Vicious Mockery (5e spell)

[Doyen75]

Vicious Mockery Bard FG.JPG

I'm playing and DMing 5e Adventures League in FG.

As you can hopefully see in the picture, there are no effects for the Vicious Mockery spell. This spell comes from the bard spell list. You can force your target to make the save, you can apply damage to your target, but you cannot apply the effect. According the the PHB, the effect should be that the target must make its next attack with disadvantage, any time before the caster's next turn.

I'm still learning how to use Fantasy Grounds. What am I supposed to do, as a DM or as a player, to get this to work correctly?

[Nylanfs]

Check out the Complete series of posts on how to handle effects that aren't fully automated.

[Trenloe]

Moved to the 5e forum.

[Doyen75]

I'm sorry I wasn't clear.

Vicious mockery is a basic spell. It can potentially be used 20 or 30 times in a play session. I purchased everything available to run and play this game in Fantasy Grounds.

This basic spell does not allow me or my players to use its most basic effect.

The materials you linked are exhaustive. I spent a mere hour looking through them. I'm sure that if I had any desire to be a programmer, I would be excited. I have no such desire.

I looked at the link you provided around bards. It says, "At the time of writing virtually every spell can be dragged and dropped into the actions tab and will create a suitable effect (if one is needed)." This appears to be untrue for this basic spell. The granting of disadvantage on the affected creature's next attack is a basic feature of the bard class. It is kind of a big deal that the effect isn't granted when the targeted creature fails its save.

I spent a long time trying to find an effect that I could add by hand that would fix this spell. I looked at this google doc: "https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dctEkBftJFivXBYBQ3cQPqDyRuRr6KNcGwTf9oQ2YzU/edit" This problem isn't mentioned. And I do not see a solution to this problem.

This is one of my frustrations with Fantasy Grounds. This is why I have started, and stopped, using this program 5 times. If I want to use it for anything except the maps, I quickly find that I can't do half of the combat in the actual game. Every single time I end up with my players doing all their rolls by hand with their dice at home. And I have to use a piece of paper to keep track of everything on the board. And when I try to find out how to fix issues, I'm basically told to reprogram the game on my own.

My expectation, after spending more than $600 on FG plus the monthly fees, is that my players and I should be able to play the game entirely in the online platform. I'm not a programmer.

What I feel like I'm hearing, yet again, is that basic things don't work, and its my responsibility to try and jury rig something to force FG to do basic things for playing D&D.

[Ecks]

Here's what we set up for the bard in my campaign:



The first two lines were set up automatically via drag/drop from the spells list.
The "Viciously Mocked" effect I added to handle the disadvantage part if the target fails the save:

This will give the target disadvantage on their next attack until the effect expires after 1 round. The "viscously mocked" bit is just arbitrary flavor text to know what the effect was caused by.

[Doyen75]

Ecks, thank you so much!

I'm sorry I got frustrated.

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for answering my original question, and for providing such clear directions. I was able to fix the issue, and confirm that it worked.

I'm sincerely grateful. Thank you for helping me, as I try and help my players have a good time.

[Zacchaeus]

Not every spell or ability is coded. FG uses a parser which tries to make sense of the words used in spells and abilities etc and creates the effects from those words. However it isn't all encompassing and so in some cases manual intervention is required. That does mean learning how to use effects.

There is this series of videos which may help https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Videos-for-5E

And there is more information on the wiki https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...ced+Automation

You can also get almost instant help (depending on who's around) as well on the Discord channel https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...Discord-Server