New to Fantasy Ground... with tons of physical Rulebook on my back

[Luca Bimbocci]

Hello everyone!
As the title said, I'm completely new to Fantasy Ground because I've learnt of its existence just a week ago. I'm a player and a master for 3.5 and 5e and always played online, using Roll20 and physical manuals. At the beginning of this year I've also found D&D beyond, beginning to purchase some manuals there because I thought that having somewhere where I can do some fast search for rules would have been great.

In Fantasy Ground (I'm a demo user, for now) I've looked in the 5E sample campaign, trying to create new character etc, and I noticed that you can't do much with only the basic rules that the platform concede to those who doesn't buy the manuals.

I'm in a pinch: Fantasy Ground looks really cool, but I don't think that I can buy another time the manuals... is there anything I can do?

[Valyar]

If you don't want to invest in converted content (which has much more than the text, it comes with automation, effects and etc.) the only thing left is for you to manually enter what you need for your game.

I share your pain to some extent, nobody wants to double or tripple pay, but sometimes it is not really the same content. FG gives much more than that, it comes with the automation, prepared maps with LoS and other things for more number-crunching rulesets. And in contrast to other VTT, the price are reasonable. With PF you have discounts, but Wizards/Hasbro are not that.

[Zacchaeus]

Welcome to FG

You can add all the information yourself manually; but that'll take a lot of time and effort. Since FG is a separate platform if you want the books you'll need to buy them in FG format. I think there's more scope with 3.5 than for 5e; since Pathfinder is basically 3.5 if you have the PDFs for books from Paizo you can get a discount on the books from Smiteworks.