D&D 5E Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds?

[Mistwell]

Interestingly I have found the opposite. I am writing my own campaign in Fantasy Grounds and making good use of the story and pinning elements. I also like the ability to create magic items and treasure parcels and then transfer them over to the party if they find them.

Yeah that's all meaningless to online gaming for us. I see no purpose in "creating a magic item". It's text on a character sheet. It's not the hard part of creating an adventure - the friggen map is! Unless you're uploading a map from an outside source, which for me is NEVER exactly what I want, it's way easier to just make one. And Fantasy Grounds is very poor for that. With Roll20 I can choose the walls, floors, texture for anything, desks, lamps, whatever - light it however I want it lit, etc.. That's stuff that's not so easy in Fantasy Grounds. It's the actual useful stuff of playing online. What they heck do I need it to do macro texts better for a 5e game - 5e isn't about complicated math, the player just adds a +1 to rolls if they get a +1 sword.

Admittedly I have also purchased the monster manual (again) so building encounters is super simple. You can customise the monsters easily too. I didn't feel I could any of that in Roll20

You didn't feel you could make a custom monster on roll20? ALL monsters are custom monsters on roll20! You find an icon of the monster you like, you enter the data for that monster, and that's it. For the most part all I need is hit points, AC, attacks, and damage. It takes next to nothing to do.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I prefer Roll20, by a large margin. Mainly because I have a big hate-on for FG's interface. There aren't enough tooltips; there's no way to add or subtract values on the character sheet; and no way to ping the map. Setting up spells/powers is far too difficult, with little/no in-app guidance. FG's LFG solution is light years behind roll20 as well.

However, I've only played in (not run) a FG game; it's possible that the DM experience could change my opinion.

 

[Hawkwind]

Yeah that's all meaningless to online gaming for us. I see no purpose in "creating a magic item". It's text on a character sheet. It's not the hard part of creating an adventure - the friggen map is! Unless you're uploading a map from an outside source, which for me is NEVER exactly what I want, it's way easier to just make one. And Fantasy Grounds is very poor for that. With Roll20 I can choose the walls, floors, texture for anything, desks, lamps, whatever - light it however I want it lit, etc.. That's stuff that's not so easy in Fantasy Grounds. It's the actual useful stuff of playing online. What they heck do I need it to do macro texts better for a 5e game - 5e isn't about complicated math, the player just adds a +1 to rolls if they get a +1 sword.



You didn't feel you could make a custom monster on roll20? ALL monsters are custom monsters on roll20! You find an icon of the monster you like, you enter the data for that monster, and that's it. For the most part all I need is hit points, AC, attacks, and damage. It takes next to nothing to do.

Yes but you have to spend a couple minutes, finding a token copy and pasting the special attacks entering the stats and building the dice macros should you chose to, in FG you don't have to do that you just drag your monster into the combat tracker and all you as the GM have to do is click the attack buttons when its turn comes up, no tracking status of conditions or hit points or special defenses and vunerablities its all done for you. You don't need macro's and all this automation, you can play a perfectly satisfactory game of 5e with or with out spending ten dollars a month on API access in Roll20 but does make life easier for the Dm leaving him more time to spend on other things like the plot and entertaining the players and enjoying himself.

 

[Prism]

Yeah that's all meaningless to online gaming for us. I see no purpose in "creating a magic item". It's text on a character sheet. It's not the hard part of creating an adventure - the friggen map is! Unless you're uploading a map from an outside source, which for me is NEVER exactly what I want, it's way easier to just make one. And Fantasy Grounds is very poor for that. With Roll20 I can choose the walls, floors, texture for anything, desks, lamps, whatever - light it however I want it lit, etc.. That's stuff that's not so easy in Fantasy Grounds. It's the actual useful stuff of playing online. What they heck do I need it to do macro texts better for a 5e game - 5e isn't about complicated math, the player just adds a +1 to rolls if they get a +1 sword.

Yeah fair enough about the mapping abilities. I tend to either use an existing map which is often not quite right as you suggest, or hand draw my own using the touchscreen and a painting app. Or this site http://pyromancers.com/

For the magic items I'm not worried about the maths - Fantasy Grounds doesn't do that - but handing over the item description, weight etc saves time. I know I could email or share a document too but its nicer in game.

You didn't feel you could make a custom monster on roll20? ALL monsters are custom monsters on roll20! You find an icon of the monster you like, you enter the data for that monster, and that's it. For the most part all I need is hit points, AC, attacks, and damage. It takes next to nothing to do.

Of course I could but its much easier in Fantasy Grounds when its all done for you and also includes all the automation for the monsters spell, attacks, saves etc. If you are building the creature from the ground up its probably a wash but if you want to use official or customised monsters the FG Monster Manual is a decent purchase if you fancy saving some time. My point is that you can chose to buy this in Fantasy Grounds but not Roll20. Our group has moved to Fantasy Grounds from Roll20 mainly because of the ability to buy this extra stuff. The actually system itself, without the additional purchased options its probably not worth the slight price increase between the two (difference of $5 per month for us)

 

[Rhenny]

I've tried roll20...found it a little sluggish and unwieldy on my computer. FG has worked more fluidly for me. There is certainly a learning curve, but I really appreciate what FG offers.

I started with $9.99 monthly to feel it out. After a few month, FG had a sale so I purchased the ultimate 1 time full license, and I'm happy I did.

 

[Mistwell]

I've tried roll20...found it a little sluggish and unwieldy on my computer. FG has worked more fluidly for me. There is certainly a learning curve, but I really appreciate what FG offers.

I started with $9.99 monthly to feel it out. After a few month, FG had a sale so I purchased the ultimate 1 time full license, and I'm happy I did.

As roll20 is an online-only web service, it being sluggish on your computer seems...odd.

 

[Prism]

I've tried roll20...found it a little sluggish and unwieldy on my computer. FG has worked more fluidly for me. There is certainly a learning curve, but I really appreciate what FG offers.

I started with $9.99 monthly to feel it out. After a few month, FG had a sale so I purchased the ultimate 1 time full license, and I'm happy I did.

I tried running Fantasy Grounds on a hosted windows machine so that the players could connect at any time and update their characters, check the adventure notes etc. It was almost unusable due to the lack of a dedicated graphics card in such machines. Roll20 worked just fine being browser based and should have far lower requirements. I am surprised that your experience was opposite unless maybe it was an internet performance issue?

 

[Nylanfs]

It also could have been a internet latency issue with having to send back and forth to the server.

 

[smiteworks]

Fantasy Grounds has never tried to be a map building software, but instead a consumer. There are a bunch of free and paid tools that allow people to make fantastic maps and it seemed foolish for us to spend development cycles reinventing the wheel. You merely have to drag the map into your Maps window in FG and it put it in the correct place and you can add a grid (if you want one) and off you go. Assuming that you can export a JPG or PNG from Roll20, you could even use that to create maps that you consume within FG. I personally use photoshop for maps I build, but I prefer to use high quality maps from printed adventures since they are normally built by professional cartographers such as Mike Schley.

We will be adding new features to the next major release of Fantasy Grounds, though, to add in more tile based and non-tile based map building, dynamic lighting, streaming music and sounds, more dice macros and a built-in lobby system. Our focus so far has been in making robust character sheets, NPC sheets, ready-to-run adventures and automation to speed up game play and reduce prep time. Most of these features make life easier for DM's so they feel more comfortable running games week to week and can focus more time on the creative part of running a game as opposed to the technical side of things where they have to pre-enter a bunch of data or macros.

Regarding the ability to change values on your sheet, you can type over most areas or hold CTRL and mouse wheel up or down. Alternately, there are a bunch of preloaded effects that can be toggled on to adjust for a wide range of conditions and effects and spells can be preset to apply bonuses or penalties to things as needed too.

From our wiki page for 5E character sheets: http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Character_Sheet

 

[Burticusb]

Fantasy Grounds has never tried to be a map building software, but instead a consumer. There are a bunch of free and paid tools that allow people to make fantastic maps and it seemed foolish for us to spend development cycles reinventing the wheel. You merely have to drag the map into your Maps window in FG and it put it in the correct place and you can add a grid (if you want one) and off you go. Assuming that you can export a JPG or PNG from Roll20, you could even use that to create maps that you consume within FG. I personally use photoshop for maps I build, but I prefer to use high quality maps from printed adventures since they are normally built by professional cartographers such as Mike Schley.

We will be adding new features to the next major release of Fantasy Grounds, though, to add in more tile based and non-tile based map building, dynamic lighting, streaming music and sounds, more dice macros and a built-in lobby system. Our focus so far has been in making robust character sheets, NPC sheets, ready-to-run adventures and automation to speed up game play and reduce prep time. Most of these features make life easier for DM's so they feel more comfortable running games week to week and can focus more time on the creative part of running a game as opposed to the technical side of things where they have to pre-enter a bunch of data or macros.

Regarding the ability to change values on your sheet, you can type over most areas or hold CTRL and mouse wheel up or down. Alternately, there are a bunch of preloaded effects that can be toggled on to adjust for a wide range of conditions and effects and spells can be preset to apply bonuses or penalties to things as needed too.

From our wiki page for 5E character sheets: http://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Character_Sheet

This is very nice, I have not seen these images before...

I'd like to use this tool on my iPad, is there any plans on releasing this on iOS devices...

It's a pretty big investment, and for me to use it, I'd need to be able to use it as a local gaming aid as well. And I'd rather not have my huge laptop up on the table...