RISE OF TIAMAT Now Available For Fantasy Grounds

Hot on the heels of the recent officially licensed release of Hoard of the Dragon Queen for the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop comes The Rise of Tiamat. You get the full adventure, image handouts, tactical maps, tokens, and more. The package costs $19.99, and requires that you already have one of Fantasy Grounds' official 5E ruleset modules. (Thanks to Matchstick for the scoop!)

Find it here!

​

Avert the Cataclysmic Return of Tiamat in this Adventure for the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game.

The Cult of the Dragon leads the charge in an unholy crusade to bring Tiamat back to the Realms, and the situation grows more perilous for good people with each passing moment. The battle becomes increasingly political as opportunities to gather allies and gain advantage present themselves. From Waterdeep to the Sea of Moving Ice to Thay, it is a race against Evil. Succeed or succumb to the oppression of draconic tyranny. Win or lose, things will never be the same again.

Dungeon Masters purchasing this module can use it to run the adventure with very little prep, other than reading through the adventure in advance. The contents of the story are indexed and linked, where appropriate. Combat encounters and boxed text are preloaded and ready to drop onto maps and into the chat window with a few clicks. Nearly everything has been optimized and streamlined for ease of play online.

This Module Includes

• the entire contents of The Rise of Tiamat adventure
• image handouts that can be shared with players collectively or individually
• maps containing information for the Dungeon Master (DM) only and with all locations pre-linked to story entries which may contain additional DM notes, boxed text, encounters, images and treasure parcels
• maps with all hidden information removed and resized for use as tactical combat maps
• tokens for many of the monsters in the module. When no token is available, a letter token is used to represent the NPC
• XP for encounters that can be dragged to the party sheet and awarded to the players as they complete them
• Searchable monster indexes by CR, type and in alphabetical order

​

 

[jimmifett]

Is this true for Rise of Tiamat? Have monsters been auto-placed on the map? Auto-rolled initiatives? Monsters scaled to map grid? Are encounters almost 'plug & play'?

While I haven't seen yet for Rise of Tiamat, so far with HotDQ this has been the case most of the time.

 

[vandaexpress]

It's a luxury item. And even then, I feel like it's a bit over-priced (seriously, at ~$200 for software, I'd expect a more manageable interface, less clunky menus, a mapping tool with at least as much utility as the free stuff on Roll20 or MapTools, the ability to add custom content...).

But if you've got the money, it's a fun thing to do! I don't regret my purchase. And the fact that the players never have to buy anything is a nice balm on the money-burn.

I am right there with you on all points, KM. Those were my exact first impressions as well - I don't have a problem paying money for it, or even paying money to upgrade my DMing rig to accomodate it, but at that price point, the bulky clunky interface is far and away my biggest issue with FG, especially coming from Roll20's sleek and lightweight design. I mean, it's saying something when I'm someone who has literally dropped around $400 on this software and still wind up preferring to use Roll20, even though I have to manually input data.

I will admit a little buyer's remorse, but part of the reason I'm holding out is the hope that, as this gains popularity and as they get feedback, they will start figuring out a way to clean up the interface a bit. The fact that you pretty much have people recommending a large double-screen setup in order to effectively DM with it is telling of some major UX issues when Roll20 is able to accomplish very similar functionality on a tiny laptop screen or a tablet.

I'm not going to hate on FG - they're WotC's licensed VTT partner and so I want to support them. They obviously are working very hard to crank out content for the modules and the technical backbone of the product is very impressive and robust. As a Roll20 API power user I can definitely see the potential, but they have got to clean up the interface and get the mapping tools stepped up to Roll20. They have their work cut out for them, but I am confident they'll get there in time.

 

[smiteworks]

While I haven't seen yet for Rise of Tiamat, so far with HotDQ this has been the case most of the time.

We did not add additional maps this time where there were not maps already included. We may add some more at a future date, but that was a bonus feature for HOTDQ. Those maps are pretty generic though, so you can always re-use them from one campaign to the next.

Where ROT has a map, it is included, scaled, gridded and each room or area's description is linked to the story entry that has boxed text, DM description and links to the treasure parcels and encounters that might occur there. Encounters have all the NPCs pre-placed where they start out when that encounter occurs. Click a button on the encounter and it places the NPC tokens, adds them to the combat tracker and auto-rolls their initiative. If you have the random HP setting turned on, it will automatically roll their HP according to their statblock. That way if you have 5 assassins, they will all have slightly different HP. I like this as a DM from a roleplay perspective because I can describe a burly assassin in one case and a thin, wispy assassin in another -- assuming their HP differed enough.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I am right there with you on all points, KM. Those were my exact first impressions as well - I don't have a problem paying money for it, or even paying money to upgrade my DMing rig to accomodate it, but at that price point, the bulky clunky interface is far and away my biggest issue with FG, especially coming from Roll20's sleek and lightweight design. I mean, it's saying something when I'm someone who has literally dropped around $400 on this software and still wind up preferring to use Roll20, even though I have to manually input data.

I will admit a little buyer's remorse, but part of the reason I'm holding out is the hope that, as this gains popularity and as they get feedback, they will start figuring out a way to clean up the interface a bit. The fact that you pretty much have people recommending a large double-screen setup in order to effectively DM with it is telling of some major UX issues when Roll20 is able to accomplish very similar functionality on a tiny laptop screen or a tablet.

I'm not going to hate on FG - they're WotC's licensed VTT partner and so I want to support them. They obviously are working very hard to crank out content for the modules and the technical backbone of the product is very impressive and robust. As a Roll20 API power user I can definitely see the potential, but they have got to clean up the interface and get the mapping tools stepped up to Roll20. They have their work cut out for them, but I am confident they'll get there in time.

I just keep thinking: it can't be THAT hard to make a good mapping tool if multiple free gametables have done it.

FG isn't flawless and if money is a concern I would absolutely go with Roll20 or the venerable MapTool (probably still my fave, despite its weirdness and high learning curve).

 

[Mirtek]

Having now quite a few FG games under my belt, all I can say that I still feel that the implementation of the 5e rule set is yet too incomplete.

There are so many things that FG still doesn't too, that in many cases the automatization there is doesn't really save time, as you have manually correct it anyway and applying the correction costs just as much time as doing it completely manually to begin with.

 

[Nylanfs]

Having now quite a few FG games under my belt, all I can say that I still feel that the implementation of the 5e rule set is yet too incomplete.

There are so many things that FG still doesn't too, that in many cases the automatization there is doesn't really save time, as you have manually correct it anyway and applying the correction costs just as much time as doing it completely manually to begin with.

So how can it be improved they are always looking for ideas.

 

[Mirtek]

So how can it be improved they are always looking for ideas.

For a start: Implement the #### PHB rules they're charging 50€ for

Feats for example do diddly at the moment. What good is automatic applying damage, it it's wrong for a heavy armor master character and has to be manually edited every freaking time? The time spend to correct the 8 damage rolled and substracted by FG to the 5 damage that should have been substracted could just as well be used to substract the 5 manually in the first place.

Worse when you can't even manually correct the not implemented feats. E.g. the obersvant feat gives a +5 to passice perception, however it's not only not considered by the passive perception value calculated by FG, you are also unable to manually edit the passive perception value so you can't even fix it. That renders all automatic comparisions that FG runs against the PCs automatic perception scores void

If I have to pay 50€ to buy the PHB rules package, I excpet the programm to handle all rules therein. I can buy AAA PC games for that price

On the positive site I am pretty impressed with their customer service, however that doesn't quell the nagging feeling that they released the 5e rules before they were fully finished adding them to FG

 

[smiteworks]

To fully implement all the rules in the PHB and then in the DMG would be a massive and error-prone undertaking. To even attempt a subset of those sort of rules, AAA game companies normally employ a small army of developers and content folks and even then they typically prune the list of features down to a handful of supported classes. What we are selling for $50 is the content from the PHB. All of the automation that we have for the 5E ruleset is provided as part of your license purchase, along with similar support for Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, Numenera and FATE Core.

For Passive Perception, you can adjust this on the character sheet with a permanent modifier, such as for the Observant Feat. Hold the CTRL key and mouse-wheel up while hovering over the PERC. Anywhere there is a + icon on a text entry, you can add persistent plus or minus values. I have it listed as Misc Modifiers on screenshots in the Wiki for the character sheet documentation, but it is easy to overlook.
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Character_Sheet
View attachment 68691

For Heavy Armor, this can be handled with a Power that applies an Effect targeting Self.
Go to your character sheet for the fighter with the Heavy Armor Master feat. Add a new power using the list editing tools and choosing Power. Call it Heavy Weapon Mastery and then click the magnifying glass to enter the details. For the details, set it as Targeting Self and the description to "RESIST: 3 bludgeoning, slashing, piercing, !magic"

Effects information on the Wiki: http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Effects

View attachment 68692

Originally, neither of these features was supported. They came about by people requesting them on our forums and were recently rolled out. We can't guarantee that we will be able to handle everything, but we will try to implement as much as we can with the resources we have available. John (aka Moon_Wizard on the forums - and the other owner/developer) did experiment around with implementing automatically picking up power and abilities from various classes and feats and turning them into effects. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to come up with something suitable for it that works consistently enough for all the various options that are present in the rules.

 

[jimmifett]

For Heavy Armor, this can be handled with a Power that applies an Effect targeting Self.
Go to your character sheet for the fighter with the Heavy Armor Master feat. Add a new power using the list editing tools and choosing Power. Call it Heavy Weapon Mastery and then click the magnifying glass to enter the details. For the details, set it as Targeting Self and the description to "RESIST: 3 bludgeoning, slashing, piercing, !magic"

oooh, i'll have to try that!

 

[mattcolville]

On the positive site I am pretty impressed with their customer service, however that doesn't quell the nagging feeling that they released the 5e rules before they were fully finished adding them to FG

Smiteworks covered this, but there will never be something that does what you want. The PHB is not something that can be "implemented," as that it not how it's written or designed. It is something designed to be interpreted. Observant gives your character +5 to their passive perception. . .but those words don't actually do anything without a human being interpreting them.

At the table, the DM would have to remember "Dave has Observant." Because the DM is probably going to make passive perception roles (otherwise it's not very passive!) That's still true in FG.

That's sort of the beauty of FG. Where it automates, it improves. Where it doesn't, you just deprecate back to the original implementation which is; "you do it."

Where Fantasy Grounds draws that line between automation and interpretation is idiosyncratic and arbitrary, but it's easy to just add a bonus in your Modifier box any time the automation lets you down. It's certainly not harder that handling the entire implementation yourself.