Drawing on Maps: Is It Bad, Or Am I Bad? (And Other Questions)
So I ran my first session with Fantasy Grounds yesterday, and overall it was positive. I had to fight with the interface a bit - not realizing you can click the arrow in the corner of maps to throw them to the background lost me a lot of time in the first encounter I ran, but then I figured that out and things went fairly smoothly.
My biggest frustration, however, was with how limited the "draw on map" tools appear to be. Specifically, I was running an encounter that involves a fire spreading during the encounter. Since there doesn't seem to be an easy way to duplicate a token, I resorted to drawing on the map to show which squares were on fire. However, I couldn't figure out how to draw anything except thin black lines with the drawing tool. Even more frustratingly, it seemed like the eraser tool only erases in thin lines, which makes it very hard to cleanly erase anything without just deleting the entire drawing layer. Maybe I'm biased, coming from Maptool's fairly full-featured set of drawing tools, but the limitations combined with the drawing tool feeling a bit slow and laggy overall made the encounter a lot more annoying to run than I expected.
I had a similar issue with vision masking when we got to the dungeon exploration part of the adventure - the dungeon has a lot of diagonal lines in it, which made the masking tool only unmasking in squares hugely inconvenient. Is there any way to draw freeform shapes with the unmasking tool?
A couple other small issues that came up during the session as well:
-My players like to roll their own dice, including damage. I couldn't figure out how to apply a set amount of damage to a monster without rolling, other than just manually calculating the monster's new damage value and typing it in.
-Initiative seems to come up a bit weird when I try to use the combat tracker to roll initiative. At one point I had a player with a +7 Perception end up with an initiative of 2. In another case, a hazard that the book says has a +5 initiative modifier somehow ended up with a -4 initiative when I added the encounter to the combat tracker.
-If I add creatures to an encounter, how do I preset their locations? It's very handy that the prebuilt encounters have locations defined, but I have a large party and often have to add extra creatures.
-How do you include multiple attack penalty in a creature's rolls?
-Is there a way to bring up a player's character sheet from the combat tracker? Double clicking on their picture doesn't work, although on the battle map it does.
-Is there a way to share with my players a larger version of a token's image, so that I can quickly show them what a monster looks like?
-A couple of my players are on laptops and don't have mice. When a map is in full screen mode, is there a way other than middle click+drag to move your view around the map?
Despite these gripes, I have to say I came away from the session feeling very positive about Fantasy Grounds. Being able to quickly reference rules elements without having to pick up any books was fantastic, and having all of the maps and encounters pre-built for me saved a huge amount of time compared to using Maptool (although the issues I had with masking did make exploring the dungeon a little slower as players had to wait for me to carefully unmask diagonal hallways).
