Change My Mind: Invest in FG, need top 5e capability but also OSR/ShadowofDemonLord

[mrrockitt]

Both work fine for me

That first video is what lured me away from Roll20!

[Gray Geist]

Thanks for the replies and welcomes everyone...wow they weren't kidding when they said this community was helpful and active huh? Impressive stuff. I'm going to try and reply to some posts that ask me direct questions and others where I may have questions of my own. I may not reply to everyone as I may have gleaned some great info but have no questions back but just know I've read and appreciate every post.

Welcome Gray Geist

5e is supported better on this platform than any other and by a good margin.
There is no specific Shadow of the Demon Lord ruleset at this time. A little birdie tells e someone is neck deep in coding one just now but until that comes to fruition its best not to count on it being available.
In the meantime Im pretty sure that MoreCore supports all the SotDL rolls.

Im not familiar with the LotFP rules... what are the primary dice mechanics?

LotFP is an OSR format game and to be quite honest, I've never played it yet, but it uses d20 as the main dice as well as a great use of d6 from what I can tell.

Welcome

I don't have SotDL or LotFP experience so I won't comment on those systems. I will say that I have played games that have no dedicated rule system and have been quite happy with using one of the 'generic' (CoreRPG, MoreCore) for those games.

Your entire response is great to hear and especially the part about the customer service and above, I've heard some sprinkles about the MoreCore set and it seems interesting.

It doesn't really matter. FG is more for those with the established systems as it's tricky to host relying on 'automation ' of rule-sets that aren't available, even something as simple as a character sheet doesn't exist for many of these games.

I like this reply a lot and I get what you're putting down. I'd hope to manage through the difficulty curve for sure but my question is regarding the "It doesn't really matter." What doesn't matter? I get the established systems piece but SotDL and OSR (Lamentations) use highly established systems so are you essentially saying that is doesn't matter because they are established and therefore I don't have much to worry about (can use MoreCore, etc)? Or established systems as in, they have to be established on FG?

Welcome Gray Geist.

We don't have an official ruleset for Shadow of the Demon Lord but we have an agreement with place with the owner of the IP to allow for it if we can get it developed. Official rulesets are noticeably more robust and easier to run a full campaign in than a community ruleset. With that said, the generic ruleset CoreRPG that is included with FG will allow you to support the basic needs and still use most of the common features of a ruleset. Damned took this one step further by creating the MoreCORE ruleset and it enhances and makes it even easier to support otherwise unsupported systems without doing any coding.



We offer a full 30-day money back guarantee on all purchases and subscriptions from our store, so you could dive right in with a 1 month sub and/or any add-ons that struck your fancy to run it through the paces. After an evening or two of playing around with it, you'll probably have a good idea if it is going to be a good fit for your needs.

Thanks ddavison! I see, so when you say "if we get it developed" who is that down to? Is that decision up to the official devs and pulled from a list of games the devs see as most profitable to develop? Just curious! I've heard that SotDL is being developed for FG but I'm not sure if there's a different between official and modders or if both sort of work in tandem where a modder could make a ruleset and then the devs of FG pick it up and run with it?

Does the MoreCORE ruleset cost extra money?

Also I'll be unable to test the two "unknowns" because I don't know how to test anything but 5e as that's all I've DM'd thus far and all I will DM in the near future (4 months or more perhaps). If I was experienced in SotDL or LotFP I'd be able to confidently say "Oh absolutely, I'll take on FG and test out OSR ruleset (LotFP) and SotDL on the MoreCORE ruleset and kick it's tires!" But currently I can't, does that kind of explain why I'm digging in more on those than 5e? I absolutely know FG kills it for 5e so I'm excited about that for sure.

I've played LotFP on FG in one or two sessions. I believe the DM used the Morecore ruleset... I recall it supporting the game just fine.

Oh really? Do you remember details on that though? Was the DM playing OSR (LotFP) style games for years and new how to finagle so perhaps it appeared as though it was supported easily or did he/she actually comment on how surprised he was that the MoreCORE set was highly effective? Just curious, either way good to hear and I'll take your word and everyone's word for it!

In my experience most of what you get on the internet in support of Roll20 contains a lot of deliberate misinformation or uninformed information about FG. A couple of videos that might be worth your time:

https://youtu.be/1gHmxi4EydE

https://youtu.be/qb-d3Zcznj4

Hopefully those work, I'm on a tablet right now with a less than ideal interface.

I've used FG for over 6 years. The rulesets I've used are listed in my signature. It is not terribly difficult to learn; just don't expect to know everything all at once. As with any powerful software program (not some browser app...) there is a learning curve - embrace it. Everything you make inmonth one you will be able to use in year 6 (I'm doing it now in fact...) so your work is never wasted.

Prep Less Play More

That's a good slogan and it's accurate.

If you want a demo of anything, let me know I'm happy to spend a couple of hours walking you through stuff.

I see, those are some very good points and your confidence (as well as others above) in FG is really inspiring to be honest. By Rulesets you've used do you precisely mean "GM'd" or played in or both? Just curious. Have you heard anything about OSR, specifically Lamentations and/or Shadows of the Demon Lord? 6 years is a darn long time to use a program and I'm glad to hear from so many fans of the program here that they've been around such a long time.

I really appreciate the demo offer, I may take you up on that. After I receive more feedback and can ruminate on this more I will contact you for sure - again, thank you!

Both work fine for me

That first video is what lured me away from Roll20!

What first video? The one about the costs of each program? I've seen that one, I agree it kind of floored me too!

[ddavison]

For Shadow of the Demon Lord, we have an agreement in place with Schwalb Entertainment to do an official ruleset with all the bells and whistles. There are a few community attempts at it in the past -- mostly through MoreCORE, I think. For an official commercial ruleset, we set a fairly high standard. Those cost money (normally the equivalent of the PDF for the game) and we expect that the user will get great value out of the system. Because we are a small team, we have to bring in developers from our community who have coding and graphics expertise. We *think* we have a resource for this now, but we hate to promise anything because there have been cases in the past where someone is well-intentioned but unable to complete the work for some reason. We don't have the bandwidth to complete it internally. We offer some assistance in the form of QA, access to raw files from the publisher and access to source code from any of our previously released rulesets. The latter is typically available to any user already. We allow new ruleset developers the ability to reuse any of our code from other rulesets. Our community devs typically get a 15% commission for building a new ruleset and maintaining it.

[Trenloe]

Welcome to the forums Gray Geist

One of the decisions you will have to make is how much automation you want, and how much automation you need, to be able to game in FG. A few people demand 80/90% automation and won't play a system unless they have that. Which is cool - it's their money, time and gaming requirements. Many people just want to play and have the main VTT options available to them - sharing of maps/images, story entries, language functionality, basic character sheet data, basic NPC data, common rolls, etc., etc.. Stuff that allows you to play, but you still need to know the rules and apply a lot of things manually - just like you would playing face-to-face around a real table.

CoreRPG and MoreCore (I'd recommend MoreCore as the dice rolls are more supported and the MoreCore tab on the character sheet gives more flexibility) allow you to do the latter - play the game with basic info, sheets and rolls available to you.

Here are some examples of what people have done with MoreCore:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...oreCore-Themes

Here's an example of what I've done for The Dark Eye in MoreCore: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...l=1#post384185

And here are examples of character sheets GMs have put together using the CoreRPG ruleset: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...aracter-Sheets

Sure, there will be little things that CoreRPG or MoreCore won't be able to do - but they should be able to do the majority of things needed to get you playing. As long as you don't expect lots of automation, you'll be able to play most games. If not, a friendly dev (usually damned) may help get the main rolls/data you need coded up for you to use.

So, back to my original question: "how much automation [do] you want, and how much automation [do] you need?" If you ask me this, I say I want a good level of automation to make things slick and easy to play. Do I need all of this to be able to play fun games with my friends and people I've met over the Internet using Fantasy Grounds? No, not at all, and I frequently play just such games and have a great time - FG still provides a lot of cool VTT features that are RPG system agnostic - add to this some PC/NPC sheets in MoreCore and you'll be good to go...

[JohnD]

The first video I linked does indeed show, that if 5e is your ruleset, FG is truly cheaper than "free". The "it's free it's free it's damn free" rallying cry really gets the people who aren't willing to do exactly what you're doing now though; put in a little time researching your product purchase ahead of time.

OSR type games are pretty well all I play now. Castles and Crusades is my #1 presently and likely for the future. It gives me almost everything I want and is an absolute value steal at the current price. Seriously... $10 for the ruleset, PHB and M&T... huge bargain.

I've DMed all the rulesets listed in my signature and created game content for them. I've played in Pathfinder, C&C and Rolemaster games as a player. FG handles Rolemaster the best I've ever seen that ruleset handled... in fact seeing that was what led to me choosing FG over that browser app you're also considering.

As a disclaimer, I have invested heavily in my FG experience; I own a lot of what is currently known as DLC even for rulesets I no longer play. The 5e bundle is at first glance pricy, but look what you get for your money and what it could cost you over at the "free" place.

One other consideration for you possibly. FG has all those rulesets on the front landing page licensed. Your alternative web based app, not so much. If supporting the people that make your favourite games is important to you, then buying a FG product sends some $ their way. That has a lot of value to me personally.

Anyways, drop me a PM if you want a quick tour. During the summer I'm generally only available late nights after 9 pm central.

[Andraax]

LotFP is an OSR format game and to be quite honest, I've never played it yet, but it uses d20 as the main dice as well as a great use of d6 from what I can tell.

I just read a review of LotFP on rpg.net which included some info about it's mechanics. Sounds very similar to Castles and Crusades - I'd bet you would be able to play it pretty well using that ruleset. If not, there are a couple other OSR rulesets, plus the generic ones previously mentioned.

[LordEntrails]

Does the MoreCORE ruleset cost extra money?

No. MoreCore is free and can be downloaded from the forums here.

As mentioned, it is developed and maintained by damned. And though he's not a SmiteWorks employee, he is one of the senior community devs and I believe he does contract/commission work for SW when his schedule allows. So, yea, it's a professional quality ruleset for free (Oh, and he is very active maintaining and adding to it).

[Gray Geist]

For Shadow of the Demon Lord, we have an agreement in place with Schwalb Entertainment to do an official ruleset with all the bells and whistles. There are a few community attempts at it in the past -- mostly through MoreCORE, I think. For an official commercial ruleset, we set a fairly high standard. Those cost money (normally the equivalent of the PDF for the game) and we expect that the user will get great value out of the system. Because we are a small team, we have to bring in developers from our community who have coding and graphics expertise. We *think* we have a resource for this now, but we hate to promise anything because there have been cases in the past where someone is well-intentioned but unable to complete the work for some reason. We don't have the bandwidth to complete it internally. We offer some assistance in the form of QA, access to raw files from the publisher and access to source code from any of our previously released rulesets. The latter is typically available to any user already. We allow new ruleset developers the ability to reuse any of our code from other rulesets. Our community devs typically get a 15% commission for building a new ruleset and maintaining it.

That is awesome, it sounds like Schwalb placed the official place of the ruleset in good hands. The fact that your team is so open about the way things work is also very enlightening. With that said I'm surprised if you don't have the bandwidth to get it done internally that anything gets done at all! I mean that in a good way, you must have some seriously hard team members and community members pouring their hearts out into the officially done rule sets. I'll keep this all in mind, thank you!

Welcome to the forums Gray Geist

One of the decisions you will have to make is how much automation you want, and how much automation you need, to be able to game in FG. A few people demand 80/90% automation and won't play a system unless they have that. Which is cool - it's their money, time and gaming requirements. Many people just want to play and have the main VTT options available to them - sharing of maps/images, story entries, language functionality, basic character sheet data, basic NPC data, common rolls, etc., etc.. Stuff that allows you to play, but you still need to know the rules and apply a lot of things manually - just like you would playing face-to-face around a real table.

Hmmm well I would obviously prefer full automation or near to you, like you said ...80/90% would be absolutely amazing because as JohnD said "Prep Less, Play More" is the slogan. With that said I am becoming more aware of what I'd be walking in with if I were to run a SotDL or LotFP on Fantasy Grounds.

But I do have a question regarding what you said about automation:

Welcome to the forums Gray Geist

Sure, there will be little things that CoreRPG or MoreCore won't be able to do - but they should be able to do the majority of things needed to get you playing. As long as you don't expect lots of automation, you'll be able to play most games. If not, a friendly dev (usually damned) may help get the main rolls/data you need coded up for you to use.

So, back to my original question: "how much automation [do] you want, and how much automation [do] you need?" If you ask me this, I say I want a good level of automation to make things slick and easy to play. Do I need all of this to be able to play fun games with my friends and people I've met over the Internet using Fantasy Grounds? No, not at all, and I frequently play just such games and have a great time - FG still provides a lot of cool VTT features that are RPG system agnostic - add to this some PC/NPC sheets in MoreCore and you'll be good to go...

Because of how open you've been about the levels of automation and how open everyone has been about MoreCORE and the strengths of OSR and SotDL content in it I am aware I won't get 80/90% automation but would you say that would be somewhere near 20%? I know we're just talking "made up" numbers here but that level of automation isn't very good right? 1 out of 5 things being automated is kind of rough. But in the end you do touch upon damned (who has already been very helpful in this conversation) being open to helping and I already feel quite confident that this community would be open to helping and even at that it kind of sounds like OSR and SotDL have working community rule sets. (Which JohnD touches upon below)

OSR type games are pretty well all I play now. Castles and Crusades is my #1 presently and likely for the future. It gives me almost everything I want and is an absolute value steal at the current price. Seriously... $10 for the ruleset, PHB and M&T... huge bargain.

That is great to hear that you play primarily OSR games via FG. So I assume you use MoreCORE for the OSR content including Castles and Crusades? And damn..$10 is a steal, I agree with that!

As a disclaimer, I have invested heavily in my FG experience; I own a lot of what is currently known as DLC even for rulesets I no longer play. The 5e bundle is at first glance pricy, but look what you get for your money and what it could cost you over at the "free" place.

What advantages does this give to you that leads you to name it as a disclaimer? Just curious, again totally new to the scene and FG.

I just read a review of LotFP on rpg.net which included some info about it's mechanics. Sounds very similar to Castles and Crusades - I'd bet you would be able to play it pretty well using that ruleset. If not, there are a couple other OSR rulesets, plus the generic ones previously mentioned.

This is great to hear Andraax, it supports what JohnD was saying too. I'm curious as to why if Castles and Crusades exists there isn't a LotFP rulset...it's up there in popularity for OSR. Let's just say it didn't exist right? And I wanted to take Castles and Crusades and sort of edit it to make it all work, is that what the community is talking about when they say someone like damned would help?

No. MoreCore is free and can be downloaded from the forums here.

As mentioned, it is developed and maintained by damned. And though he's not a SmiteWorks employee, he is one of the senior community devs and I believe he does contract/commission work for SW when his schedule allows. So, yea, it's a professional quality ruleset for free (Oh, and he is very active maintaining and adding to it).

That is awesome to hear. Thank you! I am super excited about trying this system out! I primarily play 5e now so all of these questions are "for the future" and I really appreciate you all being so patient, open and informational!

[LordEntrails]

That is great to hear that you play primarily OSR games via FG. So I assume you use MoreCORE for the OSR content including Castles and Crusades? And damn..$10 is a steal, I agree with that!

C&C has it's own ruleset. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store....php?id=DGA045

This is great to hear Andraax, it supports what JohnD was saying too. I'm curious as to why if Castles and Crusades exists there isn't a LotFP rulset...it's up there in popularity for OSR. Let's just say it didn't exist right? And I wanted to take Castles and Crusades and sort of edit it to make it all work, is that what the community is talking about when they say someone like damned would help?

Some games get rulesets and other don't because of the interest or love for the game of various community developers. Many of the rulesets, even the official ones, are done by community devs who have a love for that system, not for financial gains. So the systems that have someone willing to out in the time get systems

Because C&C is a commercial ruleset, I think you could use it as a base and layer your ruleset over the top of it, but you would still have to require your ruleset (if you distributed it) to require the C&C ruleset. I believe this is how one of the devs did their AD&D/OD&D ruleset. Their ruleset is free, but it requires the C&C ruleset to be purchased by the GM.

[Trenloe]

Because of how open you've been about the levels of automation and how open everyone has been about MoreCORE and the strengths of OSR and SotDL content in it I am aware I won't get 80/90% automation but would you say that would be somewhere near 20%? I know we're just talking "made up" numbers here but that level of automation isn't very good right? 1 out of 5 things being automated is kind of rough. But in the end you do touch upon damned (who has already been very helpful in this conversation) being open to helping and I already feel quite confident that this community would be open to helping and even at that it kind of sounds like OSR and SotDL have working community rule sets. (Which JohnD touches upon below)

The numbers game is interesting. 20% automation (i.e. covering 20% of the rules) can cover 80% of the mechanics used within an average gaming session. This can be achieved usually pretty easily - get the main rolls covered, damage and health tracking and you've got the basics to let you play and cover off a lot of the events that require automation within a gaming session. Beyond that it can be a case of diminishing returns - working to increase automation from 20% to 30% might result in an increase of in-game time impact of 80% to 82% - just numbers used for example.

Just having the base rolls setup leads to a good gaming experience. The GM says "make a XYZ roll" and the player has that setup on their MoreCore character sheet - they apply whatever modifiers are needed (MoreCore has SotDL boon/bane dice implemented) and then click the roll button. FG rolls the dice and displays the result. Having the main rolls setup on the character sheet will cover the vast majority of actions a player will roll for in the game. You can then setup common modifiers in the Modifier window, or apply them manually through the Modifier Stack - or just roll and tell the GM what the result is based of all the modifiers that will be applied - just like you would at a gaming table.

That is great to hear that you play primarily OSR games via FG. So I assume you use MoreCORE for the OSR content including Castles and Crusades? And damn..$10 is a steal, I agree with that!

Castles and Crusades is it's own ruleset - product info here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store....php?id=DGA045

Plus it has lots of converted official content too: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store...search=&sort=1

This is great to hear Andraax, it supports what JohnD was saying too. I'm curious as to why if Castles and Crusades exists there isn't a LotFP rulset...it's up there in popularity for OSR.

Primary reason - there isn't an official agreement between LotFP and SmiteWorks. Without an official agreement you're left with community (not for sale, OGL/Cc only) products which usually are done to allow the game to be played with low levels of automation and you usually find that the community developer moves on when they stop playing or have other projects that interest them more. Official products have more impetus to get them fully developed and maintained. Although, it must be made clear, niche rulesets like this will never make you any money - if you get more than a couple of $$ an hour return you'll be very lucky.