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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6469827" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think the first thing to understand is the different types of tools that are out there. Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and Maptool are all VTTs. There are also a few others in this category, including the original WotC VTT, which is still available (they sold it to a 3rd party, you can use it free though they charge for access to premium features). The other tools are more various, they are 'management tools' and play aids of other types. Masterplan for instance lets you manage your campaign, track combats, and a whole slew of other things. Various other tools are things like character generators/character sheets, etc. Honestly AFAIK Masterplan pretty well subsumes the functions of all except character generation in this category. Maybe there are some other tools that are better at a specific thing, but it does most all of it well enough and is 4e specific.There are of course also cartography programs, of which 100's exist of all sorts. These do ONLY map generation, again Maptool, Fantasy Grounds, and other VTTs incorporate this type of functionality by necessity, but something like Campaign Cartographer might be more useful.Honestly, as far as VTTs go, Maptool and Fantasy Grounds stand head and shoulders above all the competition. Roll20 is good enough to be useful, but it basically doesn't know anything about the rules, it just displays maps with some FOW, lets you roll dice, chat, and display a few numbers of your choice on character tokens you can move around.Maptool is a fully programmable environment of one might say vast complexity. It CAN do anything, and people have written macro sets for it for practically every RPG in existence that will do as much or little as you desire. Its map display technology is unrivaled. Each character's view of the world can be independently displayed with FOW line of site blocking, layers of visibility, specific visibility of individual elements to different characters, and numerous other tricks. Of course laying out a map to use all this, and for instance importing a 4e character into an MT macro set, and understanding how the macro set works, learning its UI, etc is not a small task. For simpler games it is more approachable. For 4e you really need to be wanting to use it in a big way. I ran an online game with it for over 4 years, it was fun, but it was also challenging.FG is also very sophisticated, but as a commercial product it is much more consumer-oriented. I haven't played with it much, the price was just too steep for me, but it has full support for 4e. The advantage is that support is not just scripting language, its somewhat deeper and has had some professional work done on it. I'm not entirely sure where it falls in terms of functions vs some of the Maptool macro sets, but it handles a lot of the tracking stuff that Masterplan does, though perhaps not as well or in quite the same detail (I don't really know). FG is intended to allow you run your entire campaign out of it though, so it does have a lot of functions of that sort. So the question is what sort of thing do you want to do? You should really decide if you are running a game or not and what kind and then select the right tools.</blockquote>

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