mattcolville
Adventurer
In November I spend $150 on the Fantasy Grounds II ULTIMATE LICENSE. Which is the "anyone can join your game with the free version, no one else needs pay anything" version.
It took me WEEKS, almost 2 months, just to get to the point where I felt like I had some idea what was going on. It's pretty ridiculous the way it doesn't work like a normal Windows program, it's got all sorts of unique data structures, it's bizarrely particular about client/server stuff and while it's got an officially licensed 4E ruleset, those rules are not the data. It knows, for instance, there are At Will, Encounter, and Daily Powers, but it doesn't know what any of those powers are.
So you have to get or make Data Files, which isn't easy and if someone else has already done all the work, you better not talk about it on the FG2 site because they consider it piracy. Even if you have the books, even if you have the books and could have legally made all these files by datamining the Compendium (which there is a tool for).
But after all this, using friends as guinea pigs one on one, making a dude for 30 minutes and then stopping when we couldn't figure something out, three or four encounters where we stopped because we couldn't figure something out, I had three friends who've been bugging me to play make their characters today and we ran an encounter.
It worked great. It was smooth and in many ways, more fun and faster than playing in person.
A player with an Area Effect attack could easily target everyone, and with one click make an attack roll against each. The tool correctly determine who was hit and who was not and automatically deselected everyone he missed. Then with one click make a damage roll and correctly apply the damage and effects to everyone.
It doesn't do data validation. So it doesn't know, for instance, that a Warden can't use a Wizard power, or that you can't have a 33 Strength at 1st level. It doesn't know what Slow is, though it does know A: you're slowed and B: that it ends with save and how that works. It'll automatically make saves for bad guys.
But YOU know all these things. It's never *worse* than playing at a table. All your powers, feats, class abilities, even your skills, are all right there in your sheet. Can't remember what you can do with Acrobatics? Just click on Acrobatics and it shows you the actual PHB entry, complete with formatting from the PHB.
There's a lot of little things. It's impossible to forget, for instance, which one of the 8 kobolds you hit last turn, because they've all moved around and you can't tell one from the other. It tracks all that. It's impossible for any miniature or terrain piece to get in the way of your view of the map.
Any piece of art you can lay hands on, on the internet, can be pushed out as an illustration. No print outs. I checked out a lot of virtual tabletop solutions, including the WotC VT Beta and in every instance, or every instance I noticed, it was NOT a virtual table. It was a virtual battlemat. Designed exclusively for encounters.
But this really is a table complete with 3D die rolling that looks real. Anything you can draw or hand out, any map, illustration, tavern menus, pictures of NPCs, anything can be tossed on the table for the players to look at and use however they want. Once you push it out, they control their version of it. Open and it close it and move it around at will.
Needs a lot of polish on the UI and they need to get over their data structure weirdness, but it's pretty remarkable. At the end of this first "real" session, the three players were all really excited. They didn't have to sit through weeks of experimentation, they were the recipients of that work and from their point of view, it was pretty cool.
It took me WEEKS, almost 2 months, just to get to the point where I felt like I had some idea what was going on. It's pretty ridiculous the way it doesn't work like a normal Windows program, it's got all sorts of unique data structures, it's bizarrely particular about client/server stuff and while it's got an officially licensed 4E ruleset, those rules are not the data. It knows, for instance, there are At Will, Encounter, and Daily Powers, but it doesn't know what any of those powers are.
So you have to get or make Data Files, which isn't easy and if someone else has already done all the work, you better not talk about it on the FG2 site because they consider it piracy. Even if you have the books, even if you have the books and could have legally made all these files by datamining the Compendium (which there is a tool for).
But after all this, using friends as guinea pigs one on one, making a dude for 30 minutes and then stopping when we couldn't figure something out, three or four encounters where we stopped because we couldn't figure something out, I had three friends who've been bugging me to play make their characters today and we ran an encounter.
It worked great. It was smooth and in many ways, more fun and faster than playing in person.
A player with an Area Effect attack could easily target everyone, and with one click make an attack roll against each. The tool correctly determine who was hit and who was not and automatically deselected everyone he missed. Then with one click make a damage roll and correctly apply the damage and effects to everyone.
It doesn't do data validation. So it doesn't know, for instance, that a Warden can't use a Wizard power, or that you can't have a 33 Strength at 1st level. It doesn't know what Slow is, though it does know A: you're slowed and B: that it ends with save and how that works. It'll automatically make saves for bad guys.
But YOU know all these things. It's never *worse* than playing at a table. All your powers, feats, class abilities, even your skills, are all right there in your sheet. Can't remember what you can do with Acrobatics? Just click on Acrobatics and it shows you the actual PHB entry, complete with formatting from the PHB.
There's a lot of little things. It's impossible to forget, for instance, which one of the 8 kobolds you hit last turn, because they've all moved around and you can't tell one from the other. It tracks all that. It's impossible for any miniature or terrain piece to get in the way of your view of the map.
Any piece of art you can lay hands on, on the internet, can be pushed out as an illustration. No print outs. I checked out a lot of virtual tabletop solutions, including the WotC VT Beta and in every instance, or every instance I noticed, it was NOT a virtual table. It was a virtual battlemat. Designed exclusively for encounters.
But this really is a table complete with 3D die rolling that looks real. Anything you can draw or hand out, any map, illustration, tavern menus, pictures of NPCs, anything can be tossed on the table for the players to look at and use however they want. Once you push it out, they control their version of it. Open and it close it and move it around at will.
Needs a lot of polish on the UI and they need to get over their data structure weirdness, but it's pretty remarkable. At the end of this first "real" session, the three players were all really excited. They didn't have to sit through weeks of experimentation, they were the recipients of that work and from their point of view, it was pretty cool.
