D&D General Tools for PCs?

[500 Toads]

I believe Fantasy Grounds is free to use now. One only needs to buy the plug-ins for whatever game you're playing. And, yes, it looks like they support both 5e (2014) and 5e (2024).

The license for Fantasy Grounds VTT is indeed free, which means that you no longer need to pay Smiteworks in order to be the host (and GM) for a session.

They still need to abide by intellectual property rights, though. So, they can (and do) ship with implementations of the freely-available base mechanics and SRD'd content, they cannot include the great bulk of player options without paying WOTC for the privilege. Most of the subclasses in the PHB (either version) for instance are non-free; and any legitimate, non-infringing tool needs to abide by that. In this case, the Smiteworks/Fantasy Grounds model has the GM pay for licensed content to enable him to use it in his campaigns, where he could share any and all of it with the players.

If you only want to use the Fantasy Grounds character sheet functionality for tracking things, however, and don't actually care about associated automation (character creation wizards, resolving spells, w/e), you can certainly manually enter things in the character sheet. If you do want automation and don't want to pay WOTC, you can still enter things and take time to enter all required metadata etc. for that, but it's a question of how you value your time; and you wouldn't be permitted to publicly distribute anything like a module that just contains data records for everything in the PHB, nor would anyone be allowed to send you such a thing.

The other quibble that comes to mind here is that since Fantasy Grounds uses a "host the campaigns on your own machine" model and only uses the Smiteworks services for faciltating connections ( lobby functionality ), unlike e.g. DDB or Roll20, the character sheets are not accessible to a web interface, but only when connected to the host (1) via the FG client. This excludes users who only use tablets or phones, because there is no FG client for those platforms.


(1) Technically, the players retain copies of their own character sheets cached on their own machines; but I haven't checked lately to see how usable these are if, say, there are references to material only owned by the GM. I think they may still be usable outside the session with data records being copied to the character sheet, but shrug.