FG or Roll20 for LotFP

[lerugray]

Hello all

I'm looking to run an old school 1974 style D&D campaign.

I've noticed that some people have bemoaned the drawing abilities for FG, this would be fairly bad given players need to map out wilderness and underground encounter. but FG does look fantastic.

Has anyone had any experience running 74 style games with FG? I don't mind spending time uploading stuff, but I wouldn't really want to have to code a whole a bunch in order to get it to be fun.

or as another example, would it be possible to upload a map from something like Keep on the Borderlands and have players able to "explore" it with fog of war without too much coding?

I feel like I want to get FG but im worried that roll20 might do better what I need in terms of having players be able to actively map, ideally I would describe everything and only map out encounters for the players.

Thanks
Ray

[Maasq]

Hiya!

Welcome to the community first of all :)

It requires no coding to upload a map and reveal it however you wish using fog of war. I'm not sure about active player mapping - other people who play more than I do will be along to answer that.
Good luck whatever you choose eventually!

Maasq

[lerugray]

Hiya!

Welcome to the community first of all :)

It requires no coding to upload a map and reveal it however you wish using fog of war. I'm not sure about active player mapping - other people who play more than I do will be along to answer that.
Good luck whatever you choose eventually!

Maasq

Thank you! Knowing me, I'll end up with both lol, FG looks absolutely beautiful for CoC

[shadzar]

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is mostly porno modules from what I hear... i doubt a ruleset would ever be officially on FG.

Just remember to NOT use the 64-bit launcher that comes with FG because it has problems with the masking and unmasking of areas and crashes a lot.

make sure everyoen is using the 32-bit when they connect.

[lerugray]

lolol a lot of the material is 18+ yes, some of the other supplements are excellent though, carcosa being an amazing setting

[Andraax]

Just remember to NOT use the 64-bit launcher that comes with FG because it has problems with the masking and unmasking of areas and crashes a lot.

That's why it's marked as "experimental" and the default install runs the 32-bit executable. You have to go out of your way to even find and use it.

[dulux-oz]

Hi lerugray, and Welcome! to the Community,

Yes, you can use FG to run and old school game very easily. Loading a map and then slowly revealing it with the Fog of War (ie Masking) is something we do all the time - very easy to do. Mind you, you may want to have a "Players version" of the map so that the Secret Doors, etc, aren't revealed until necessary :)

Check out my Twitch/Youtube channels (links below) to see us playing some old school Star Frontiers (c1986 TSR).

Also, if you haven't done so already, let me encourage you to take a look at some of the great Tutorial Videos available on the Fantasy Grounds Wiki (and on YouTube). Damn's are good, as are Xorn's, and people seem to like mine as well (mine are also available from the links in my sig, below).

Start with the ones on the CoreRPG, because the CoreRPG forms the foundation of just about all the RPGs we play with Fantasy Grounds - so by learning how to use FG with the CoreRPG you'll learn about 80% of what you'll need to know to play any RPG with Fantasy Grounds. Once you've gone through the CoreRPG Videos you can then go on to Videos about your chosen RPG.

When you get familiar with the basic Fantasy Grounds product the next step is to check out some of the Extensions (Plug-Ins) for FG, such as the DOE: Sound (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?31369-DOE-Sound-Extension), DOE: Locations (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?20794-DOE-Locations-Extension), DOE: Weather (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?22142-DOE-Weather-Extension) and DOE: Organisations (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?27169-DOE-Organisations-Extension) Extensions (to name a but a few - and a Shameless™ Self Plug).

You may also want to drop into the FG College (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?40020-Join-Fantasy-Grounds-College-Learn-Fantasy-Grounds-learn-D-amp-D-and-then-play!); a great place for newcomers to get started.

And of course, as mentioned above, there's plenty of Twitch Channels where you can watch games in progress (including my own - https://www.twitch.tv/dulux_oz - another Shameless™ Self Plug).

And keep on asking questions - we're a pretty friendly lot here, and we love answering questions.

Cheers

[LordEntrails]

The only thing that you mention that might be a challenge with FG is having the players create their own maps in the VTT based off of your descriptions. FG does not have good inbuilt mapping/drawing tools for drawing maps.

My players don't have a problem with that. They either use grid paper to draw their maps, or they use a mapping program or digital graph paper program like https://print-graph-paper.com/virtual-graph-paper and then the GM can drop those into the game as needed/desired.

Of course, the way I handle this is I actually make a master map, and then mask it in FG so the players can only see what I reveal. Then they don't have to map it. I go back and forth on the value of having the players map. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't *shrugs*

[Targas]

The party sheet has a tab with a grid map, players can draw on. If not the GM, but drawn by the player, noone but the player him/herself can see their doodles, like text with ‚I was here‘. Another way could be the GM to put down lots of tokens as map tiles like those: https://www.rpgartkits.com/?product_cat=map
players could arrange themselves on a grid map. Those could be seen by everyone. I haven‘t tried something like this myself, but I like the idea.

You might face issues when placing encounter and character tokens on top of the tiles. One can avoid it by either using the layers extension: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?20231-Enhanced-Images-(layers)-for-FG-3-0-CoreRPG-(and-rulesets-based-on-CoreRPG)
...or by simply using the party sheet grid and put encounters, characters, order of movement in there, as I would do being more pragmatic.

I would take a snapshot of the map after the session, and rebuild it in a paint program to ‚tidy it up‘ as a GM, then export it as a jpeg for the next session to build on it, but that‘s just me. This would as well reduce the amount of tokens flying around in a map, but won‘t give the flexibility of everchanging dungeons. *grin*

As others said, we‘d usually create a map ourselves - or actually two - one player variant and a GM variant with some map program like this for 5 bucks: https://store.steampowered.com/app/630900/Illwinters_Floorplan_Generator/
Then we slowly share the masked image of the player map.

Your way players will depend on your verbal description to draw their version of the player map, it‘s more time consuming in game, but more fun and old school pen and paper wise I would imagine.

Maybe I‘ll try it out in one of my next sessions...

[lerugray]

Thank you guys!

Yeah I am thinking my players may just want to map by hand, take a pic with their phone and then have me drop it in for the other players. either that or if I can find some means of multiple people editing one drawing at once that would be cool to.

FG just looks / feels so much nicer than Roll20, if I am going to be playing a virtual tabletop I feel like I may as well do so in the nicest way.

EDIT: Just found this, with my double monitor this may be the perfect solution for collaborative mapping. https://awwapp.com/

[Targas]

... if I can find some means of multiple people editing one drawing at once that would be cool to. ...
If you want, you can vote to add such funtionality to FG here: https://fg2app.idea.informer.com/

[lerugray]

Just did, getting much closer to buying this, just seeing if I can maybe come up with a group first that way we can split the cost of the 4 pack.

Not sure if any of you guys know of the Carcosa supplement for LotFP, but im having fun coming up with all the ways I could set up a campaign for it, pulling images from the PDF etc.

[damned]

Its possible that there could be some discount on that on Friday... you might hold off a day or three just in case.