New to FG/DnD - Some Quick Questions

[Rison]

Howdy all

New to FG, looking to purchase. Played RPG's in the 80's and early 90's (Twilight 2000, Hero's Unlimited, Star Wars, ect.) and my kids have expressed interest in playing. Played the starter kit of DnD 5ED and had a lot of fun with them. Found this software and have been reading up on it and it looks like a great way to visualize what we are doing. Outside of my experience playing other RPG's 30 years ago, none of us have experience with DnD or RPG's.

I play Advanced Squad Leader using VASSAL and so I am very familiar with the function and theory of the FG software - its here to aid you, not run the game for you. VASSAL has been great for ASL (ie. allowing us all to play even though we are separated by hundreds of miles), and looking to do the same for DnD with my kids.

Heres the particulars of what we would be doing:

-Everyone who is playing would be face to face here at our house
-Our play will be limited to the core DnD 5ED experience
-My thought is to HDMI our laptop to our TV so we would have just one screen that everyone could look at
-Obviously we would not have the same level of 'fog of war' as a true DM/Player expereince, but this would allow us to keep track of everything
-Similar to above, right now I want to focus more on the core gameplay experience at the expense of some of the DM/Player experiences since we are all learning together
-We would purchase everything through Steam

Now my questions:
1. What do I need to purchase to do the above? From my reading, looks like we could do all of that with the $40 of FG on Steam.
2. Would we be able to keep multiple characters in the system for each of my kids with a single seat of the $40 version on Steam? In other words, with what we are looking to do, will having only one seat limit us in anyway?
3. What would be the benefit of purchasing the DnD Players Handbook expansion? Just that all the characters, and their abilities, are preloaded into the system? Seems like a big deal though that will save significant time on our end. We have a hard copy of this book already. In other words, how would it function/look without this expansion, ie. with just the base game?
4. What would be the benefit of purchasing the DnD Monster Handbook expansion? Just that all of the monsters, and their stats, are preloaded into the system? Seems like a big deal though that will save significant time on our end. We have a hard copy of this book already. In other words, how would it function/look without this expansion, ie. with just the base?
5. What would be the benefit of purchasing the DnD Dungeon Master expansion? This is the one where I am not sure what we really get that would be of a lot of value for our situation. We have a hard copy of this book already.

Thanks in advance. Any other advice on how to get going would be appreciated!

Chad

[LordEntrails]

Welcome I think you'll find not only FG is a great piece of software, but the community here is a great group of helpful people.

1. The one-time standard license. Roughly $40, though is is still on sale atm?
2. Yep. As many characters as you want. You can actually run two instances with the one license, a DM version, and a second from the same computer using the IP of "localhost" That way you can have one on your computer screen and the second on the TV via HDMI and use fog of war if you want. You will still have to "operate" everything, but you can use manual rolls if you want to use dice on the table.
3. Drag and drop. The PHB et al allow you to drag and drop the classes to level up, and drag the races in to create characters. Now, if you already have the printed books, you don't need to buy them in FG, but you might still want to. If you don't have them, they PHB also has a "Reference Manual" which is a FG eBook format you can read a page at a time.
4. Yep, drag and drop. Just create an empty "Encounter" drag in the NPCs and set the quantity. You can pre-place the tokens on the map and then when it's time to use it, just click the add to CT button and they get added to the CT and the map. You can set an option to use default, random, max hit points on them. Run them with individual initiatives or by group etc.
5. All the magic items, random tables and the item forge.

For 3, 4, & 5, read this post for more info;
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...eed-to-play-5e

[dulux-oz]

Hi Rison, and Welcome! to the Community,

Not a direct answer to your questions (Lord E has already cover those), but some general, extra info you might find worthwhile.

If you (and your kids, etc) haven't done so already, let me encourage you to take a look at some of the great Tutorial Videos available on the Fantasy Grounds Wiki (and on YouTube). Damn's are good, as are Xorn's, and people seem to like mine as well (mine are also available from the links in my sig, below).

Start with the ones on the CoreRPG, because the CoreRPG forms the foundation of just about all the RPGs we play with Fantasy Grounds - so by learning how to use FG with the CoreRPG you'll learn about 80% of what you'll need to know to play any RPG with Fantasy Grounds. Once you've gone through the CoreRPG Videos you can then go on to Videos about your chosen RPG.

When you get familiar with the basic Fantasy Grounds product the next step is to check out some of the Extensions (Plug-Ins) for FG, such as the DOE: Sound, DOE: Locations, DOE: Weather and DOE: Organisations Extensions (to name a but a few - and a Shameless™ Self Plug).

You may also want to drop into the FG College; a great place for newcomers to get started.

And of course, there's plenty of Twitch Channels where you can watch games in progress (including my own - https://www.twitch.tv/dulux_oz - another Shameless™ Self Plug).

And keep on asking questions - we're a pretty friendly lot here, and we love answering questions.

Cheers

[Rison]

Perfect. Thanks for both responses.

Looks like we are on the right track then.

Any other thoughts/answers/suggestions would be welcome, but this does give me what we need to get started.

Thanks again

Chad

[damned]

You can definitely still have all the fog-of-war stuff if you load a second instance on the GM machine and put that on the big screen

[Trenloe]

Have a look at the D&D - Fifth Edition videos here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Videos

In particular the first 2. These will give you an idea of the drag/drop functionality (creating a PC) or manually entering data (the NPC video).

[esmdev]

I also found these items particularly helpful to avoid on the fly coding of random items.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/231...MS?src=cab_col

And these for class/racial effects...

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/226...Coding-Package

These two packages really speed up development time and also make it easier on my players too.