SCAG Now On FANTASY GROUNDS VTT

Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is not only out on general release today, but it's also available on the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop. It includes the entire contents of SCAG (divided into DM and Player sections), image handouts, maps, and 37 new character portraits. It's $39.99, and requires an appropriate Fantasy Grounds license. "Get everything you need to adventure in the Forgotten Realms on the exciting Sword Coast, home to the cities of Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, and Neverwinter. Crafted by the scribes at Green Ronin in conjunction with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide provides D&D fans with a wealth of detail on the places, cultures, and deities of northwestern Faerûn." And, of course, if you haven't yet, head to your local game store and grab the actual book!

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Find it here.

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[vandaexpress]

I personally think it works excellently as a tool for a DM at the table. It's great for tracking initiative and for not having to flip between several different books. Innate Spellcasters and Spellcasters, for instance, will have their full spell descriptions automatically imported into their character sheet and set with the proper attack amounts and Saving throw DCs per spell. You can still roll your own dice and just type in what damages are applied. If the player rolls their own dice and fails a saving throw, you can drag the effect from the NPC to their entry in the combat tracker and it will track that info for you and remind you when their turn comes up. It's also good for general campaign management, tracking party inventory, dividing coinage and loot across the party, dividing XP across the party, tracking quests, building and helping scale encounters, etc..

The tablet versions are probably a year or more out still. Development hasn't started on it yet, although it is on our roadmap. The move to Unity will give us native distribution on Mac and Linux with additional options for Web, Xbox and Playstation.
@Dhaylen, the Unreal engine is very powerful. We just felt like we had more experience in Unity and we liked the support for the different platforms mentioned above.

This is how I'm using it as well. For a while I was stumped on how to run multiple instances of it on my Mac using the steam install, but then I just ran a virtual machine for the Player-facing view.

One question I have for you is the resolution on the maps. I've noticed that if I, for instance, buy the maps direct from Mike Schley or Jared Blando, I can get them in a much higher resolution than what's included in the FG version of the adventure. I'm curious if the 50 pixel/inch (or whatever you guys use in your versions) is something that you decided on as a compromise between appearance and file size/load time, or if its another restriction (like licensing or something)? I find myself swapping in high-res versions of the maps that I purchase directly from the cartographers since I'm showing these maps on an HD LED play table, the extra detail is totally worth it in situations like mine. Is there any way you could offer low-res and high-res versions of maps?

Just a thought.

 

[Banesfinger]

I personally think it works excellently as a tool for a DM at the table.

How easy is it for a DM to add custom content in the form of hyperlinked 'pins' on a map?
On your screenshots for example, I would assume that the "Waterdeep" pin on the regional map takes (hyperlinks) the user to the Waterdeep city map and write-up.
How easy would it be to put 'pins' on that city map for locations of interest (buildings, parks, sewer entrances, etc) and add custom pages for those locations (maps, write-ups, NPCs, etc)?

 

[gyor]

Fantasy Grounds would be better then the book if you could use it on your cellphone.

 

[smiteworks]

How easy is it for a DM to add custom content in the form of hyperlinked 'pins' on a map?
On your screenshots for example, I would assume that the "Waterdeep" pin on the regional map takes (hyperlinks) the user to the Waterdeep city map and write-up.
How easy would it be to put 'pins' on that city map for locations of interest (buildings, parks, sewer entrances, etc) and add custom pages for those locations (maps, write-ups, NPCs, etc)?

You can drag any of our shortcuts (basically anything) to any other image and hold down CTRL when you do. Let go and it will place a pushpin there which links back to the item you dragged. The common thing is to create a story entry that might have further links to other images, npcs, items. etc. and then drag that to the map. We use this within SCAG for things like this. If you click on the pin for the city of Neverwinter on the Sword Coast Map, it opens a story entry with a description of the city and then a blown up regional map and a separate city map. If you decided that you wanted to add details or record notes about what happened in the Sleeping Dragon Inn within Neverwinter, you could create a new story entry with that info and then CTRL+drag that to the Neverwinter city map.
[MENTION=6790472]vandaexpress[/MENTION], the image resolution and size is what we felt gave the best experience as far as load times and detail. Super high resolution maps are okay for in-person games but less so when you have a peer-to-peer app where the players each need to load them. In that situation, the higher resolution versions available directly from the artist are probably the best solution.

 

[Nylanfs]

A couple of our guys run it on their Macs using Wine. Seems to run without any problems except for the fact that you can't change the location for campaign saving to standard folders. We tend to save our campaigns to OneDrive or Dropbox and this doesn't seem to work on the Mac. Unity should fix little issues like that

Prism, you may want to rethink that. There have been instances of campaigns being corrupted if they are stored in a cloud location you can do a manual backup of the campaign folder to the cloud but the live data has seen some unstability there.

 

[talosilus]

iPad and other tablet and mobile interfaces are on our roadmap for development. We are in the middle of a big overhaul of the core engine to move the platform to Unity and then we will be working on some additional planned development, including a version suitable for use on the iPad and other tablets and phones. Some of the design choices work best with a lot of screen real estate, so we are redesigning these features to enable a better experience on a single monitor or mobile device. No ETA yet though.

No offense to those Apple or Android users, but to your point earlier that Fantasy Grounds is good at assisting DMs run games online or at the table, it doesn't make alot of sense to bring down the form factor to a small table or mobile device as it takes away from one of its best features. I certainly use game aids at my table and electronic ones at that, but I would never try to run a game with a DMing Tool such as Fantasy Grounds from a small iPad or Android device. That to me is best suited for what MS is doing with their Windows 10 OS and the 2-in-1 devices.

While it does make sense to have a player version for those devices, please do not go the way that all of these other companies have and forget about the PC Users.

 

[smiteworks]

The user interface on tablets would need to be redesigned for that form factor and would likely be a separate application altogether, but with a large amount of the base app forming a solid base. Linked player-facing interfaces would be the first instances available.

 

[Blackwarder]

I just want to be able to connect my iPad for the nearest tv and let the players see the maps and portraits… is it too much to ask?

Warder

 

[Queer Venger]

Wow, makes me want to start running an online game on FG. These shots are amazing.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I just want to be able to connect my iPad for the nearest tv and let the players see the maps and portraits… is it too much to ask?

Warder

I used MapTool and some cable rigamarole for this for a while. It worked pretty OK, actually!