Sell me on Fantasy Grounds vs the Competition

[Hye Roler]

I've played several sessions using Fantasy Grounds with folks over the Internet and I enjoyed that a lot. Although recently (and very fortunately), I've formed a home gaming group with some local folks and I'm running my game with it. I have all of the info I need right there at my finger tips. Story items, npc/monster stats, etc.

Plus, once it is "time to roll initiative" I can't tell you how much easier it was to have my GM Map showing all of the PCs and NPCs on it while they were moving figures on a real battlemap on the table. Making stealth rolls and tracking movement of hidden npcs was WAY easier. As a GM I was able to be much more tactical in my approach since I saw everything happen before me without giving anything away to the players. Additionally, the Combat Tracker was invaluable in keeping track of 8 players and tons of monsters. Knowing exactly when someone was bloodied, auto damage drops, etc. I even tracked PC health and conditions.

Bottom line: I've tried all of the others and there is nothing that can compare to FGII in terms of the feel and capabilities. I'm confident that future releases will just continue to impress.

[mattcolville]

I bought the ULTIMATE license, so you can stop selling me now.

So far, the learning curve is steep, and I feel the tutorials assume a little too much on the viewer's part about how Fantasy Grounds organizes its data, but I've made a lot of progress in a short time thanks to the help of people on this forum and I am looking forward to deploying this to my group.

[Whippetsnapper]

The learning curve is steep indeed. Make sure you go through the User Guide for 4e in the library area.

And I can't stress enough how much it helped me to run test combats and such before I started running my first campaign(which I'm doing right now). Get one good friend and have them help you by making a character and and trying to kill your monsters.

You'll want to use mod files, though making them is a feat in its own right. Creating your own data libraries is crazy helpful.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, the User guides for hosting and playing are invaluable. It was the first thing that I did when I joined the company, because it was all buried in forums and readme files before that. People were always asking how to do specific things, so I remade the User guides.

I also updated the reference section for ruleset creation to be more correct and complete. However, it needs more work as well. It's just a lower priority since there are so many examples in the existing rulesets out there.

Regards,
JPG