What's your VTT of choice?

[Thomas Shey]

No, but you can pop up on the forge for cheap. Everytime im looking for something, its right there to down load. Dont get me wrong, there is plenty of rabbit holes to go down, but Foundry doesn't require any of it. Im just poppin this bubble its hard to use, becasue it doesnt have to be.

I mean, you can go down massive rabbit-holes with Maptool, but you don't have to. For years I didn't even bother with macros.

 

[LordEntrails]

No, but you can pop up on the forge for cheap. Everytime im looking for something, its right there to down load. Dont get me wrong, there is plenty of rabbit holes to go down, but Foundry doesn't require any of it. Im just poppin this bubble its hard to use, becasue it doesnt have to be.

Cheap is relative and lots of folks don't like subscriptions. But I do like that the option exists.

So I get that it doesn't have to be hard to use. I don't think any VTT really is if you stick to the basics. But is that what Foundry is good at? Competing with Owlbear? No, it shines when you are willing to invest time in all the modules and community add-ons, or so it seems most people in this thread have said.

 

[Zaukrie]

Cheap is relative and lots of folks don't like subscriptions. But I do like that the option exists.

So I get that it doesn't have to be hard to use. I don't think any VTT really is if you stick to the basics. But is that what Foundry is good at? Competing with Owlbear? No, it shines when you are willing to invest time in all the modules and community add-ons, or so it seems most people in this thread have said.

To be clear, foundry is pretty good at that basics! And it especially good for some non DnD games that have more built in stuff. It just even better when you add stuff (and some adds should be standard, and it boggles the mind they aren't).

 

[payn]

Cheap is relative and lots of folks don't like subscriptions. But I do like that the option exists.

So I get that it doesn't have to be hard to use. I don't think any VTT really is if you stick to the basics. But is that what Foundry is good at? Competing with Owlbear? No, it shines when you are willing to invest time in all the modules and community add-ons, or so it seems most people in this thread have said.

Yeah the forge entry level is 3 bucks a month I just pay annually. It provides a server copy of my foundry so we can all game online and no port forward. You can back up your copy and roll back if any update doesn’t work well.

That’s just to avoid port forward. Foundry is one time 50 bucks and then the worlds are your oysters. For me the free downloads alone make it better than Roll20 premium even.

Foundry is almost too cheap to not have a copy!

 

[Ondath]

See, I hear all the time how easy Foundry is. And then you look a little deeper and you find dozens of comments like this.

I agree Fantasy Grounds is complicated and hard to learn. But we're talking a few days. not a few months.

My experience with FG (which was around 5 years ago, just before FGU came out) was that it is complicated in a different way and to different people. With Foundry, the difficult part is for the GM, and it's mostly technical. Setting up modules, customising systems and debugging takes time. But once you get past that hurdle (or don't try to automate everything and thus don't need that much tinkering), I think actually setting up and running your game is incredibly easy.

With Fantasy Grounds, I never was a GM, but our GM (who was running a prewritten module) always had trouble with how unintuitive the UI was for running the game. And the players likewise never fully understood how to do the most basic actions. How do you select a token? How do you change scenes? How do you add new stuff to your sheet? All of these kept being problems 10+ games in. Once that GM switched to Foundry and basically imported the FG module to her Foundry world with a paid plug in, everything was butter smooth.

Another downside for FG is the pricing scheme, especially if you're trying to run a game from the global south. With Foundry, only the GM needs to pay (and despite what everyone says, you can set your game up for Internet access easily with stuff like Hamachi, which was the default way to run LAN parties 5-10 years ago), and people just connect with their browsers. With FG, either the GM pays for the much more expensive ultimate license to let people connect with the demo, or everyone buys a license. That's a big hurdle in countries where the minimum wage is 300-400 dollars!

But I can honestly see how FG can be a preferable VTT for some people. You can pay for the books and have everything set up for you. And if the interface becomes intuitive to you through habit, then it basically has no downsides. But that's kind of like saying Crusader Kings 3 is super intuitive and fun to play after 100+ hours. It's a great game, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't ready to go through its learning curve.

 

[Bunch]

I voted for Fantasy Grounds Unity, but in truth I'm fairly evenly split between it and Foundry. I own more content for FGU having used it longer and tend to run campaigns with it a bit more often. For overall features, I have a preference for Foundy. I've found the official and 3rd party content/DLC for FGU to be more plentiful and stable. While I have run fan-made content with decent results, my paid content gets updated more frequently and has consequently been more reliable. I do really love my exclusive DLC/content for Foundry, like The Dark Eye ruleset.

Can't say that about the core product though - FGU can go through a very unstable week or 2, when big features are implemented. While core Foundry has been IME more stable during such changes.

My experience has been the reverse but maybe it's just timing. We used Foundry for a PF2E game and Fantasy Grounds for D&D5E and SotDL. Foundry had updates that would break or move things around (partially I think because the GM used lots of add ones). FG we havent had an issue with in years.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Cheap is relative and lots of folks don't like subscriptions. But I do like that the option exists.

So I get that it doesn't have to be hard to use. I don't think any VTT really is if you stick to the basics. But is that what Foundry is good at? Competing with Owlbear? No, it shines when you are willing to invest time in all the modules and community add-ons, or so it seems most people in this thread have said.

Well, it seems a two-prong advantage:

1. Its capable handling extensive automation without you (as in, the end user) having to do all that (applying community material is still work but not the work of doing it all yourself), while also:

2. Run off your home machine and not be dependent on someone else's server.

Far as I can tell, there's not a lot of others that hit both those hard.

 

[LordEntrails]

My experience with FG (which was around 5 years ago, just before FGU came out) was that it is complicated in a different way and to different people.

This is very true. I accept the FG UI is strange and hard for some folks. But it was intuitive to me. While I could never figure out the Roll20 UI. Spent hours just trying to get a couple maps setup correctly for a one-shot.

How do you select a token? How do you change scenes? How do you add new stuff to your sheet?

Left click. A scene? You mean a map? Right click>share (from the image list or the image itself). Click and type, or if it's an item, skills, feature, spell, etc, drag and drop is the easiest.

Another downside for FG is the pricing scheme, especially if you're trying to run a game from the global south. With Foundry, only the GM needs to pay (and despite what everyone says, you can set your game up for Internet access easily with stuff like Hamachi, which was the default way to run LAN parties 5-10 years ago), and people just connect with their browsers. With FG, either the GM pays for the much more expensive ultimate license to let people connect with the demo, or everyone buys a license. That's a big hurdle in countries where the minimum wage is 300-400 dollars!

Yea, all this info is way out of date, and has been for years. The FG Ultimate license is a one-time $50 fee. A GM with an ultimate license can has an unlimited number of free players. And if you are somewhere Steam has regional pricing, like the global south where the minimum wage is 300-400 dollars, then the FG price is adjusted per Steam's policies so it's only a few USD. Way cheaper for folks like that than Foundry is.

Well, it seems a two-prong advantage:

1. Its capable handling extensive automation without you (as in, the end user) having to do all that (applying community material is still work but not the work of doing it all yourself), while also:

2. Run off your home machine and not be dependent on someone else's server.

Far as I can tell, there's not a lot of others that hit both those hard.

That's not an advantage over FG. It is over Roll20 and some others. I'm told FG has more out of the box automation than Foundry, and you can increase that automation even more if you want to load one of the community extensions. FG also runs off your home machine, but it has also has a cloud brokering service so you don't have to worry about port forwarding.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's not an advantage over FG. It is over Roll20 and some others. I'm told FG has more out of the box automation than Foundry, and you can increase that automation even more if you want to load one of the community extensions. FG also runs off your home machine, but it has also has a cloud brokering service so you don't have to worry about port forwarding.

If it can be run purely on your home machine, I've not previously heard any sign of that.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

If it can be run purely on your home machine, I've not previously heard any sign of that.

FG was alwaysrun from the local machine which has pros and cons. The main con being that one need some heft in the upload