Arrix
April 21st, 2021, 03:07
Hello everyone,
I'm currently in the process of prepping my first FGU game session comming from Roll20 playing the Exalted 3rd Edition system.
With this thread I intend to give a little bit of feedback to the devs (and maybe extension/module authors) of this wonderful software. There are mostly good things, but also a few bad things. I do not intend to give an objective critic but the subjective user experience from someone transitioning to FG. I'm comming from the perspective of someone that has used Roll20 for all his games (DnD, Exalted 1-3rd Edition, Demons, Vampire, Scion) for the last 7 years.
Since the pandemic hit Roll20 got unbearable to use so we are looking for alternatives and I found Fantasy Grounds Unity to be the most promising I found so far. I also took a short look at VTT but since we've been burned by the whole web interface and using a middleman server thing I bought the FGU license. It's also a lot more attractive on the financial site of things. The choice between paying monthly or a one time purchase is great.
Well local servers were one thing, the other one was MoreCore. Since we are mainly playing Exalted (a Storyteller system like Vampire) MoreCore was a godsent with all the functionality it brings to the table and to be honest it was one of the main reasons I decided to go with FGU. So thank you very much @damned.
Now onto the main part.
I have finished my prep work for our first FGU session. This includes a lot of work for the character sheets and importing stuff from the Exalted 3rd Edition books. Our most important requirement is having a working character sheet. Exalted has a lot of things and numbers going (9 attributes, 26+ Abilities, most players have a list of ~15-30 Intimacies for the social system, 4 static defense values, 7+ Health with 5 different wound states, 2 kinds of XP, 3 kinds of meta crafting ressources and a few other things). The real "meat" of the character sheet doesn't lie with the numbers though. It's the Charms. They are like DnD spells and every character starts with 15 of those. Currently my players are at around 40 Charms each. Each splat has different Charms but they all count around ~700 Charms to chose from each.
So having a way to put those into the sheet in a somewhat neat way is extremly important. The base character sheet from FG is able to deliver on that. We set up the Charms as Abilities and simply link them from the Abilities tab. It did however extremly poor for displaying all the numbers. MoreCore was the solution and an extremely good one at that.
The only somewhat sad part is that the Abilities tab gets crowded very fast. Please don't misunderstand, it is still superior to the sheet on Roll20.
That was the first and most important hurdle to climb. After I realized that MoreCore was all that it took to give us more quality of life that Roll20 ever did, I decided to switch. As I was experimenting on how to do Charms in FG I learned how the database worked. And it's freaking awesome. MoreCore also played a role in that with the WorldBuilder feature and today I discovered the Author extension.
I did struggle and still do struggle on how to organize stuff, though. The other thing - also the reason why I love Author - is that the entries in the database have a lot of "baggage" so that we are able to find the stuff we need quickly using the search function. There is a search function. It's awesome. It's freaking awesome. Currently under the abillties database we have around ~16 pages of charms.
Having to import all of these was... well work that needed to be done. Now we only need to drag and drop to build our characters. Which is something we Exalted player weren't really able to do since the second edition.
With that being said... Because there is so much stuff everything gets crowded real fast. But while I don't see how I can manage everything like I want I'm sure there is a more efficient way to display and order stuff that I haven't discovered yet because of my very small experience working with FG. Time will tell.
With that being said my next endeavour was the re-creation of a combat encounter I already prepped on Roll20. So I snatched my map loaded it up, put it into FG and got completely confused. Mainly on how to set up the combat and was tired from copy and pasting hundreds of charms... Well I got sidetracked and played around with maps instead.
I saw what Pins could do and fell in love with them. I don't know why anymore but I had some trouble to set them up (sorry I was really tired) but after I found the trick which I don't remember anymore I recreated our map from Roll20 and made it pretty. This also where the World Builder feature from MoreCore flexed it's muscles. Creating/linking and sharing/hiding stuff from the "world map" gives a feeling of depth we didn't have before in this way.
So after that and a break I went back to the combat. Watched a video how the encounter menu and the combat tracker work and sighed. Exalted has dynamic initiative. Since the combat tracker sorts automatically there would be a lot of situations where actors that have already acted drop below the active NPC/PC.
Then the next problem are the NPC sheets. They are bad for Exalted NPCs. A lot of numbers don't really fit in there. It is easier for me to completely ignore the first page and simply copy/paste the NPC Sheet into the notes tab.
MoreCore came to the resuce once again. The added combat rolls to combat tracker feature is nice, the additional space is also nice, but I still have wrong names in places and I alraedy know that this will lead to confusion till I learn the XML/Lua necessary to change it myself. That is gonna happen just not anytime soon. The more important feature was the addition the combat tracker for "already acted this turn" checkboxes. Ex3 combat can get really unwieldy so having less things to remember or note down somewhere else the better.
Putting the encounter on the actual map was a lot of trial and error. It was also then that I realized that for some reason images can't be tokens if you aren't a player character. Since we always used character pictures as tokens I was a bit surprised as to why I needed to upload the same picture in two different places to use it as a image record as well as a token.
Then I had the problem that the tokens were way too small. After some time of unruly clicking I saw that I need a grid. Okay makes sense and my plant giants stopped playing dwarves.
I did not bother with lightning/los/effects yet. The players can literally melt cities to the ground within a few hours in game time. They can see for miles within total darkness and use their hearing as a magical sonar that can penetrate stone walls to recreate the scenery on the other side. Nothing is hidden, nothing can't be changed, withing a battle actors can traverse quite literally kilometeres within a few rounds and as such putting a lot of work into making good looking and interesting maps is a lot less attractive than in DnD. There are exceptions so when I get to them I will try out the options FGU has.
The UI... Well I honestly don't know what to say about it. Sidebars are weird. I have yet to decide which sidebars my players should see and which they shouldn't. It is kinda hard to make out what should go where and why. The software itself doesn't really help with organizing. Well organizing in the sense that it doesn't show you what is best practice or why you should do certain things you want to do in certain ways. Story vs. Notes vs. Quests as an example. Since we need MoreCore it's WorldBuilder and Investigator functionality is added on top so it gets even wilder. Oh and a hint that categories that are not filled with an item will be deleted when closing the campaign would have been quite helpful. I think I lost around 60 or so categories I wanted to fill at some point because of that.
My players have already tested a bit and started building their characters and the consens was "a bit worse than Roll20 and a bit clunky but managable". With themes "a lot prettier" got added to the list. ;)
Now... Community. It has nothing to do with the software but still worth mentioning since you need to interact when looking up stuff. It was nothing but helpful and amazing. The forum seems to be an incredible nice place and the developer (or community manager?) activity is through the roof.
Currently my greatest fear is that the technic gremlins of our FG copies decide to go on a strike demanding more cookies. We have two players that have constant problems with their machines (and sometimes internet) but it was enough for roll20. Well if we ignore that the side sometimes somehow makes us wait for a few minutes (!) to show anyone the results of the role. The only thing that can make it worse are disconnects/crashes/incredible lags/losing data. I doubt that anything so drastic will happen, but if something can go wrong it probably will somehow.
Soo all in all FG seems to have incredible potential to make our games much better. There a few things I need to get in order and get used to. I need to develop a new workflow and if everything plays well I absolutely need to figure out how XML and Lua to change the NPC sheet.
I'll also update this post after our session tomorrow, hopefully with without any complains about technical difficulties.
Well then this concludes my rambling. Thank you for reading and thank you Smite Works for developing FG. Showing my players what new toys we can use with FG got us all excited for the switch and our first FG session. That alone speaks volumes about your work. Normally people dislike change. My players and I are no exception.
I'm currently in the process of prepping my first FGU game session comming from Roll20 playing the Exalted 3rd Edition system.
With this thread I intend to give a little bit of feedback to the devs (and maybe extension/module authors) of this wonderful software. There are mostly good things, but also a few bad things. I do not intend to give an objective critic but the subjective user experience from someone transitioning to FG. I'm comming from the perspective of someone that has used Roll20 for all his games (DnD, Exalted 1-3rd Edition, Demons, Vampire, Scion) for the last 7 years.
Since the pandemic hit Roll20 got unbearable to use so we are looking for alternatives and I found Fantasy Grounds Unity to be the most promising I found so far. I also took a short look at VTT but since we've been burned by the whole web interface and using a middleman server thing I bought the FGU license. It's also a lot more attractive on the financial site of things. The choice between paying monthly or a one time purchase is great.
Well local servers were one thing, the other one was MoreCore. Since we are mainly playing Exalted (a Storyteller system like Vampire) MoreCore was a godsent with all the functionality it brings to the table and to be honest it was one of the main reasons I decided to go with FGU. So thank you very much @damned.
Now onto the main part.
I have finished my prep work for our first FGU session. This includes a lot of work for the character sheets and importing stuff from the Exalted 3rd Edition books. Our most important requirement is having a working character sheet. Exalted has a lot of things and numbers going (9 attributes, 26+ Abilities, most players have a list of ~15-30 Intimacies for the social system, 4 static defense values, 7+ Health with 5 different wound states, 2 kinds of XP, 3 kinds of meta crafting ressources and a few other things). The real "meat" of the character sheet doesn't lie with the numbers though. It's the Charms. They are like DnD spells and every character starts with 15 of those. Currently my players are at around 40 Charms each. Each splat has different Charms but they all count around ~700 Charms to chose from each.
So having a way to put those into the sheet in a somewhat neat way is extremly important. The base character sheet from FG is able to deliver on that. We set up the Charms as Abilities and simply link them from the Abilities tab. It did however extremly poor for displaying all the numbers. MoreCore was the solution and an extremely good one at that.
The only somewhat sad part is that the Abilities tab gets crowded very fast. Please don't misunderstand, it is still superior to the sheet on Roll20.
That was the first and most important hurdle to climb. After I realized that MoreCore was all that it took to give us more quality of life that Roll20 ever did, I decided to switch. As I was experimenting on how to do Charms in FG I learned how the database worked. And it's freaking awesome. MoreCore also played a role in that with the WorldBuilder feature and today I discovered the Author extension.
I did struggle and still do struggle on how to organize stuff, though. The other thing - also the reason why I love Author - is that the entries in the database have a lot of "baggage" so that we are able to find the stuff we need quickly using the search function. There is a search function. It's awesome. It's freaking awesome. Currently under the abillties database we have around ~16 pages of charms.
Having to import all of these was... well work that needed to be done. Now we only need to drag and drop to build our characters. Which is something we Exalted player weren't really able to do since the second edition.
With that being said... Because there is so much stuff everything gets crowded real fast. But while I don't see how I can manage everything like I want I'm sure there is a more efficient way to display and order stuff that I haven't discovered yet because of my very small experience working with FG. Time will tell.
With that being said my next endeavour was the re-creation of a combat encounter I already prepped on Roll20. So I snatched my map loaded it up, put it into FG and got completely confused. Mainly on how to set up the combat and was tired from copy and pasting hundreds of charms... Well I got sidetracked and played around with maps instead.
I saw what Pins could do and fell in love with them. I don't know why anymore but I had some trouble to set them up (sorry I was really tired) but after I found the trick which I don't remember anymore I recreated our map from Roll20 and made it pretty. This also where the World Builder feature from MoreCore flexed it's muscles. Creating/linking and sharing/hiding stuff from the "world map" gives a feeling of depth we didn't have before in this way.
So after that and a break I went back to the combat. Watched a video how the encounter menu and the combat tracker work and sighed. Exalted has dynamic initiative. Since the combat tracker sorts automatically there would be a lot of situations where actors that have already acted drop below the active NPC/PC.
Then the next problem are the NPC sheets. They are bad for Exalted NPCs. A lot of numbers don't really fit in there. It is easier for me to completely ignore the first page and simply copy/paste the NPC Sheet into the notes tab.
MoreCore came to the resuce once again. The added combat rolls to combat tracker feature is nice, the additional space is also nice, but I still have wrong names in places and I alraedy know that this will lead to confusion till I learn the XML/Lua necessary to change it myself. That is gonna happen just not anytime soon. The more important feature was the addition the combat tracker for "already acted this turn" checkboxes. Ex3 combat can get really unwieldy so having less things to remember or note down somewhere else the better.
Putting the encounter on the actual map was a lot of trial and error. It was also then that I realized that for some reason images can't be tokens if you aren't a player character. Since we always used character pictures as tokens I was a bit surprised as to why I needed to upload the same picture in two different places to use it as a image record as well as a token.
Then I had the problem that the tokens were way too small. After some time of unruly clicking I saw that I need a grid. Okay makes sense and my plant giants stopped playing dwarves.
I did not bother with lightning/los/effects yet. The players can literally melt cities to the ground within a few hours in game time. They can see for miles within total darkness and use their hearing as a magical sonar that can penetrate stone walls to recreate the scenery on the other side. Nothing is hidden, nothing can't be changed, withing a battle actors can traverse quite literally kilometeres within a few rounds and as such putting a lot of work into making good looking and interesting maps is a lot less attractive than in DnD. There are exceptions so when I get to them I will try out the options FGU has.
The UI... Well I honestly don't know what to say about it. Sidebars are weird. I have yet to decide which sidebars my players should see and which they shouldn't. It is kinda hard to make out what should go where and why. The software itself doesn't really help with organizing. Well organizing in the sense that it doesn't show you what is best practice or why you should do certain things you want to do in certain ways. Story vs. Notes vs. Quests as an example. Since we need MoreCore it's WorldBuilder and Investigator functionality is added on top so it gets even wilder. Oh and a hint that categories that are not filled with an item will be deleted when closing the campaign would have been quite helpful. I think I lost around 60 or so categories I wanted to fill at some point because of that.
My players have already tested a bit and started building their characters and the consens was "a bit worse than Roll20 and a bit clunky but managable". With themes "a lot prettier" got added to the list. ;)
Now... Community. It has nothing to do with the software but still worth mentioning since you need to interact when looking up stuff. It was nothing but helpful and amazing. The forum seems to be an incredible nice place and the developer (or community manager?) activity is through the roof.
Currently my greatest fear is that the technic gremlins of our FG copies decide to go on a strike demanding more cookies. We have two players that have constant problems with their machines (and sometimes internet) but it was enough for roll20. Well if we ignore that the side sometimes somehow makes us wait for a few minutes (!) to show anyone the results of the role. The only thing that can make it worse are disconnects/crashes/incredible lags/losing data. I doubt that anything so drastic will happen, but if something can go wrong it probably will somehow.
Soo all in all FG seems to have incredible potential to make our games much better. There a few things I need to get in order and get used to. I need to develop a new workflow and if everything plays well I absolutely need to figure out how XML and Lua to change the NPC sheet.
I'll also update this post after our session tomorrow, hopefully with without any complains about technical difficulties.
Well then this concludes my rambling. Thank you for reading and thank you Smite Works for developing FG. Showing my players what new toys we can use with FG got us all excited for the switch and our first FG session. That alone speaks volumes about your work. Normally people dislike change. My players and I are no exception.