca]

I would love to have other options, if you have some names I will google them.

I'll save you the trouble of Googling them. Just go to this page and scroll about halfway down: http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/links.html

You should be able to find something that suits your needs.

 

[Matchstick]

It is not my intention to start any kind of debate on which is better. I have tried both demos and they both seem like fine programs.

Let me tell you about the group who will be using it and please give me any feed back on the experience you have had with either of these programs.

The group will consist of some World of Warcraft friends. Some with a lot of experience with table top gaming and some with none. I will DM and I have many years sitting at the table. Most of us have full time jobs or are full time students so something that takes a lot of time to learn or prep for will not be embraced.

The demos were lacking in one key aspect, they did not allow me to create a campaign from scratch to get a feel for how easy it was and more important how well they supported ‘on the fly’ maps and encounters.

So please give me your experiences with either Klooge or Fantasy Grounds.

Don't know anything about Klooge, but I know a little about FG.

Sounds like most if not all of your people will be at least a little computer savvy, that will help with both programs.

"something that takes a lot of time to learn or prep for will not be embraced."

For FG at least, but probably for both I don't know that the players will have a lot of preparation. Even characters can be pregenned and uploaded to them in FG if you'd like. Otherwise I'd set aside a session for generating characters, or, even better, have them make their characters and send them to you so you can enter them in FG. PCGen actually outputs to FG's XML format now, and PCGen is free, so that might help as well. Beyond that there's some massive number of customizable hotkeys in FG, so that once the players are comfortable with how to make them (pretty much drag and drop) they can set up anything from battlecries to initiative to attacks as hotkeys. For WoW players I would think that would be pretty easy.

"The demos were lacking in one key aspect, they did not allow me to create a campaign from scratch to get a feel for how easy it was and more important how well they supported ‘on the fly’ maps and encounters."

FG is cool in that you can get additional rulesets to add to it. Iron Heroes is available for example, as is the D20 Modern SRD, and the 3.5 SRD. In fact I think it comes with the 3.5 SRD. What that means is that all of the information in the SRD is within the program and referenceable. Including a passle of monsters. With the drawing tools and the monster lists right there it's pretty good for coming up with things on the fly. Oh, and the tokens.

Creating campaigns is a tougher one, because it can depend on so many things. For example if you're planning on using voice chat software then a lot of the campaign can be prepared in the same way that you would prepare for a PnP game. Possibly just descriptions, maps, and other select things (like monster stats which are really easily created, even if not in the list) would be needed to prepare for the text chat in FG.

If you're not using voice chat then more work will probably have to be done.

FG uses XML which is pretty straight forward and which allows you to do house rules etc. pretty easily (you just make a copy of the SRD ruleset and then modify the copy and then use the modified rules as the basis for your campaign). I don't know that I'd say creating a campaign from scratch is "easy". I'd say it's a learning process and it will get easier the more you do it. But when you think about doing an entirely text campaign there's just a lot that's going to go into it.

I'm not sure I'm answering your questions well, but I'm trying.