Some newbie questions

[Quin]

Hi all,

Lots of good info here provided to new players, and I've tried to look there first to no avail. Just wanting to ask a few questions of my own.

1. In the screenshots there seems to be a lot of text-based communication, including from NPCs. My group will more than likely be using voice chat - is there scope for the GM/DM to essentially be the sole provider of area, encounter descriptions, along with the conversations with NPCs? Or are we forced to create NPC conversations ahead of each session? I'd rather not have to type in specific keywords to provoke a pre-written response from an NPC, but would prefer that a GM can have a script or description that he/she takes from when asked questions by a PC.

2. Is it easy to use the non-core rulesets, ie. the ones that arent available from the Store and are essentially player-written?

3. On average, how long would it take to prepare enough material in FGII for a 3-4 hour session?

Thanks all.

[damned]

you do not need to use text chat at all.
dice rolls and combat will still appear there though.

community rulesets vary greatly in completeness and polish...

if you are not using chat then things you would/should still prepare are loading images and maps - it takes 3mins to load the images/maps - finding making them is another story...
copy all your monsters into an NPC tab and modify if required. type up your npcs if required. create your encounters from these copied monsters. this could take 5-30mins. if you are doing the story etc via voice then there is no fg prep time - you still need to develop your plot/story/characters etc but that is irrespective of fg...

[dr_venture]

1. In the screenshots there seems to be a lot of text-based communication, including from NPCs. My group will more than likely be using voice chat

You can use as much or little pre-written text as you want, or juts use voice chat instead. You can create description or conversational text in your module documents if you want to - it's certainly nice to have it waiting when you're running a game... but not necessary. It just depends when you want to do your typing (assuming you're even typing at all.

If you find yourself doing a text game at some point, one nice FG feature is that there are several ways to create a custom NPC to speak to the players, so that they see the speaking in the name of the NPC.



2. Is it easy to use the non-core rulesets, ie. the ones that aren't available from the Store and are essentially player-written?

Not an easy question to answer. I wouldn't want to be creating a custom ruleset unless you just happen to enjoy doing that kind of thing. It's not a trivial task to create a ruleset fro scratch, not even to do much modifying, unless you're pretty familiar with scripting and especially XML. It certainly can be done, but it's not a task to take lightly.

That said, there are a bunch of rulesets available at the rulesets page on the FG wiki. (https://oberoten.dyndns.org/fgwiki/index.php/Category:Rulesets) As damned pointed out, these have varying levels of completeness & features.

Also, I have heard folks on here speak of a basic ruleset... my impression is that it's kind of a template ruleset meant to be tweaked as easily as possible for folks who want to use a game system that doesn't have ruleset. Hopefully others more knowledgeable that I can point you to the correct place!



3. On average, how long would it take to prepare enough material in FGII for a 3-4 hour session?

Another very hard question to answer. It depends on the level of detail you want your game to have. I find I spend a lot of time on maps, and on writing up details that I never used to in the past. But that's because FG fosters that kind of creativity for me. You could easily just prepare your hand drawn maps like a tabletop game, then scan it into the computer and drop into FG.

You prep time will also depend on whether or not you are using a full featured ruleset that has all your assets entered already, such as items, treasures, and monsters. For something like D&D4e (once you parse in all the source files) or Castles & Crusades or Rolemaster (the 3 rulesets I'm familiar with) the prep time can be much quicker, in that it's fast to look up monsters and items and drop them into your GM's notes to reference later. 4e is so well supported that you can find the magic item you want, toss it in a note, then when the party finds it, you can just drop the item into the inventory of the character who picks it up. I think it even updates their encumbrance and shows the "unidentified" name & description... which you can later toggle to "identified" which shows the items details to the player.

So as you can see, it's a very hard question to pin down an answer to.

[Quin]

Thanks for the replies.

I downloaded the game and I'm testing it out, with another instance of the client logged on to my server.

I'm have an issue: I'm running a mock encounter, and despite rolling for hit and damage (and this appearing in the chat window), the damage isn't being recorded on the hostile NPC's sheet within the combat tracker? This is in contrast to the damage from the NPC being recorded on the PC.

Also, playing as a PC, when I move a token on the map, it moves it as it would for a GM, ie. there are no lines emanating from the token in the same way as occurs in the tutorial video?

I get the feeling I've assigned tokens incorrectly here.

[Callum]

If the PC has targeted the NPC (i.e. clicked on its token on the map), the damage should be recorded on the Combat Tracker (for the GM, at least).

To stop players being able to freely move tokens, the GM needs to right-click on the map and select "Lock Tokens" from the radial menu.

[Quin]

Thanks for the answers guys. Think I've nearly got my head around this.

My friends and I would like to try out the demo campaign - is the limitation still two client connections?

[Trenloe]

My friends and I would like to try out the demo campaign - is the limitation still two client connections?
It's only 1 client connection - see some info in this thread (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15828).