Alarian
February 5th, 2006, 17:15
Thought I would throw up my first impressions after GM'ing my first session using FG.
First off, I'll say I have been playing GM'ing since the 1970's (1977 to be exact) and have played a LOT of different gaming systems, versions and genre's over the years. My current group has been together since around since the late 80's and as happens with most groups, has suffered from Marriages, moving etc. The group currently is scattered across the US with get togethers for most memebers once a year and monthly weekend long sessions for those that live within driving distance (I'm about 2 1/2 hours away from where we game). Due to other commitments the past year or so has seen our weekend sessions drop to about 4-6 times a year.
Come in the internet. We first starting using email to 'fill in the gaps' between sessions and later that turned into using IRC with a die bot for occasional sessions. We've looked at most of the tabletop online systems as they have come out over the years (I used to use GRIP for any of you out there that have heard fo that) and up until now, there hasn't been a system that our group thought was worth purchasing. Step in FG. It only took an afternoon of our group looking it over to determine it was the best program any of us had seen to date. A few hours of using the demo and we all wanted it. So, I bought 2GM modules and 3 player modules and we ran our first session last friday. Man talk about an awesome program!!! We all kept commenting on how nice the map feature is, with being able to draw on maps, draw up a quickie encounter map, the masking function for being able to reveal sections of the map as needed (and the ability to freehand draw what I want to remove verses having to reveal a 'box'). The chat function was nice, but we use Teamspeak, so we really didn't use the chat box at all to talk, but the dice rolling, boy what that nice. We all really liked that you could see the die being rolled as the person rolled instead of just having a line come up says "x rolled y". We are currently playing 2nd edition AD&D, so we used the 1st edition file I downloaded off the forums (from Elric I think, thanks!) and we're going to upgrade to the 1.5 version that Cantstanzya has been working on. Other than the map making functions and looking up monsters and tables and such in the reference materials. I haven't had a chance to create an entire adventure yet in the program, but I plan to have the entire adventure put in by our next session. The biggest nod I can give is usually when we finished a session using IRC, there was never much talk about when our next session was going to be, usually a month or so away. With FG, everyone was saying we need to schedule a new session for next week.
If there is any minus to the program, it would be that we did have one crash in which I lost a very simple map that I had drawn and a player lost a note he was working on. The crash occured when a player, who was entering a log of the nights event into a note shared it. When it came up on my screen, I entered something into it and tried to share it back. The GM client crashed. Other than that, I can't recall anyone else complaining. Oh there was one thing. The player that was keeping a log of the session discovered the next day that evidently his notes are kept on my system or something as he no longer had is log (he cound't find it in the program or as a file on his hd) until I loaded up the GM server and he logged into my session. He was then able to recover his notes.
All in all, I think this is hands down the best product on the market (I don't even think there is a close second).
Anyway. Hopefully no one thinks I rambled on to much about this, but I just wanted anyone else out there that might be on the fence to know what a great product this is!
Alarian
First off, I'll say I have been playing GM'ing since the 1970's (1977 to be exact) and have played a LOT of different gaming systems, versions and genre's over the years. My current group has been together since around since the late 80's and as happens with most groups, has suffered from Marriages, moving etc. The group currently is scattered across the US with get togethers for most memebers once a year and monthly weekend long sessions for those that live within driving distance (I'm about 2 1/2 hours away from where we game). Due to other commitments the past year or so has seen our weekend sessions drop to about 4-6 times a year.
Come in the internet. We first starting using email to 'fill in the gaps' between sessions and later that turned into using IRC with a die bot for occasional sessions. We've looked at most of the tabletop online systems as they have come out over the years (I used to use GRIP for any of you out there that have heard fo that) and up until now, there hasn't been a system that our group thought was worth purchasing. Step in FG. It only took an afternoon of our group looking it over to determine it was the best program any of us had seen to date. A few hours of using the demo and we all wanted it. So, I bought 2GM modules and 3 player modules and we ran our first session last friday. Man talk about an awesome program!!! We all kept commenting on how nice the map feature is, with being able to draw on maps, draw up a quickie encounter map, the masking function for being able to reveal sections of the map as needed (and the ability to freehand draw what I want to remove verses having to reveal a 'box'). The chat function was nice, but we use Teamspeak, so we really didn't use the chat box at all to talk, but the dice rolling, boy what that nice. We all really liked that you could see the die being rolled as the person rolled instead of just having a line come up says "x rolled y". We are currently playing 2nd edition AD&D, so we used the 1st edition file I downloaded off the forums (from Elric I think, thanks!) and we're going to upgrade to the 1.5 version that Cantstanzya has been working on. Other than the map making functions and looking up monsters and tables and such in the reference materials. I haven't had a chance to create an entire adventure yet in the program, but I plan to have the entire adventure put in by our next session. The biggest nod I can give is usually when we finished a session using IRC, there was never much talk about when our next session was going to be, usually a month or so away. With FG, everyone was saying we need to schedule a new session for next week.
If there is any minus to the program, it would be that we did have one crash in which I lost a very simple map that I had drawn and a player lost a note he was working on. The crash occured when a player, who was entering a log of the nights event into a note shared it. When it came up on my screen, I entered something into it and tried to share it back. The GM client crashed. Other than that, I can't recall anyone else complaining. Oh there was one thing. The player that was keeping a log of the session discovered the next day that evidently his notes are kept on my system or something as he no longer had is log (he cound't find it in the program or as a file on his hd) until I loaded up the GM server and he logged into my session. He was then able to recover his notes.
All in all, I think this is hands down the best product on the market (I don't even think there is a close second).
Anyway. Hopefully no one thinks I rambled on to much about this, but I just wanted anyone else out there that might be on the fence to know what a great product this is!
Alarian