New to FG - advise

[2eDM1981]

Old fart who has a 4 year old game with friends that has fallen apart. The thief moved to NJ, the dwarf tank just had his 1st kid and the wizard and ranger got married and moved to WV. We played add 2e ask kids and that’s what we played as adults. We are “ converting” to 3.5 and starting up on FG.. any and all advise for a new FG DM is welcome.

[LordEntrails]

Start slow. Don't try to accomplish everything on day one.

If you are converting from one edition of D&D to another edition, consider 5E since all of the official content is available and the 5E ruleset as the most automation and capabilities of all the rulesets.

You can also consider Pathfinder since it has official content too and is the second most advanced ruleset of them all. Finally, their is Castles & Crusades which is an OSR clone and has good ruleset and the content is very affordable.

Regardless of what ruleset you choose though, don't just try to start up and expect to be able to do everything. If you like videos, there are lots of tutorial videos, if you like reading, their is a user guide and lots of info on the forums and the wiki.

Look into FG College, they do free "classes". You can check them out on Discord, and their is also the official FG Discord server. People on both are friendly and helpful if you want immediate interaction.

There is also the upcoming FG Daze, which is a one day con next weekend where you and your players can get some experience with FG.

[LordEntrails]

Oh, welcome!

[2eDM1981]

Thanks ,,, switching to 5e seems so daunting. We have played 2e since 94’.

[mr900rr]

Watch a lot of the videos, make sure to watch ones on combat and targeting, most of the new videos will be for 5E rule set but most of the basic stuff still applies. I like this one https://youtu.be/6QAJzGKMEZA its older and for 4E rule set but its basically the same as 3.5E as far as function. I run 3.5E and Fantasy Grounds, once you learn to use it will greatly reduce the number crunching you and your players will need to do, and you can make your own modules to have all the 3.5E content it will just take a lil time to learn the XML used in the .mod files and a lot of time entering data. You will also want to know the keyboard shortcuts, here is a link to a thread on here https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...oard-Shortcuts. You will want to also look up how to put the grid https://youtu.be/et4ZjJ5UOzU and mask on your maps https://youtu.be/NEDffDfLfzM, how to scale and lock tokens, apply effects and conditions and how to build encounters and parcels. Your best friend in this will be Google, YouTube , the Wiki and these forums. The links I provided are by no means the best or only ones you should watch they are just ones I watched and felt were easy to follow. Hope this helps.

Oh and most importantly , hold alt when you roll the d20 to make it spin like a top (dont tell your players) .

[damned]

5E is a breeze - much easier than 3.5E
There is also a community 2E ruleset - with some SRD data.

[mr900rr]

I prefer 3.5E do to the endless options for character class customization, but 5E is nice for the ease of play. I actually use Fantasy Grounds for my in person games because 3.5E at higher level becomes a math convention and slows game play to a halt (had one combat encounter take 3 hours), Fantasy Grounds does about 95% of the math for me and the players and our games are way more productive now. If I didn't have this program I would probably only run 5E games.

[dulux-oz]

Hi 2eDM1981, and Welcome! to the Community

If you haven't done so already, let me encourage you and your group 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).

You may also way to drop into the FG College; a great place for newcomers to get started.

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

Cheers

[mr900rr]

Another good thing to do is start a second instance of Fantasy Grounds and click "Join Game" then type in a name in username field then in the host address field type in "localhost", this lets you connect to your game as a player. This is good to do when starting out as you will want to see what controls and options they have and test out things like image sharing and sync view.