Why should I get Fantasy Grounds?

[jambo81]

Hi, I feel like I’m continually looking for the perfect VTT and Fantasy Grounds is the main one I’ve not tried.

I’ve used the free version of Roll20 along with the Beyond20 extension. I’ve tried Above VTT, Shard VTT and am currently DMing a game in Foundry. I find Foundry a bit overwhelming with the amount of modules I need. I should probably have said I have quite a bit of content in dndbeyond and sub to a few map patrons. Cash isn’t a huge problem - at a stage in life with a decent salary and some spare cash for hobbies.

I like running homebrew sandbox type campaigns and I have a longing to try pathfinder as well.

So is Fantasy Grounds what I’m missing in life? What makes its so good and why? Thanks to anyone who takes the time to respond 😊

[Zacchaeus]

A little over eight years ago I stumbled on Fantasy Grounds and what sold me was a now very old video by a young Doug Davison who was showing off the program. He put a fire ball casting wizard on the combat tracker with a bunch of enemies and with just two clicks rolled the saving throws for all of the enemies and then applied the damage correctly halving it for those that made their saves.

It was, for me, a way to resurrect my gaming group which had for more than a decade not played due to us mainly being on different continents.

I had not until that point even heard of a VTT and even now I have never looked at any other one, so I can’t give you a comparison review. It’s fair to say that each will do some things better than others and each will have their flaws.

Fantasy Grounds I think still has the most licensed content than any other VTT, and supports a lot of rulesets officially and there are many community developed ones as well. The support and community here is also second to none.

I think though your best bet is to try it out for yourself. Take out a subscription for the ultimate license and play around. Watch a few videos (I’ll link some below). It you don’t like it, or it’s not for you cancel just before your month is up and contact support to get your $10 back since Smiteworks offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you will lose nothing.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?55797-How-do-I-in-Unity

[HywelPhillips]

I wrote a comprehensive comparison a while back:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?70355-18-months-on-FG-vs-Roll20-vs-Foundry

Although all three have seen considerable development since then, my main conclusions remain the same and I still run everything on FGU.

Hope that's of some help.

Cheets, Hywel

[LordEntrails]

So when I chose back in 2015 I had a few criteria and picked FG out of the ones that were competitive at that point in time. I did a pretty detailed analysis with a spreadsheet and everything :) I've been very happy with my decision, and though the features, capabilities and my own needs have changed since then, here's why I stay:
- SmiteWorks is a solid customer focused company with a proven track record of being customer focused and continually improving their product.
- The community here is awesome. Friendly, helpful, willing to discuss and disagree. I think in the time I've been here I've only engaged with 3 or 4 users who were not acting in good faith or were so toxic that they were a detriment to the community.

FG probably won't be the first VTT to have some new feature or capability. They also probably won't have the easiest or intuitive interface. But they have a lot more solid backend GM capabilities and features that make the game run smooth and flawless. They have a very powerful and well thought out program.

I also am certain that the content I purchase and create with FG today I will be able to use in 10 or 20 years. This is a hobby I've been in for 45 years, and its one I will be in as long as I'm alive. I'm not keen on re-creating things I've created in the past. FG has the longevity and the business acumen to be a viable VTT for the foreseeable future, and my investment in it is solid.

[Temmpest]

I have been using Fantasy Grounds now for at least 6 years. There's a bit of a learning curve at the start, but once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you ever DMed without it. They're always making improvements, weekly updates, and their customer service is unmatched. You won't regret switching to Unity.

[Nyarly Dude]

Advantages/disadvantages will vary a bit with the system, and therefore the ruleset.

w/ D&D 5E at least, off the top of my head:

* Licensed conversions of... a lot, and not just WOTC books but e.g. Kobold Press. So, if you're willing to trade money to save effort re: assets, stat blocks, story text, etc -- there's the opportunity. For 5E, the alternatives that I'm aware of in terms are DDB (which is not a full VTT, and does not offer content published by others) and Roll 20. For things like character options, having them makes it easier to create characters in FGU and to drag/drop (e.g. no need to manually enter everything for spells or subclasses that aren't part of the SRD or Basic Rules). If you happen to like monsters from Kobold Press's "Tome of Beasts" series, you can buy adaptions of them and save yourself the time of manually creating NPC statblocks etc.

Line of sight and dynamic lighting can baked into maps (and often is, for e.g. official WOTC adventures). This again saves effort. Unlike, say, Roll 20, dynamic lighting isn't locked behind an upsell subscription.

* Good support for automating things. A lot comes ready out of the box; e.g. automatically factoring in various effects when relevant, automatically rolling concentration saves. With spellcasters, one can switch between 'standard' view showing everything, 'preparation' view allowing one to select up to however many options are appropriate, 'combat' view which will automatically hide options as they become unavailable due to having used up all their uses etc. Spell slots, powers can be configured to be recovered on short rests, long rests, etc. The combat tracker is quite good, allowing the DM to track individual initiative, effects, targeting, available attacks, links to PC/NPC stat sheets, etc.

* The 5E FGU community has written a lot of modules and extensions to add more; some paid, some free. For instance, FGU out of the box doesn't let you associate an effect with an item that automatically gets applied and removed when the player equips or unequips it; or to associate an item with charges with a recharge policy (e.g. +1d6/long rest) and an "odds that it blows up if the last charge is used", but e.g. "Advanced Effects" adds this. If you want an extension to help you run Paladin auras, that exists. If you want an extension to let you set up a Druid's character sheet with links to beast forms so that he can select one and push a button to wildshape to it with the physical stats changed, proficiencies combined, hp changed, token swapped, etc and automatically reverts to original form with proper carryover of excess HP damage when brought to 0, *that* exists. Halflings rerolling 1s on ability checks, that's been automated etc. Want to be able to attach a link to a custom-renamed Riding Horse stat sheet to a player's character sheet giving him control over the horse NPC as a mount, go ahead; there's an extension for that. If a player has multiple possible summons that need personalized stats (e.g. based on the character's proficiency bonus etc), yeah, that's doable, so that the player will be able to modify those stat sheets and control the summoned NPC in combat.

The upshot is that, with some upfront work and cost, you can set up things so that a lot of actually *playing the game* goes smoother. Character sheets exist within the campaign, which live on the host's computer; so, e.g. if I'm running a 5E campaign and some player wants to run a druid and has just leveled up to level 2 at the end of a session we can discuss offline about his subclass and wildshape options and I can rig his sheet with appropriate wildshape stuff so that the player only needs to worry about finding the button, etc.

The amount of available content and automation support will vary based on the ruleset. For instance, the "Call of Cthulhu" 7E ruleset doesn't support that degree of automation, or nearly close -- but it's not really important for that system, really; like, probably the big 'missing' thing in that regard is that Keepers need to just let players roll damage and in certain cases the Keeper will need to do something besides apply that amount as-is, like if the investigators are trying to shotgun a Shoggoth. But for that system, it's more important to be able to run skill checks properly (e.g. reporting degrees of success/failure, factoring in bonus/penalty dice) and also tracking sanity (IIRC, it does the checking required for indefinite insanity) and to be able to share appropriate handouts (portraits, articles, drawings, w/e) and for investigators to be able to keep and share notes; they're not regularly casting spells with save-each-turn ongoing effects, etc. If I'm running a CoC scenario set in a city where the players might for some reason provoke police at some point, I can set up a base NPC stat sheet that actually randomizes characteristics via specified die roll formulas just so that they're not completely identical, and also have ready an extension to provide randomized names. Likewise, Chaosium's published a fair bit of content that doesn't have any official FGU versions yet (same for Roll 20, for what that's worth, and what's absent differs between them).


FGU requiring each player to have a (free) account and the FGU client (potentially free tier, if the host has the ultimate license) may be an obstacle. If your group regularly switches DMs, something that may be a problem is that FGU does not allow hosts to 'lend' licensed content to a player or to grant them control of the session as if they were DM. e.g. if two players regularly run D&D 5E campaigns on alternating weeks, they cannot share one pool of licensed content, and each would need an ultimate-tier license to FGU itself if they wanted to host players using the 'free' tier license ('standard'-tier hosts can host 'standard'-tier players). Corollary -- it's not *web* hosted, and players cannot access the campaign (to review notes, etc) unless the host is still hosting at the moment. Nor can they create a character using a web page and from there import it to the campaign, although there's nothing saying that a web-based tool cannot be written that exports the character sheet in FGU's specific format AFAIK (at least, it's probably documented somewhere).

[SilentRuin]

Because no other VTT can allow me to be as lazy a DM as this one can.

Con:

High learning curve.

Pro:

Once you know your stuff it is super flexible to change to what your table needs based on extensions and ability to change stuff.

Summary:

Lazy DM enabled.

[Springroll]

I have tried and used most of the major VTT's, Shard (Only 5e), Foundry, Roll20, Alchemy, Above VTT, Owlbear and Fantasy Grounds.
And I keep coming back to Fantasy Grounds :D

All mentioned VTT's does things a little bit differently, of them I enjoy Foundry the least as I find it to be fiddly and more close to a CRPG with lots of moving parts, but there are many who find Foundry to be the beezneez.

The question is really how do you want to play? Automation? Theatre of the mind? Trying to mimic that table-top feel? Lots of cool effects?

The VTT which will allow you to get the above most of the time is Fantasy Grounds, but the main reason to choose FG is for its customer service and community.
FG is actively developed and cool features are released continuously, the last release giving us animated maps and tokens.

Roll20 on the other end of the spectrum does not have all the automation and cool effects but is easy to set up, find players for and is arguably the closest VTT to a group sitting around the table playing TTRPG, but with that said, after you try FG you will have a hard time going back to any other VTT :p

[VenimeuxHaine]

I really like the automation that Fantasy Grounds allows me to set up. I get a kick out of setting things up and having players encounter them.

The biggest thing that disappoints me is the players having to install Fantasy Grounds on their computers. None of them are computer savvy and they always have issues with running the program due to low-specced computer systems. That's the single thing that pushes us to use Foundry VTT.