Longtime DM contemplating FG

[Hawkwinter]

I've been playing & DMing (D&D and other games) games since 2000. Just started looking at FG for 5e.

I have a bunch of house rules I use. Can the core rules for the 5e ruleset be changed? I use stacking & canceling additive advantage, flat +5 proficiency and expertise, universal scaling level-based roll bonus. Players can *only* take feats with ASIs, I give them (generous) stat arrays to choose from, and they've got a bunch of custom feats they can take, some I found online, others I wrote for the group.

Which is to say - I make changes to the core rules for my games, not just adding / changing classes and such.

So...

Can FantasyGrounds handle that kind of customization?

I understand there may be LUA involved in some of these things. I have a software development background so that doesn't intimidate me.

But hardcoded restrictions that get in the way of me running mygame are a big deal (if I'm spending the money I want to be sure it will be better than running it online over skype with something like roll20 or maptools just for moving minis around the board).

[Myrdin Potter]

Welcome to the forums, Hawkwinter.

The short answer to your question is, yes, you can do all of that, but some are a lot more work.

Simple changes are straightforward. You can create new classes and feats and spells, for example. You can modify attributes and rolls via effects (within certain, but pretty broad limitations).

But once you really start changing the character sheet or certain built in assumptions, you will need to modify the ruleset either via an extension or rewriting the ruleset and creating a new one for you (the ruleset is open and available to be edited). To do that you need to know or learn a language called lua.

Here are two examples:

Adventures in Middle earth is a pretty changed version of 5e with 5e as the core. Users here wrote an extension to the ruleset to do it:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...read.php?37167

AD&D 2e is way different than 5e, but Celetian wanted to use all the advanced features built into the ruleset so he rewrote the ruleset itself to add and subtract what he needed:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...D-Core-Ruleset

I hope those two examples help.

[LordEntrails]

Note that FG doesn't try to automate everything, and most of the automation that it does can be avoided or not used. So I think you could do almost everything you want without any programming (i.e. developing a custom extension).

With an extension, I'm sure you can do all of it.

What you might want to do is sign up for one month of the standard license, take some classes at FGCollege, and try to do what you want. It'll only cost you $4, or you can always use the 30-day money back guarantee for FG if you went the one-time license path. Just remember if you do the subscription license, Pay Pal cancels your license when you cancel your subscription, not after 30 days, so don't cancel till the end of your month.

[Hawkwinter]

"FG doesn't try to automate everything"

Does that mean the sheets & rollers are not auto-calculating? - If so, is there an extension I could use / modify to make it auto-calculate all the roll bonuses and such?

[Zacchaeus]

Certain things are automated and others are not.

For example when creating a charterer you add in your stats and then drag and drop a race, background and class into the character sheet as well as some weapons, armour and inventory items. FG will automatically calculate from all of this the character's hit points, armour class attacks, saving throws, Hit dice, Initiative, passive perception and damage amongst other things. Spells can be also be dragged in and they will automatically create attacks, saving throws, damage and effects.

Just as an example FG can handle a PC throwing a fireball at a group of NPC; it will automatically make the correct saving throw when the attack is made, it will compute the damage and it will apply the correct damage according to whether the NPC made the save and whether any of the NPCs have fire resistance.

So, yes, there is a lot of autocalculating in sheets and rolls. But it is not completely and utterly automated. Some things need to be done manually, usually edge cases where significant time would need to be spend coding it in for very little reward.

As noted above you do have full access to the ruleset and can modify it to how you want it. This may or may not be a) easy or b) time consuming depending on what you want to do.

Looking at your list (and I don't understand some of the things you are talking about tbh) you could do some of them without any coding using the effects system. But some things would I think require significant changes to the ruleset via an extension which you'd need to write.

I feel your best bet is to have a look some videos as to what FG can do and play about a bit with the demo; perhaps find yourself a game in the forthcoming FG Con day. Also of course if you have more questions then feel free to post and/or check out the FG college.

[Hawkwinter]

Thanks guys!


Zacchaeus:
>What I mean with my houserules:

Advantage:
I let people get up to 3x advantage, or 3x disadvantage, and when they cancel out, they cancel out one at a time. I've tried both Advantage, Advantage+2, and Advantage + 3; and +3, +5, and +6 (Because math and statistical crunching). I think I prefer the former.

Proficiency & Expertise & Level-Based Scaling:
My players didn't like how little a difference proficiency makes in 5e before level 10. I was inclined to agree (from the player perspective). But I didn't want to change the upper bound of the math and have to change all the difficulties and such. So what I did was set proficiency and expertise to near the +6 maximums at +5, which gives me +5 to work with before hitting what the bonus would normally be from Proficiency + Expertise + Magic items. That divides evenly over 20 levels. So - their rolls are Dice + Attribute bonus + 5 (Proficiency) + 5 (expertise) + 1/4 level (Round up). If I give a magic item that boosts their rolls / defenses on something (fairly rare with the passive bonuses I give them), That bonus is either nonstacking with Proficiency (minor items), or nonstacking with Expertise (more major items), and never exceeds +5.
The result is basically that while we're playing with everything else in the full 1-20 level range; AC and roll bonuses all end up falling in the range you'd normally have from like 8-20, making low level characters feel much more competent at the stuff they're supposedly good at.

The only annoying downsides are needing to correct the NPC/Monster math on AC and attack bonus and skill bonus, but if I understand correctly that FG stores everything in XML, I may write some kind of quick-ish batch script to do that for me rather than doing it all manually.

ASIs & Arrays:
My players wanted more feats (they're the interesting options) but they didn't like having to choose between feats and keeping up with the math. So again I did a bunch of math to came up with a solution that solved our problem with the base rules without mucking up the upper bound math too much (but raising the minimum's a bit isn't such a huge deal for me).

Here's what I came up with: Players can *only* take feats with ASIs, and I give them (very generous, but chosen through doing a bunch of math on how bonuses would have otherwise worked out) stat arrays to choose from to make up for the fact that the only stat boosts they can get come from feats that give an attribute boost (18 14 13 12 10 8; 16 16 14 12 10 8; 16 15 15 13 10 8). Then the available feat list is rather expanded for more variety.

Default classes and races are more or less the same, though I allow some classes and races I got from DMs Guild that I would have to enter in - and I suspect there's some Unearthed Arcana stuff I allow that I would have to enter in. So the supplemental materials are basically the same, but we've changed how some of the stuff is calculated and a couple parts of how character creation works.

>Corner Cases aren't automated
I guess I would have to see what those are when they come up. But at least the common rolls are automated.

>Look at videos, play around with the demo, and look at FG College
Yeah, that seems like the best approach at this point. It sounds like all of it is doable, but will just take some extra effort - Likely still very worthwhile though. I'm gonna be watching some videos about the product and checking out the stuff over the next bit and see how it works. It sounds like it will probably do what I want it for though. Thanks!

Myrdin Potter
>Extensions may well be necessary, check out these examples if thats what you want to do.
Thanks! I will absolutely check those out!

[LordEntrails]

As an example, Advantage is automated. (All you do is click the ADV button prior to rolling the attack.) But double advantage or advantage+2 etc is not. But, that doesn't mean you can't do it as is. All you would have to do is roll the attack two or three or etc time, and if one of them hits then roll damage.

[Zacchaeus]

So if I am understanding correctly (and I still may not really be understanding what you are doing admittedly):

Advantage/Disadvantage: I guess what you mean is that you allow advantage three times instead of once. I'm thinking that what you mean is that you allow inspiration to fire three times? If so there is an option in FG which allows for more than one inspiration dice which can be set to Standard (1 dice) or 2 or 3.

Proficiency Bonus: I got lost with this one. You can use effects to alter the proficiency bonus for any roll that involves proficiency See video eight in this series on how to do that. I think you can do whatever you need to do more or less with effects. You can't add a quarter of a level but you can add half using the [HLVL] tag, so for example SAVE:[HLVL] will add half the PCs level to saving throws. Of course you can just add in a straight figure so SAVE:1 for a level 4 character would add a quarter level to a saving throw. You can do the same with DMG, ATK, SKILL and CHECK.

Feats: This one is easy enough since you can create feats within FG and then export them to a module for use in any campaign. The players can then choose feats whenever they hit an appropriate level.

[damned]

I wasnt sure if he was giving 3 inspiration points or allowing Advantage to roll 3 dice instead of 2...

[Hawkwinter]

Advantage / Disadvantage: I allow advantage 3x (but the 2nd and third time it's a flat bonus based roughly on how the math works out for the average benefit for rolling three times). So if you have advantage from 5 sources, and disadvantage from 2 sources, you roll with advantage + 2 + 1. If you have adv from 5 sources and dis from 3 sources, you roll adv+2. If you have adv from 4, and dis from 6, you roll dis - 2.
More granular than advantage / disadvantage, less granular than tracking a million tiny bonuses like in Pathfinder. It's mathematically similar to allowing you to roll 4 dice instead of 2 for average roll, but it doesn't mess with the individual probabilities as much.

Proficiency: Normally Proficiency is 1+1/4 level, rounded up. Expertise is the same and they stack. I'm replacing that 1+1/4lv for both, with a flat +5, and then adding 1/4 lv to everything on top of that (which replaces the bonuses you could normally receive from items, plus the top ends of both proficiency and expertise). It's a change to how some things are calculated to achieve a specific gameplay change - is all.