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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5866268" data-attributes="member: 20741">I own Fantasy Grounds 1,Fantasy Grounds2, and have a ten seat license for d20Pro. Yes, I have Map Tool as well.  We have tried them all for multiple sessions with each.Multi-camera setups provide a qualitatively better game experience. Here is why:1. It feels like real gaming, not a hybrid computer game. Don't get me wrong, I love technology and I was the first on ENWorld to sing the praises of digital projection technology. But VTT play does not feel like a face to face session. It's something different.2. It takes WAY less prep time. One of the big problems with VTTs is that as a GM you have to take the time to prep your encounters, maps , fog of war, etc. in the software. This takes a fair bit of time and in my experience, at least one hour per session (though you can prepare for multiple sessions all at once weeks ahead). It is still far too much time that I would rather spend on preparing other elements of the game. 3. It is easier to play as the technology now permits it. VTTs were invented at a time when streaming video was in it's infancy, free services like Twitch did not exist, and Xsplit was still a dream in  some gamer's head. The technology to just go with projection/battlemats/flip mats and minis live over the net did not exist and the broadband was not robust enough to support it.  And these new 1080p cameras for $45 was a pipe-dream. We might get 320x200 through a smaller pipe -- and a 1080p sensor was professional only video equipment costing hundreds -- if not THOUSANDS of dollars. And even if you somehow assembled all that anyway -- your CPU wasn't fast enough to encode it all at high-res on the fly.No longer. If you were wondering what a multi-core i5 or i7 desktop processor with a 64 bit OS and 16 gigs of screaming fast ram was good for? Well, it was made for this.Time has moved on and in all honesty, I think the VTT's technological niche moment has passed. There is no need for it now when all the benefits of mats, minis and dice can be brought to bear on the game remotely.With d20Pro, however slick the software, it still felt like a computer game to me. A fun computer game, but still -- not the same experience as gaming at a regular tabletop session. With multi-cams, it is not LIKE real gaming, IT IS real gaming. I have thousands and thousands of minis, a projector, battle mats and flip mats galore and I LOVE the feel of real dice in my hand. I admit, Fantasy Ground's dice roller is slick and its fog of war is slicker. But my fog of war is pretty hot on my setup,too -- and I don't spend hours setting it up, I don't worry whether or not someone is running Windows Vista or a Mac or they are slumming it on a Linux netbook or on an iPad from the cottage. It all works and the prep time as a GM is spent on the game, not on tinkering with scaling maps, or truing them up to make the grid actualy square.I've tried all the major VTTs out there and this tech is superior, IMO.</blockquote>

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