Newbie GM with some questions!

[qwortec]

Me and some friends purchased FG2, and I'm the designated GM for our Pathfinder game. This means I've spent the past few days watching tutorials, reading this forum, and playing around with the program. So far it seems amazing, and perfect for our needs.

We did try running a little test session last night to find out if it's going to work and where some problems might be that need to be addressed, and here are the results of that session. These are just a few of the questions we couldn't find answers to and are certainly just the first of many. If the experts here could provide some answers and/or advice it would be greatly appreciated by all of us.

1. How do you equip armor and items? I understand how FG looks in the PC's inventory, finds linked weapons, and adds them to the actions tab so that you can choose which item to use. The problem we ran into is FG not understanding that armor was equipped and not applying the AC bonuses, etc. (though IIRC we could get it to apply the armor check penalties). Is there a way to tell FG what set of armor is in use? E.g. if you were wearing full plate but also had some leather armor in the inventory, could you easily get FG to switch between which set of armor is being worn?

2. Is there an easy way to add wand (or other magic item) spells to the action list? We got it to work for a wand of fireball by putting it in a character's inventory, then adding a custom entry to the action tab for sorcerer type spell with 50 uses, and casting a fireball lvl whatever the wand is. It seemed to work OK, but is there an easier way to do this?

3. Along those lines, is there a way to tell FG to only apply half damage on saves? With the fireball example above we could get FG to cast the fireball on all selected targets, roll their will saves, and then it would deselect the enemies that passed the save. Next we rolled damage and it would apply to all the enemies still selected. It's slick and awesome, but then we have to take that damage, half it, and then apply it to all the enemies that passed the will save. In the spell mechanics there are only 2 options for saves: "Fixed" and "caster DC" plus a set modifier. This seems really limited and doesn't allow any way to set what the save does. Am I missing something?

4. Is there an easy way to apply aoe effects like obscurring mist? There doesn't seem to be a "concealment" effect that I can place on a character, it appears that it has to be selected manually from the modifiers box every time someone attacks that character.

5. Sometimes both myself and the PCs could not get FG to roll damage on targeted characters unless we manually pulled the dice over the tokens. Is this a known issue or are we doing something wrong?

6. Is there a way to save any custom made spells/abilities? I had to manually create the channel energy effects for a cleric (not sure why this isn't in the program by default), and would like to save them so I can just drop a link into any other clerics that get created. Can I do this?

7. I have a bunch of images that I would like to make into tokens and add to my games; how do I create my own tokens.mod file to import them?

I know that's a fair number of questions... Thanks in advance for the help!

[Trenloe]

Glad to hear you and your friends are enjoying Fantasy Grounds.

Some quick answers to your questions:
1) You manage the AC added by your armour manually on the Combat tab. Armour Check Penalty and max dex can be controlled from the "Armor" window in inventory, but the actual AC provided by your armour must be manually added on the Combat tab.
2) What you did is the usual way to track things like wands, etc.. A lot of player will add a "spell class" tab and call it something like "magic items" or "miscellaneous" and put things like magic items, special ability effects, etc. in this list.
3)There is currently not a way to apply half damage if saves are made in an area of effect attack. There are too many potential exceptions to this rule (evasion being one of them) that the devs have not implemented any automation for this.
4) Use CONC or TCONC effect for concealment or total concealment, respectively. Effect guidelines here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/3.5E_Effects
5)There was an issue in 3.0.4 - make sure the GM and all of the players are running FG 3.0.5.
6)To create library entries requires editing of XML and understanding of the FG format. Some players have made "template" PCs with frequently used entries that they can drag from the template PC to the required PC. It's not great, but it work... Using the character importing and exporting feature you can move this template between campaigns.
7)A quick way is to add the tokens to the \tokens\host directory in the FG Data App folder - then your tokens will be available for every campaign you use. However, this can take up a lot of memory if you have a lot of tokens, so a module is the best way to go. Have a look at one of the token modules that comes with Fantasy Grounds - perhaps lettertokens.mod (in the \modules directory). Change the .mod extension to .zip and then unzip to look at the required format.

Hope these quick answers help to address your questions.

[qwortec]

Excellent. THanks for the info. That list of effect names is really helpful!

[Trenloe]

That list of effect names is really helpful!
Do a on the forum, there are many threads that deal with effect examples. Like this, for example: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?18006-Effects-library

Assuming you're using Pathfinder or 3.5E, of course...

[damned]

well done!
you sound like you have a pretty good grasp of things.
i have nothing further to add :)

[darrenan]

For #2 the only gotcha is that you can't use the casts/day part of the spell UI to track wand usages, because it resets if/when the GM does a full day rest (unless there's some way I'm unaware of to exempt that either at the spell or caster level of the UI).

[Trenloe]

For #2 the only gotcha is that you can't use the casts/day part of the spell UI to track wand usages, because it resets if/when the GM does a full day rest (unless there's some way I'm unaware of to exempt that either at the spell or caster level of the UI).
Good pointing out of that gotcha. :)

You can't remove the full rest functionality from spell classes or individual spells. Mind you, until your wand got down to only a few charges you probably wouldn't want to have 50 little circles next to it! ;) I just track charges in the wand title, e.g. "Wand CLW (47)" or something like that - OK, it's not a single click, but it does the trick...

[Valarian]

3. Along those lines, is there a way to tell FG to only apply half damage on saves? With the fireball example above we could get FG to cast the fireball on all selected targets, roll their will saves, and then it would deselect the enemies that passed the save. Next we rolled damage and it would apply to all the enemies still selected. It's slick and awesome, but then we have to take that damage, half it, and then apply it to all the enemies that passed the will save. In the spell mechanics there are only 2 options for saves: "Fixed" and "caster DC" plus a set modifier. This seems really limited and doesn't allow any way to set what the save does. Am I missing something?

You are able to halve a die roll result through a right-click on the result total in the chat window. One of the right-click context menu options is to halve the result. That may help, though I don't know how it might interact with the automation in the ruleset.