Which is better for tabletop-online? Klooge or Fantasy Grounds?

[Wavestone]

I can only speak for myself - I use Fantasy Grounds, and is part of an ongoing campaign..I like it a lot. (In honesty, I might add that I haven't any experience with the other products..)

One of the design ideas behind FG is that it is supposed to be lightweight - it is just a simulation of a gaming table, with character sheets, maps etc.. And not to forget the dice! (FG uses 3d graphics to show the dices rolling.. This might not be a huge feature for some, but I think it adds a lot to the feeling, seeing your d20 roll across the screen and land for the result.)

Ergo, FG doesnt do autocalculations (as I've understood that OpenRPG do?) or enforcing rules. You have a character sheet, you have to trust other people to not cheat. (might add that my group is a good one who has played for 9 months now, long time for gaming over internet.) This is a matter of taste, I think - FG is light - it is just a simulation of the table and sheets. The rules is up to the DM/group - this makes it possible to do many different rulesets, mostly you just have to make/modify a character sheet, which is doable.

Right now, some things arent really supported - like dice pools and like.. but the next patch will change that with the introduction of scripting. After that, I think more systems will be played over FG more easily.

Ultimately, I don't think the choice of "game table simulator" is not so much of "which is best?", but rather "what style suits me?"..

As for skype/ventrillo, You really forgot the option of "FG/OpenRPG with NO voip software!" Not everyone is interested in that. I'm really glad that my group is not going to go voip, as I'm hard of hearing/borderline deaf.

Uh.. a bit verbose, perhaps.. If you have questions, just ask!

 

[DMFTodd]

I thought Skype was limited to 5 people at a time? I'm using Ventrilo, it works fine.

For gaming, I'm using Klooge. I was impressed with all of the advanced features it had in comparison to the others.

In Klooge, you have a character sheet where you can enter your dice rolls. In game, you double-click your icon to bring up the dice roller, it shows you all the stuff you entered, and you just click to make your roll. 15th level fighter with improved two weapon fighting? Click, click, click, click. You're made your attacks. Roll damage? Click, click, click. You're done.

Same for spells. Setup your spells with a dice roll and just click to use that spell. Klooge makes the dice roll (no more waiting around for the wizard's player to find 8d6), plays a sound, shows a graphic, and move on.

Klooge also can handle modiifers easily. You can enter that your STR is up 2 points and all your attacks and damage is adjusted on the fly. You can setup the effects of your barbarian rage and turn that on/off during game and have everything adjust on the fly. For higher level play, I'm finding klooge to be faster play than paper & pencil.

On the DM side of things, you still have the character sheets with all those advantages. You select targets in Klooge so the program can apply damage for you to the right target (with DR or 1/2 damage reductions on the fly).

Klooge's map features were also better than the competition when I looked, don't know if they have caught up or not. Use any graphic file you want as the map (I scan in Dungeon or use Dunjinni to draw) and then set the scale on the map (here to here is 5 feet, or 500 feet). Klooge then adjusts the size of all icons on the map to be to scale. You can zoom in and out on the map. When you target a creature on the map it tells you how far away the creature is, tells you how far you've moved when moving a character, etc. So now you can have battles on a large scale, something that is very difficult to do on a battlemap.

 

[PK]

One final thing to add about voice chat...

...we use Skype but more often than not we end up typing in game rather than speaking. That way we have a full chat log to refer back to, plus it is often easier to roleplay through typing than by voice.

 

[Festivus]

I like Fantasy Grounds because it's so light. I don't do any of the prep work some folks do, I usually just scan in the map (it can be jpg, gif, bmp, png, whatever) and then use the system as a virtual tabletop. I don't even use the combat planner they include, preferring good old index cards for keeping things straight.

Because FG is so light on rules enforcement, it was easy for us to run a Call of Cthulhu game, or a Boot Hill game online and not have to worry about the medium getting in the way.

FG is customizable, if I wanted to invest a little time I could make custom character sheets and rulesets for other games, but as I said, I prefer to keep it as just what it is, a virtual table. Using it this way is remarkably simple to use, and I could get any adventure up and running in a few minutes (just need to scan the maps)

Lastly, for voice chat I use ventrilo. Because my young son is asleep in the crib next to me later in our gaming sessions I usually just have the players speak / type while I type responses but havng voice speeds up online play tremendously. If you can, I suggest some sort of voice over IP chatting be included. One last comment about voice chat, make sure everyone uses a headset and sets up a hotkey to activate it. Otherwise you get wierd echos and background noises nobody wants to hear or voice dropouts when their voice trails off.

 

[heruca]

A rules-agnostic VT is definitely the way to go if you want to easily be able to play any RPG that strikes your fancy, or if you use a lot of house rules.

FG does indeed let you play most anything (does it have a hexgrid option, though, for games like GURPS?), but I think I would find it a bit distracting to be playing, say, a scif-fi game and have the fantasy-themed interface constantly contrasting with the genre being played. There are ways to customize the interface, but I believe it's far from a trivial task.

As for Skype, I don't think it's limited to 5 users at once anymore. In fact, I think I recall reading that up to 50 users can chat at once.

[QUOTE="Wavestone]Ultimately, I don't think the choice of "game table simulator" is not so much of "which is best?", but rather "what style suits me?"[/QUOTE]
Very well said.

 

[catsclaw227]

I'm 100% biased but, like BlackMoria, I would suggest you take a look at Battlegrounds: RPG Edition. It's slated to be released within 10 days or so, and is priced cheaper than Klooge or Fantasy Grounds. It's also much easier to use, and is cross-platform.

For voice chat, I recommend Skype, but the others would also work just fine. The voice chat is free for PC to PC chats, and using Skype to call a regular phone is free for the rest of 2006. I believe that applies only to calls in the US and Canada.

PS: Thanks for the mention, BlackMoria.

Very interesting. If you were to be self-critical, what would you say it is lacking at the moment, what area's would you improve if the resources were available?

 

[heruca]

Very interesting. If you were to be self-critical, what would you say it is lacking at the moment, what area's would you improve if the resources were available?

Good question.

While v1.0 will include everything you NEED to play most games, some things it is currently lacking are: hexgrid support, a minimap, zooming, editable character sheet support, dice macros, chat macros, drawing tools, and a GM-editable Fog of War masking layer. All are planned, but not yet implemented. I'd also like to support multiple maps/encounters at once (useful in case the adventuring party splits up).

On the other hand, it already includes some things that some other VTs don't, like audio transfers, animation, and dynamic Fog of War (which takes into account things like Dark Vision, Low Night Vision, and moonlight).

Part of the problem is that Battlegrounds is being developed by a single person (me ), and with no budget. Once it starts selling, I plan to enhance it much more with 3rd party development tools that I just can't afford to purchase at the moment.

 

[DMFTodd]

If you want only a virtual map to play, all of the programs out there will do that - You don't have to use the advanced features. That's certainly true of klooge. While it has all sorts of advanced things available if you want them, you don't have to use any of them. I don't see that as an advantage of one program or another.

I'll agree that VoIP speeds things up tremendously. I tried to play without and found it much too tedious.

Good to hear that Skype dropped the 5 people limit. Does Skype require a server version to be running? Ventrilo does so that might be a deciding factor for some people. You could run the Ventrilo Server on your gaming machine but that's an extra step to deal with.

As for grids: We don't use grids anymore. With klooge tellling how far away something is, how far you moved, etc. there's just no need for a grid when you play. Why bother figuring out diagonal square movement when the program can tell you that you moved 42'6"?

 

[havoclad]

You can also try RPTools (http://www.rptools.net) for the Maptool program. It's not as full featured as other programs, but it is working just fine for us.

 

[Emirikol]

Here's what I think I'd find important when looking at a product:

1. Ease of learning the system for the DM and players. You shouldn't have to know ANYTHING technical to use a program. You should just be able to fill in the blanks and click.
2. Absolute compatability with 3.5
3. Room for a couple of house rules, supplemental classes, feats
4. Faster combats than tabletop
5. Communications with players and NPC's should either show the players' face or a picture of their PC when they speak so that you know who's talking without guessing.
6. Ability to place "2D" elements that mark 3-D things (either automatic or DM-input) to keep combats from being boring toe to toe "movehere-movethere" combats. I'm not talking 3D graphics, just the "markers" for them.
7. Large visual area for the action.

I really like the idea of a Tabletop-Online rather than something mindlessly arcade like DDO or horribly time-consuming like NWN (there are times I want to be mindless..don't get me wrong .

I still want to be the DM and be able to upload a map and a game quickly and go. Tweaks should be a capable afterwards, not the standard.

How do Fantasy Grounds and Klooge do that well? Where can they improve?

jh




..