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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OnlineDM" data-source="post: 5281368" data-attributes="member: 90804">I love EN World!  I ask a question and I get a whole bunch of well-thought-out answers.  Thank you to everyone who chimed in on what makes Fantasy Grounds 2 a good virtual tabletop.I think Griogre's post did the most to help me understand how FG2 is different from MapTool.  Being character-sheet-focused makes it very different from MapTool's map focus.  Yes, you have maps in FG2 and yes you can have character sheets in MapTool, but the programs differ in their focus.Having read the comments from everyone who prefers FG2, it doesn't sound like are any dedicated MapTool users who later switched to FG2.  I also don't hear anything that makes it sound like FG2 has any real advantages over MapTool, at least not for me (though I'm sure the animated dice are nifty).  As I said, I enjoy macro programming, so that's a plus for MapTool, not a drawback (and as others have pointed out, if you prefer a pre-packaged framework, you might not ever need to program anything).  And I do mainly need the VTT for the map and combat, not the role playing.I just finished running my weekly Friday night four-hour D&D 4e session via MapTool.  In tonight's session we had two combat encounters and a whole bunch of role-playing / skill challenge stuff.  For the combats, we had the MapTool battle maps.  For the role-playing we had Skype.  The only things we were looking at on the screen during the role-playing sections were the outcomes of the dice rolls (which are easy for the players - they just click the appropriate button on their character for whatever skill they want to roll).  We ignored the map during those sections and just talked and rolled some virtual dice.  It was great!I'm sure that FG2 is an awesome program, and if I had discovered it and gotten invested in learning and using the program before I came across MapTool, I'm guessing I would see no reason to switch to MapTool.  But now that I know and love MapTool, I see no reason to switch away from it.  That's really what I was looking for with my question, and no one said anything that made me feel, "Wow, MapTool is nice, but just look at what FG2 offers! MapTool can't compete with that!"I imagine that cost will be a big issue for a new player/GM in deciding what tool to use.  If both MapTool and FG2 can do everything a RPGer would want and they do these things equally well, my guess is that most people will choose MapTool because it's free.I wish the developers of FG2 the best of luck, but it honestly seems to me that there's a community out there that's willing to build a program every bit as good as FG2 just for the pleasure of building it, not as a business.  With that being the case, I imagine it will be hard for FG2 to be profitable since MapTool seems to be just as good, and it's free.</blockquote>

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