New to Fantasy Grounds, Some Questions:

Hi everyone, purchased this VTT a few days ago (excited about Paizo licensing!) and am exploring the many different functions and uses that this cool little system has to offer.

One thing I've been struggling with, is getting my spells to actually do something in game.....I've done some looking around on the web and it appears there have been people that have added spell effects manually into the game. Now this is great, and I appreciate the effort, but I was wondering if as of the latest FG version this has just been built into the VTT itself and i'm just too much of a noob to figure it out.

Like I said I've done some of my own searching but most of the info on this is a year past due (or older) and this seems like it would be a reasonable way for me to sort this out in a timely fashion.

Thank you to the community for you're time...and take it easy on the new guy :P

These don't always work perfectly, but it's a lot better than the default: Farnaby's Spellbook.

The wiki also has a page here.

You can also simply ask for help with specific spells.

Okay cool, so just need to do a little add-on work to get the spells to function with (mostly) automated effects.

Thanks for the quick answer.

Hi Industrious, and Welcome! to the Community,

If you haven't done so already, let me encourage you to take a look at some of the great Tutorial Videos available on the Fantasy Grounds Wiki (and on YouTube). Damn's are good, as are Xorn's, and people seem to like mine as well (mine are also available from the links in my sig, below).

Start with the ones on the CoreRPG, because the CoreRPG forms the foundation of just about all the RPGs we play with Fantasy Grounds - so by learning how to use FG with the CoreRPG you'll learn about 80% of what you'll need to know to play any RPG with Fantasy Grounds. Once you've gone through the CoreRPG Videos you can then go on to Videos about your chosen RPG.

When you get familiar with the basic Fantasy Grounds product the next step is to check out some of the Extensions (Plug-Ins) for FG, such as the DOE: Sound, DOE: Locations, DOE: Weather and DOE: Organisations Extensions (to name a but a few - and a Shameless(™) Self Plug).

And keep on asking questions - we're a pretty friendly lot here, and we love answering questions.

Cheers

Thanks for the warm welcome :)

I've watched a TON of tutorial videos and to be honest a lot of them are obtuse, outdated (See: Very Outdated) or just plain mislabeled....or all 3...lol.

Some of them are good but I've probably learned more from watching people play on YouTube than I have from most of the tutorials on here (the text ones are actually pretty good though).

I am guessing that most of the veteran and technically proficient FG users are still updating a lot of their mods and extensions for the new version? Because, holy cow it seems like most (not all) of the stuff around here is mothballed.

Alright so I have noticed that many of the extensions/modules that render spell effects and other abilities are from late 2015 and mid 2016....with the subsequent updates that FG has undergone during that time does that mean that these great looking alterations to the VTT have been rendered useless or do they still work fine with a few glitches here and there?

The one in particular I've been looking closely at is Farnaby's spellbook which apparently renders effects for all spells up to level 4.

Anyone used it since the 3.30 update?

Modules are generally OK - as the rulesets rarely change the data structures.

Extensions you will have to look at the relevant extensions thread for compatibility as extensions usually contain ruleset code that can have issues if not kept up to date. Always check extensions for compatibility before using, and after a FG update.

Excellent.

Will give a few of them a try as I feel like I have a basic understanding of how the VTT works. Now I want to start playing with some of the toys :)

I have a spell library that was last updated last year (sept 2016) Paizo hasn't released much in the magic department since. I can run another fresh parse to pull the new spells.

In regards to them doing something, FG auto parses what it can from each spell. But depending on how context sensitive it needs to be, it can't grab everything or might need to have their spell effects adjusted. If you're pulling from the various libraries such as the one I have, make sure you run the 'parse spell actions' when you right click the spell in the radial. It'll get you 70% of what you needed in terms of spell actions populated out the bat.

That is precisely the kind of information I was looking for.

Thank you Mr. Ken!