Question about starting a campaign/server

[HavocSmurf]

Just have a technical question. When I create a campaign, is the campaign available for any player to log into at anytime, or do I (the host DM) need to have the game up and running on my PC for others to join? Wondering if players can join the campaign and create their characters with the shared resources if I'm not online. Please and thanks.

[BasiliskOnline]

Newbie here, myself, but i know that you need to be online for your players to connect with you or your campaign, i do believe they can make their own characters on their client and port them to yours, but they wont have access to any DM shared resources.

[HavocSmurf]

Thanks for the info Basilisk. I suspected that was the case, but wanted to confirm. Cheers

[LordEntrails]

Yep, Basilisk has it right.

[Torgaard]

That's what I do: I leave our campaign up and running on my machine 24-7. I've got my custom made (via PAR5E) Player's Handbook and my custom made Deities and Demigods (via PARS5E) shared so that players can connect any time, use the books, and do whatever they want. They'll often review notes they've taken from the campaign, tweak their characters background a little, etc - but the thing a couple of them do most (by far) is make additional characters. I've lost count of how many characters those guys have created. It's pretty funny. I'll often get the call from one of them: "Mock battle! Need to test a new character - get on the table, let's do this!"

Another interesting bit of info is that while my campaign is pretty huge, with a ton-o-stuff in it (it's been running for 2-3 years now), we don't really have any trouble with bandwidth or the table slowing down - even with one of my players being on the other side of the planet (in Singapore).

[HavocSmurf]

Thanks Torgaard. It didn't occur to me to just have the software running indefinitely. Am I correct in assuming that you can have just one 'campaign' and have multiple products loaded in, say Horde of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat + Sword Coast Adventurers Guide + custom content? You could then conceivably run multiple games from the same 'campaign' . If that's the case, going forward, I can start a fresh campaign and just move all my resources into it. Or maybe I'm reading this wrong? I'm still getting a handle on the finer aspects of hosting a campaign. I initially started with a Rise of Tiamat campaign with a group of players, then I created a new campaign for my custom module, but this requires me to log them in separately. What's the best practice for this?
Cheers

[damned]

You would generally load RoT only and as they finish you would unload it and load the next one. You dont want to load EVERYTHING just because its there. It will have a memory overhead and will create ooodles of tabs and take longer to find everything.



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[Nylanfs]

Consider FG your Kitchen table, the modules your bookshelf of material. You don't bring your bookshelf over to the table every time you play, you just grab the one or two books you need. And the only constant things at your table are the characters, and the events that have happened in your game.

[HavocSmurf]

Ok, thanks for the tips!

[Trenloe]

If you're running multiple games (i.e. different campaign with different players) then you probably won't want to leave your FG instance running all the time - at least not in a specific campaign instance. If you want to leave it for players to mess around with characters then load up a different campaign and just allow access to the player specific libraries - however this could limit the times you can work on your actual campaign.

But, once you have a campaign running, your players are rarely going to want to gain access to all of the libraries etc. out of the game - and they can access their PC data by using "Manage Characters" on the locally stored campaign cache. So - if you really need to, have a character generation instance up for a couple of days at the beginning of a campaign. Outside of that there's not much need - or work with your players to schedule a specific time when you're going to have the campaign up and running.

[Torgaard]

Am I correct in assuming that you can have just one 'campaign' and have multiple products loaded in, say Horde of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat + Sword Coast Adventurers Guide + custom content? You could then conceivably run multiple games from the same 'campaign' . If that's the case, going forward, I can start a fresh campaign and just move all my resources into it. Or maybe I'm reading this wrong?
Cheers

Epic huge writeup incoming! Sorry, it's Friday, I'm at work and it's every American's cod-given right not to do actual work on Friday's!

Yup HavocSmurf, that's how I do it. As long as you mean "run multiple games" as "run multiple sessions for the same core group", then ya. Though as damned noted, I don't load every module I've got all the time. But, as we just wrapped on Princes of the Apocalypse, that one was always open during the campaign. I only have one group running one ongoing campaign, so I don't have any situations where I'd have to shut down the table and load up a whole other campaign for another group (which, as Trenloe noted, would probably not work so well). While I do make and parse other modules to open/close during my campaign for various things, I tend to think of the core campaign as the repository for all my ongoing notes, story entries, ongoing NPC's, images of NPC's, images of symbols (the gods symbols for example) and coat-of-arms, images of items and gems (I like using D&D as a learning opportunity, so it's like "This is what a tourmaline looks like!" kind of thing), maps, etc. Modules come and go, the the dearth of content is always there in the core campaign. I work on adding notes and story entries and NPC's and all that stuff while the table is running - even when players are connected during off-session hours. Sometimes without them even knowing it :bandit: Because of course your players don't see anything until you share it with them.

Very early into the Fantasy Grounds experience, having a campaign running like this was something I really wanted it to be able to do. I liked the idea that it might lend itself to sort of a turn-based MMO server kinda feel or something. That the players could connect any time, day or night, and help breath life into their characters AND the campaign by kinda helpin' out with content. Players reviewing notes, making notes, tweaking character background stuff, etc. Because that is a concept that is oh so often forgotten or doesn't even occur to most D&D groups: D&D is NOT a one way street. The DM does not create your campaign - you all do. I am constantly nudging my players in that direction. Sorry, but you won't get a free ride at Torgaard's table :p If I run into a player that's kinda "Meh, I don't wanna do any of that stuff - I just wanna connect and play". Well, that's just not how it is at my table, and everybody is told that up front. Nuttin' wrong with it, no hard feelings if a player doesn't like that style, these things don't always work out, etc. Anyway, having the table up like this works pretty well in that regard.

It can get a little busy with all the different tabs with all that stuff loaded. I've already got alotta tabs in my core campaign (in the Story section for example, I have one for Session Notes, one for Session Archives, one for Rumors, one for Mini-Adventures, etc) - and a big module like Princes of the Apocalypse made it kind of a hot mess - but it didn't bother me much.

Your mileage may vary depending on bandwidth, speed and power of you and your players machines, etc. While performance was an issue a few major versions back, it's been runnin' like a champ for a couple years (or more) now. I keep it running while I'm rockin' out to The Sword (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MQK_Ia63OM) on Music Bee, while playing Guild Wars 2, with a half dozen webpages open, etc - all at the same time. Works fine. But my machine is a bit of a hot rod.

I should point out that my players have a fairly long load time when they connect to the table. It's a good 3-5 minutes. It's the price ya pay for all that stuff. But they basically just hit connect and go make a cup-o-coffee, what-have-you. Doesn't seem to bother anybody.

It's also important to note that if you go with my approach, you basically need to kinda think it through a little bit and make sure you're ok with the consequences of doing it this way. If my core campaign ever blew up and was totally unrecoverable, Torgaard would be a sad panda. There's alotta work in there. Though in all the years I've been using FG, it's never happened (except when my entire hard-drive fried, but it all would've been lost anyway in that situation), but just bear that in mind. I now backup my FG folder regularly (monthly).

It's also a bit of a pain to extract parts of what's in there (outside of FG) and put them in a new campaign if you started over, though you could make a module out of your current campaign, close the table, make a new campaign, open the old campaign (which is now a module) in the new campaign, and then just drag n' drop stuff you want out to your new (blank) campaign, drag n' drop it again in your new campaign (so it makes a copy of the item) framework, and then close the old one. LOL, does that make any sense?

I'm at work, but I think I can rundown the list of modules I have loaded and running 24-7:

5E Player's Handbook - Shared with players, Custom PAR5E with a crapton of homebrew in it. Tons of homebrew class archtypes, House Rules, etc. Notably, I had purchased the 5E Book of Lost Spells from Frog God Games on pdf when it first came out, and I literally PAR5E'd every spell I wanted (up to 4th level) into my custom made PHB - I'll parse more in as my players get high enough level to use them.
5E Deities and Demigods - Shared with players, Custom PAR5E of all the Faerun gods.
5E Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide - Shared with players, Official (purchased via the FG Shop)
5E Fifth Edition Feats - Shared with players, from Total Party Kill Games, this one completely and utterly breaks the 5E game, but my players loooove what they can do with their players with these feats. I just have to ramp up the difficulty on my encounters to make up for it.
5E Complete Dungeon Master's Guide - DM only, Official (purchased via the FG Shop)
5E Dungeon Master's Compendium - DM only, my custom PAR5E with a bunch of custom content
5E Monster Manual - DM only, Official (purchased via the FG Shop)
5E Tome of Beasts - DM only, from Kobold Press (purchased via the FG Shop)
5E Princes of the Apocalypes - DM only*, Official (purchased via the FG Shop)
5E Quests of Doom 1 - DM only, from Frog God Games (purchased via the FG Shop)


* Parts of it shared with players of course (maps, images, etc)

On top of that I've got tons of images. I'm an art nerd, so I'm very much into having images for my players. Every NPC has a portrait, every map, as I mentioned I do images for every gem type, symbols of gods, on-and-on. But what's important with the images is that you periodically UN-share old ones (click the little round white "S" to the right) that aren't super relevant anymore. I also do NOT toss every token I've got into the Tokens folder - and I've got a crapload. I think I've bout dang near every fantasy related token Devin Night's ever made, and then hundreds more scoured from the web. But I only load the ones I'll need for the next few sessions, and I'll periodically go in and remove some I don't need anymore.

Phew, sorry - that got kinda long.

[Nylanfs]

Setup a bat file to copy your campaign folder into Dropbox, or Google Drive location that way you always have a good backup.

[HavocSmurf]

Thanks for the awesome tips. I have been backing up to the cloud as I go, so I don't worry about loosing too much.
Cheers

[HavocSmurf]

cool beans!

[Zacchaeus]

Thanks for the awesome tips. I have been backing up to the cloud as I go, so I don't worry about loosing too much.
Cheers

The general advice is not to use a cloud based back up system; namely don't point Dropbox to your campaign data. If you do you will eventually run into a problem with syncing and you could lose a lot of data. It's ok to zip up your campaign and physically put it into Dropbox or whatever but don't have it linked to the folder(s).

[HavocSmurf]

Thanks for the warning Zacchaeus, it will be heeded.