More love for FG

I've had FG for a couple years now and have used it for a couple small remote games as well as for running the FG client as a dedicated DM console for my local tabletop gaming.

Last night I started up a new Pathfinder campaign with a group of 6 players and introduced them to the world of FG. They are experienced gamers and experienced RPG players but they hadn't used FG before. The first session went perfectly and FG received high marks from the group.

The players took to the client quickly. They enjoyed the integration between their character sheets and the combat tracker, the fog of war on the maps added a good deal of fun, and they were highly entertained with the PC language implementation in the chat client (Mostly with the halfelf player saying rude things in Elven about the rest of the party that couldn't speak Elven). The element of whispered GM chat along with the ease of using the dice tower for hidden rolls to the GM made things interesting and fun for the players as well. The high quality of the official published PF material along with the flexibility of manually implementing PF content not in the core books really helped the client interface to enable and enhance their gameplay, rather than be something they had to struggle with.

From my side, things were great. I have to admit that before the session I was slightly concerned about potential performance because I'd never had a total of 7 people in a session at once. But we went the whole session with no crashes, no performance issues, and everything went off without a hitch.

The more I use FG the more I love it.

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.

I also use FG for face-to-face games.

We are still getting used to it. My players still want to roll their dice and learning how to use their sheets, but they love it, specially the map, using Mask, being able to show are of effects and the whole automation of it, specially the combat tracker and the auto roll initiative optional rule.

Live gaming was taking too much time, then i tried it and they love it!.

There is an option(at least in the 5e rule set, I assume it works for pf too) where the players can roll their own physical dice and the gm can then input the results. Fantasy grounds will then calculate the hits, misses, resistance etc. I've never tried it so I don't know all the details, but maybe your players would enjoy that.

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Originally Posted by timdog88

There is an option(at least in the 5e rule set, I assume it works for pf too) where the players can roll their own physical dice and the gm can then input the results. Fantasy grounds will then calculate the hits, misses, resistance etc. I've never tried it so I don't know all the details, but maybe your players would enjoy that.

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Yes, it is in options. (the very first one)

I like to roll from FGs and my players roll physical dice and then types in the box there. It takes a while longer and generates pollution, but they want to do it and i let them.

FG can be surprisingly useful face-to-face. I initially started using it just as a single GM instance(no player clients) to replace me scribbling stuff in notepads like initiative, hits, statuses, etc. Then I started using FG more and more to replace other game functions.

A long time ago I'd started using a big table-sized dry erase board to sketch out maps for my sessions and the players would put their miniatures on the tabletop that way. The fog of war was me just not drawing out the next section of the map until the characters entered those areas. Then we moved to modular cardboard tiles for maps. But now two of the group members are in-process of building gaming tables with built-in TV sets to replace tabletop functionality, and are intending to use FG to drive all the maps on the displays.