questions before I buy

[KyleC]

I've been poking around the demo and this site and so far I'm intrigued. I do, however, have a few questions before I take the plunge.

1. I understand that the character sheet is customizable, but just how customizable is it? I'm asking because I would want to use this product for True20. The main difference I'm wondering about is the Damage Track that True20 uses instead of hitpoints.

https://63.173.68.74/DamageTrack.jpg

Basically, True20 uses a Toughness save when a character is hit and how bad he fails his save determines the level of damage. Looking at the chart above, the Bruised/Dazed/Staggered/Unconscious conditions result from nonlethal damage and the Hurt/Wounded/Disabled/Dying/Dead conditions result from lethal damage.

Using True20 in Fantasy Grounds, each time a character takes a Bruised/Dazed/Hurt/Wounded condition, that condition should increment by 1 (you can have multiple Wounds, for example). The other conditions should just be a checkbox. In addition, there should be a field that tallies all the conditions to provide a quick method of determining the penalty to the Toughness save (since each condition provides a cumulative -1 to future Toughness saves).

Can this be implemented in Fantasy Grounds?

2. I've read several threads about stability issues. How often are crashes occurring? Each session? Once every few sessions? Every 5 minutes? I'm a little leery of purchasing an unstable product.

3. As I was playing with the demo, I noticed that the entries in the Personalities "book" doesn't allow you to drag their combat modifiers into the modifier box. Is this still the case in 1.05?

4. Can you create different mask layers to send to different players? In the event the group splits up, this would be a nice function to have.

That's about all I've got so far. Thanks for the help.

-KyleC

[gurney9999]

4. Can you create different mask layers to send to different players? In the event the group splits up, this would be a nice function to have.I let others answer the top three questions since I'm not at home to check the client and/or not an expert on the question :)

But for the layers question: currently image sharing does not support different layers, separate masks, etc.

The only way you can handle this at this time would be to have more than one version of a large map saved in your images folder, and when a group is separated, share one version of the image with group A and share the other version of the image with group B... then when they meet back up you can use one version of the map and share with both groups.

[richvalle]

1. Ummm... Kinda yes now. Probably, definatly yes after 1.06 and the macro's come out.

People have made extensive changes to the character sheets even now. I'm sure you could get something like the above in place. I'm not sure how hard it would be to do the totaling bit.

It would take xml skills and creating the images you want to place in (I think... I've never done it).

2. Stability. I've not had a chance to use the new 1.05e patch yet. For some it seems to work better but for others there are still problems.

When they have happened to us, it happens about 3-4 times during a 3-4 hour game. Relogging in usually works so the down time is minimul. During combat if its not that players turn we hardly even notice it.

You might want to wait a bit to see how this develops. Sounds like you would want the 1.06 version anyway.

3. I don't remember for sure, but I think 'no'.

4. Gurney got this one already. :)

rv

3.

[Alkaven]

Wow... There were some ideas in there too. Someone should copy and paste all this in the Workshop forum.

While I love the way that damage tracker works, it seems to be only valuable for small encounters consisting of a small PC party and a few NPCs. For a warfare-style battlefield encounter, it would be WAAAY too hard and cumbersome to manage all those characters. If there was a way to automate it, I'd definitely make use of it for sure.

For the most part, alot of those features I haven't witnessed firsthand in Fantasy Grounds, so I doubt they are there naturally. Still, you should already be surprised by it's flexibility, and those few features your looking for seem to be very 'specific'. The sort of thing that could be remedied by cleverness (Gurney's solution is a good demonstration of that).

[Goblin-King]

A bit of elabortion on what was already stated by others...


Using True20 in Fantasy Grounds, each time a character takes a Bruised/Dazed/Hurt/Wounded condition, that condition should increment by 1 (you can have multiple Wounds, for example). The other conditions should just be a checkbox. In addition, there should be a field that tallies all the conditions to provide a quick method of determining the penalty to the Toughness save (since each condition provides a cumulative -1 to future Toughness saves).

Checkboxes are treated as numbers internally, and a two state box would have 0 and 1 as the possible values. You can link these and number fields using basic mathematical functions (+, -, *, /) and simple lookup tables (in case some of the boxes caused a -2 modifier or something). The total of the calculation can be displayed in another field you can attach a text label to, so that if you used that as a modifier it could say "Toughness save".

Sounds like a pretty neat system :)


2. I've read several threads about stability issues. How often are crashes occurring? Each session? Once every few sessions? Every 5 minutes? I'm a little leery of purchasing an unstable product.

My analysis of the situation is that the latest major patch 1.05 implemented some features that caused the utilization of some parts of the program to increase dramatically, which caused some network conditions for some users that didn't occur before. We always take any stability problems extremely seriously, but I'm happy to say it seems we have managed to make a fix to all the reported major stability problems. There's another hot fix coming early next week at the latest that should improve the situation further, and we'll put up new ones if needed.


3. As I was playing with the demo, I noticed that the entries in the Personalities "book" doesn't allow you to drag their combat modifiers into the modifier box. Is this still the case in 1.05?

1.05 is pretty much on the same level as the demo on this front. The personality book is going to be one of the places that should benefit the most from the upcoming patch 1.06. The reason is that manipulating ruleset specific information such as NPC stats is hard to do generically using just basic control types. The next major patch will feature scripting support that should allow us to do a lot more on that front, such as parse strings and pick modifiers from the standard d20 skill listing found on the sheets.

I'm not very familiar with the True20 system, but if you want to customize the sheet for your own purposes, you can use exactly all the options that are available on the PC character sheets if you want to. The primary reason we didn't do that for the default d20 ruleset is that most players will be looking at just one PC character sheet at a time, whereas GMs will have several NPCs open and it's not very convenient if the sheet is as large as the PC sheet.

[richvalle]

I noticed last night that, at the least, the npc save boxes are drag and droppable into the modifier box.

rv

[KyleC]

Thanks for the replies. I have another question:

Are the image masks saved between sessions? Meaning, if my group has explored half a cave and we break for the week, when logging back on the following week are the unrevealed areas still intact?

-KyleC

[Crusader]

Yes, they are.

[Alkaven]

I still think the Player Character sheets are too big. It wouldn't hurt to break it into more pages instead of only four ridiculously huge pages. Smaller font for the pages would also be nice.

[Spyke]

Smaller font for the pages would also be nice.
Not for my ageing eyes! :shock:

Spyke