3.5 Books

[Destrinnbriar]

Hi, I'm looking at possibly using this system to run some games, but from what i'm seeing you have the original 3.5 system and core classes in it which is good.

I have ... roughly 73 books for 3.5 aside from the base three books(over about 14 years since my teens my friends and later co workers, and later my SSgt's who played with me bought me the books to expand my DMing). It looks like you can buy the books and stuff again, but how easy is it to input all the information that would be pertinent to say a Duskblade, a warmage, a favored soul, etc. Or say the luck feats/charges from complete scoundrel into the actual system? I'm sorry if this has been asked but have tried using the search feature and either i'm just blind, stupid or just really good at accidentally overlooking things. This would be my main deal breaker if i had to rebuy ALL the books that I have physical access to, that my friends who are all around the country have put money into jsut for us to use that, AND pay for the virtual table top.

On a related note, what about adding in completely home brewed things, including classes.

[Moon Wizard]

Only the 3.5E SRD data can be provided with Fantasy Grounds. The owners of D&D (Wizards of the Coast) have not licensed their data for resale to any virtual tabletop or character creation program.

Also, one clarification is that Fantasy Grounds is not designed to be character creation software. We provide a character sheet that information can be entered into, but no enforcement of character creation rules is made. There is quite a bit of automation around the game mechanics themselves for gameplay once the characters are ready to go.

You can import characters from popular character creation software, such as Hero Lab or PCGen. I seem to recall that there might be some unofficial data packs for those character creators floating around, but nothing can be done officially due to licensing issues. Whatever data is included in the character files imported into FG will automatically be included.

The data files included with FG contain character class info, spells, feats, skills, magic items and core monsters. The feats, spells, magic items and monsters can be used within the campaign via drag and drop. The remainder are informational only.

Given that, the modules for Fantasy Grounds are essentially just shells for XML data. You could create your own XML files as needed based on the ones we have provided in order to add additional FG modules containing your custom or extended data.

Regards,
JPG

[Trenloe]

EDIT: Just seen that Moon_Wizard replied - still leaving my post as it adds to what M_W said.

There is additional info (available through the store) relating to the D20 SRD - see this thread for more info: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17382

The thing to keep in mind is that other than monsters, spells and weapons most of the entries in the library modules are descriptive text - there is very little underlying these entries that link to functionality in the underlying ruleset.

For example, Power Attack is just the name, pre-req and descriptive text:

3124

There is nothing built into Fantasy Grounds that checks that you have a Strength of 13+.

So, what I'm trying to say is that there is nothing in the ruleset stopping you running anything from all of your 70+ rulebooks. As M_W said in his post, if you want to you can create your own modules using XML. If you don't want/need to do that, just enter the data as required into the character sheet (special skills, feats, etc.). You can play whatever class you want - it is just a name on the character sheet after all...

[Destrinnbriar]

So as i understand it, modification of macros or entering the new information on different classes and such from valid sourcebooks is easily done with little to no work, aside from just adding information, descriptions, or text? Was fooling with Maptools and though I've a decent handle on HTML programming trying to work out everything for each campaign map, do all the monster tokens/macros and everything like that was just too much work and totally deflating.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, just fill in the appropriate fields on the character sheet. Check out the demo, and give it a try for yourself using the Tale of Dinor example campaign.

Regards,
JPG