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  1. #71
    Hi All,

    I've pushed an update for PoD tonight.

    • [Fixed] Sun & Shadow Adventure now links to local Gazelle Class Close Escort instance in the 3.02 Spacebattle.
    • [Fixed] Book 1. Broken links fixed within Chapter 11.
    • [Fixed] Book 1. Missing Lyonesse III Spacecraft Image.


    Should be updated next Tuesday as normal.

    Cheers,
    MBM
    Ruleset and much more content built for FGU.
    Come join me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/MadBeardMan to see what I'm up to!

  2. #72
    Just ran my first session with the FGU PoD material session 31 of my campaign so far
    Loved it

  3. #73
    Quote Originally Posted by Ramid View Post
    Just ran my first session with the FGU PoD material session 31 of my campaign so far
    Loved it
    Awesome, first thanks for purchasing it, I know $99 is a fair chunk of money, I hope you understand how much content you've now got. Please use as much as possible and enjoy even more.

    You find any niggles/issues then let me know and I'll sort them as soon as I can.

    Cheers,
    MBM
    Ruleset and much more content built for FGU.
    Come join me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/MadBeardMan to see what I'm up to!

  4. #74
    Thank you so far found no problems.
    As for the price i am fine with it considering the amount of material offered as well
    as the work in importing and arranging it. It made my job much easier having
    everything in Fg rather than switching between the Pdf and FG

  5. #75
    i used it in our pod campaign for the first time last week.
    worked well and was happy to not have to spend time screenshotting and cross-pasting stuff to zoom.
    nice work mbm!

  6. #76
    Quote Originally Posted by Evil Aardvark View Post
    I've picked up a copy of PoD, although I must admit I did balk a bit at the price. I've been thinking about why that is, and I realized that I know why I had that reaction.

    I know that there is a lot of work to convert, but I find it a bit painful because I'll never use the majority of the work that's been done. I have the pdfs, I'll always have the pdfs, if I want to read the adventure, I'll read those. In FG I only want the "crunch" - maps, gear, vehicles and NPCs - I, personally, have no interest in the text of the adventures.

    Now, I'm not trying to short-change anyone, I know that there's a lot of work to convert things, but I wonder if there's an opportunity here. Mongoose is releasing a strong pipeline of content, and the FGU support is falling behind. No complaint there, we know that MadBeardMan is doing a heroic job trying to keep up. Is there an opportunity to produce conversions that are "crunch" only, use the reduction in work per product to produce more, to catch up, and perhaps make more money out of it? I'd happily pay 75 or 80 percent of the cost of modules today for a version without the text of adventures and background material. It'd be worth the same to me, actually, it might even be worth more since it'd be faster to load, will clutter up FG less, and sharing with players will have less chance of accidental exposure of plot material.

    I don't know if any of this is realistic or practical, but producing twice as many products at 80% of the price would seem to be a commercial win. And nothing stops anyone from going back and filling in the textual material as a follow-on.

    Just a thought, could be nonsense.
    In many respects, I think this is a great idea. Many of us Referees already have the printed books and PDFs, so the majority of the text and images are quite trivial to move over to FG. It's because of this, that I feel I wouldn't be getting the most out of the FG POD package.

    This kind of leaves me in a quandary.

    I know a lot of hard work and effort went into the conversion and I'm pretty sure that for a referee that does not own the physical materials/pdfs, it is actually very good value for money. But if you already have those books and PDFs, I'm not so sure that the value is there, as the majority of what's in the books can be easily imported into FG on an as-needed basis. Especially in PODs case as even with the official FG module, the referee will still have to create a lot of their own materials anyway due to the open ended nature of the campaign.

    I can't help feeling that the FG versions of the adventures shouldn't just be a 1:1 conversion. Doing this limits the value of the product for referees that already own the physical books - which I suspect is most of us. Instead, I feel that the FG versions of the adventures should take advantage of the fact that they are running on a computer, so as to help ease the referee's considerable work load (especially in POD).

    For example in POD's case, I would do exactly what Evil Aadvark suggests, just have the crunchy bits in. But then I would go further and program all the tools into the module that would help the ref run this campaign. Stuff like trackers for player's relations with planets, automated rules implementations of the POD specific rules, asset trackers etc etc. This way you end up with a product that stands by itself and offers something different from the books. This then makes it a much more attractive proposition for referees that already own the books - even if the FG modules cost the same as the original books. As for refs that don't own the books and PDF's, it would encourage them to get both - which would be an easy sale as they would be buying two very different packages.

    In my mind I can justify the cost for a package that supplements the PDFs and printed materials, but I find it a lot harder to justify that cost when they are essentially the same thing being bought twice.

    Right now, I'm finding it really hard to push the button and spend the money, as the books and PDFs already have everything that I need. I admit that I'm a little biased, as I'm a programmer - see https://ancientarmies.wordpress.com/ for an example of what I can do on one of my home projects - it would be relatively simple for me to automate much of the import process, thus further diminishing the perceived value of the FG versions.

    RobP
    Last edited by RobP; September 29th, 2021 at 23:05.

  7. #77
    In many respects, I think this is a great idea. Many of us Referees already have the printed books and PDFs, so the majority of the text and images are quite trivial to move over to FG. It's because of this, that I feel I wouldn't be getting the most out of the FG POD package.
    Much like how D&D Beyond can sell bits and pieces of a sourcebook, even down to buying individual magic items or statblocks, I'd spend a lot more money if I didn't have to buy entire books that I already have when I'm just looking for certain item stats or the like.

  8. #78

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    Prices are set my Mongoose and they are really proud of their stuff. This has been brought up several times and Mongoose insists on charging hard cover prices for digital copies. Can't even get a bundle put together to at least save a little money.
    So the choice is buy it or find another game I guess. Currently this is my game of choice so I buy it.

  9. #79
    Quote Originally Posted by Grommit57 View Post
    Prices are set my Mongoose and they are really proud of their stuff. This has been brought up several times and Mongoose insists on charging hard cover prices for digital copies. Can't even get a bundle put together to at least save a little money.
    So the choice is buy it or find another game I guess. Currently this is my game of choice so I buy it.
    My quibble isn't with the pricing. I think given the effort MBM put in, the FG version of POD is actually good value for money..... provided you don't have the printed versions.

    The majority of the POD books provide background details for the campaign with 10 or 11 not too detailed scenarios that a referee would need to work on before they can be used. To use these scenarios one has to read the background material in the books, and whilst I can't speak for other people, I find it much easier to read the background information from physical books (or even the PDF's) rather than FG's rather limited means of viewing text.

    I guess the point I'm trying to make is that MBM and Mongoose are missing a trick here. They could produce the nitty-gritty only versions on FG for a lot less time and effort - or maybe even create a FG POD-Lite version based on the existing FG POD. This can be sold in parallel with the heavier POD at a much discounted price for the people that already own the books.

    Or alternatively make the FG version of POD a must buy for the book owners by adding a lot of automated book-keeping and mechanics - after all that's what computers are for!

    Paragade further up the thread mentioned D&D. It's kind of weird, in that I don't quite feel the same way about the FG D&D adventures. I think it's down to the fact that the D&D rules are much more automated and the purchased FG D&D adventures are a lot better because you get scaled maps with built in sighting lines and room descriptions and full automation. For example for the Lost Mines, I bought the FG version and it was so complete, I could start running it straight away with little to no prep - that makes the adventure worth the money. This contrasts heavily with the Traveller adventures which all need heavy legwork before they can even be used.

    I think there is a fundamental difference between how WOTC write adventures and how Mongoose write them. With a WOTC adventure you can buy it, and can pretty much use it right away after a quick read because they include absolutely everything you need to run the adventure and this translates well when converted to FG - as one can simply buy'n'play and rely on the completeness of the adventures and the superb automation of those rulesets to carry you through.

    The Traveller adventures by contrast, tend to leave out a lot of detail that the referee is expected to fill in before running the adventure.

    For example, I'm running The Last Train out of Rakken-Goll (the ship owner in my campaign is a noble who got deposed by his sister who claims he is dead and is relentlessly pursuing him, so that she can claim ownership of his estate - Sir Willard reached out to offer him temporary shelter - but that's another story ). The Last Train adventure is a typical Mongoose adventure in that it is missing many of the required maps and details needed to run the adventure. It even has missing stats for some of the main NPC characters - like the residents of West Farm, despite them being described in detail within the text. This means that as a referee, I have to do a lot of prep work to fill out those missing details.

    Alas, I have found this to be the case with all of the Mongoose Traveller Adventures that I have bought so far. None of them can be run out-of-the-book. They all need considerable work before they can be used.

    This isn't a Traveller thing though. Adventures in the earlier editions of Traveller like CT and T4, were on the whole, much more complete (there are a few exceptions though ).

    This causes a big issue for the FG versions of the Traveller adventures. Without detailed maps, keys and NPC's, the FG ones tend to be just background information centric. Even where the odd map is provided, you can guarantee the FG ones have no line of sight or even a scale (in essence they are just images and not FG maps per-se) - not MBM's fault as many of the book maps lack a scale too (the two maps in Last Train adventure are scale-less). So you are essentially buying an adventure that is for the most part, just background text. Alas, this background text is better consumed from a printed book rather than through FG's rather limited interface. In fact, a lot of this information doesn't even need to be in FG as the players will never see it anyways.

    This kind of renders the FG Traveller adventures almost pointless. Buying them won't save much prep time over the printed materials, as you will still need to manually create all the details and assets that were missing from the original adventure anyways.
    Last edited by RobP; October 1st, 2021 at 21:54.

  10. #80

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    I get your point but you're complaining in the wrong place. Mongoose never ever reads this discord forum and I honestly believe they don't care even if they did read it. You should be over on their website and hitting them up there.
    As far as pricing goes their stuff is overpriced by a lot imho. Charging hard cover book prices for a digital copy is just greed and not good business in the long run, considering how little info is actually in most the adventure modules. It's little more that a synopsis. Even PoD the majority of the info can be found elsewhere on the interwebs, completely free (and legal in most cases). All depends on how much work you want to do and how much imagination you have.

    MBM does a great job and I'd like to see him make enough to do this full time, but he can only convert the material given to him.

    I think we are mostly agreeing for slightly different reasons.
    Last edited by Grommit57; October 1st, 2021 at 23:05. Reason: bad typing

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