Offline play / meatspace questions

[Filouza]

Hey All--

Been digging around the site but having trouble finding some answers so hoping I can turn to the community without being too annoying and asking a few questions. First a little background!

A few months ago me and a few friends who haven't played since we were around 12 started playing again recently and just finished LMoP. I am the DM and I had a lot of fun doing it, and we went off the rails pretty quickly. It was a bit laborious managing all the stat blocks, etc, without shuffling through the manual a bunch or stopping to look at the MM. It took a lot of prep to make it seamless. So my questions are:

1) Is anyone using this at their normal play sessions to help manage a campaign? I don't really relish the idea of all six of us sitting with a laptop apiece, but I do like the idea of pushing some pictures or text to a screen for them to look at, and having a screen for me to help track stat blocks, monster HP, maps, and all the other ephemera. It would help to have it manage some complicated rolls, but I want to keep the analogue experience as much as possible.

2) Character creation. If I buy the ultimate license and the class packs, can my players login for free and create characters and then print out those sheets? Or will they have to buy class licenses for themselves?

Thanks so much in advance for the help.

Matt

[kylania]

1) Saw somewhere recently where the DM had FG running and a second laptop facing the players with handouts, maps and the like on it. Either they could just have that player make the in game rolls or roll in real life and have the DM apply the proper results in FG. It could definitely be used as basically just a DM tool in a table top game.

2) Absolutely. If you have Ultimate they can all connect in with free and use your resources to make characters in your campaign. As for printing them you'll need to use a 3rd party tool such as alonlinetools.net (https://www.alonlinetools.net/FGCharacterSheet.aspx). You'll need to export each character as an XML for them.

[Trenloe]

There are plenty of GMs who use Fantasy Grounds for face-to-face games. Some run a player client in addition to the GM instance on their own computer and connect this to a large screen TV for the players to see - maps (with fog of war), player side combat/init tracker, handouts, etc.. Others use a second computer that the players use to move around tokens, access records etc..

[VinAlanson]

Some run a player client in addition to the GM instance on their own computer...

Hi, Does this mean the player client and the GM instance in on the same computer? If so how do you do that?

[Trenloe]

Hi, Does this mean the player client and the GM instance in on the same computer? If so how do you do that?
Yes, it's on the same computer. Launch another instance of Fantasy Grounds, go to "Join Game" and use a server address of localhost to connect.

[Mirloc]

I used FG to run a game in just this manner. It started with my laptop and the players watched the events unfold on a monitor set up back to back with my laptop (much like the old DM screens actually...).

Over time each of the players wound up with various laptops that we scrounged from a friend who was getting rid of older hardware as it became obsolete for his companies use. Fortunately for us, he scored a small group of tablet PCs that took up less room than the Player's Handbook did. They didn't use (for the most part) dice, but they liked having the map area available to them. Also let players not feeling well play from home.

Yes, I did buy the Ultimate version of the software, and I'd just leave my desktop on and connected during the week, transfer the info to my laptop before it was time to play.

[Filouza]

That's great! Thanks for the info--i'm convinced and excited to use this. Going to get started today--my next play session is on the 25th. Hopefully I can get it all together.

I'd love to hear anyone else's stories of using this system IRL/Offline for campaign management.

Thanks!

[ddaley]

That's great! Thanks for the info--i'm convinced and excited to use this. Going to get started today--my next play session is on the 25th. Hopefully I can get it all together.

I'd love to hear anyone else's stories of using this system IRL/Offline for campaign management.

Thanks!

I am using FG in much the same way as Mirioc used to use it. I two instances of FG on my laptop. The host (DM version) running on the laptop screen for me to use and a client (player version) running on an external monitor so that I can display maps and images of creatures and such. We aren't using many of the FG features. We roll on the table and use miniatures on the table, but I try to keep the tokens on the map updated in order to match what is on the table.

I use the combat tracker to track combat order and HP of all involved in combat. I also try to keep the character sheets updated so that it is easy to see what skills and abilities the characters have, though the players use paper sheets as the primary source.

FG has been useful as is, but I had hoped it would have been more useful. I find that trying to look up info in the PHB can be a pain and you can easily end up with 10 or more windows popping open (each link opens a new window). Looking up monsters in the MM is not too bad.

People have suggested that I link more content into the adventure, but, what I am talking about are adhoc lookups... questions about the rules or things the chars want to try. I had hoped that FG could streamline things like that.

All in all, it is probably worth it, and as time goes on, I should get more proficient at using it.

[Moon Wizard]

I usually place rules that I look up often on the hot bar, such as Conditions. Just drag the link from the Reference Manual in the library to a hot key.

Regards,
JPG

[scottaroberts]

I run a game store/gaming club/social space, and here's what we do:

* DM Laptop: Runs Ultimate License.
* Separate Laptop: Attached to HDTV. Runs Free license. Signed in to DM laptop. PCs of all players physically present without their own device are assigned to this instance of Fantasy Grounds. Usually, a player controls the PCs on this machine (moving tokens, etc.)
* The separate laptop also runs Skype; players who are remote dial in here. We situate their video feeds on this laptop and place it next to the HDTV.

The physical setup is:
----HDTV + player/skype laptop----
....*******************
..c.* table w/chips & dice * c DM w/ultimate license
....*******************
........c......c.......c.........c

It works out pretty darn well. Gets a little cramped with very large groups, but other than that it works, and it eliminates the "missing a player, can't play" problem--a few of my regular players travel for work, or have kids, or have other things that keep them from going out--but they can still join us and play.

[soulcat]

What I do is I have 2 computers, one is connected to a bigscreen TV for my players, as wells as a wireless mourse and keyboard, and I run the game off my Laptop. I find this setup works very well. Also if you don't have a spare compute you could probably hook your computer to a TV and run a localhost player instance on the TV, and the DM instance on your laptop screen, I considered that but I have an ultimate License and multiple computers so hey why not. Your player compute does not have to be very powerful. The one I have attach to my tv is an intel Atom 1.6 ghz, but is does the job.

[Filouza]

These are awesome tips. Thanks everyone.