18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

[strei]

There is a 5E SRD ruleset I believe for Foundry available - outside of this there are no legal means of using the full 5E ruleset with items outside of the SRD with spells with automation. The encounters were pre-built along with maps and line of sight.

there are legal means yes. just doesn't come with foundry, u need to buy the content elsewhere.
you can buy a pack of spell effects for 5e and they will just work when you cast the things it affects.

the foundry experience is far from perfect too. but it gets better daily.

[YAKO SOMEDAKY]

I'm going to say it again and i'm going to say it again I like animated maps, I want more possibilities of Occlusors, Light and Vision, I want the ability of Animations and even audio and sound effects directly in the FGU, but more than that I want that in addition to 64 bits (which is what allows us to use more than 3 GB of memory) we have multi-threads so that we have more speed and agility, because it takes 30 seconds in a campaign with no new and no extensions and take 30 seconds to load as Host is a long time!
Not to mention that each player, it takes 1 minute to get effectively into the table and this 1 minute of waiting for the player is 1 minute waiting from the Host, and this is something that I consider urgent, speed and agility and that I believe would be something that could be solved by being multi-threaded and by being Unity and it be a platform for game development so I believe that we would have this possibility and with it more agility.
I believe that the advantage of Multi-Thread is the fact that after we make the link with the server (something I know that is part of the load time! Thanks for that Smite, goodbye door release!) by multiplying the multi-threaded things could be divided into smaller parts and loaded faster, in addition to the fact that you can continue the activities while others are entering your desk. At least that's my belief.

[LordEntrails]

MODERATOR RESPONSES BELOW

... shouldn't be a problem for any user that's able to handle computer basics. see, the thousands of users who are really not tech savvy and use foundry.

... again, it's a very simple feature to work with, but people trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver often find it an issue.

... due to very unnecessary user error. as the feature is extremely robust, proven and simple. now this leads me to really question the integrity and capacity of this user. if not the intentions of the post altogether, but let's not go into that.

... targeting is literally brainless. how someone can have issues with that is beyond me, and a challenge worthy of a genius person. really hammering home the previous point's questioning.

... if people don't use them, and then complain no automation, they can solve their issue in 10 seconds flat by just inquiring about it in the community discord or googling.

... like it's a fact thousands of people don't have the mentioned issues for some reason. nor does one find opinions like those common place in neutral places on the web. but i digress.

Not useful and the attitude is not welcome here. Implying that problems with an application are the result of the user does not help anyone actually use the software. All programs have challenges with user knowledge and ability. We have it with FG; Foundry, Rll20 and every other application has similar issues. Blaming issues on the user is not helpful and instead providing links to documentation showing how to solve the issue etc. is useful (but not appropriate for this thread. FVTT support should be conducted via FVTT support/community.)

i.e. An appropriate response in this thread would be something like "All of these issues are easily solved. Instruction on how to solve each of these can be found at www.alltheanswers.fvtt".

it's hard to help someone in a closed thread that stated they don't want to try to figure out how to make it work or solve any issue. bit hard. this person also didn't choose to word it in good taste by the way.

The thread was closed for a reason. And replying with words that are not in good taste is not acceptable. Just because someone else posts in an poor manner does not mean it is acceptable for you to do so. Instead of acting like poorest member of the community, strive to act and post like the best members.

and the struggle was made to look like it's the software's fault, when it isn't. it's offensive to the entire human race, including me and you, when people word things in some ways and try to make it look like an error or limitation of them is the fault of external things or others are the same. the "brainless" remark is not meant to be an insult. it's literally describing the feature. there's nothing to using it. select targeting tool, left click token. there's 2 ways to selected that tool. there's modules to make it easier or with more features.

Not acceptable. And until you came to the forums of a application you admit you do not use and made an account on the forum you were not involved in the issue and have no reason to be offended. Again, the thread was closed for a reason, there is no need for you or anyone else to 'right the wrongs' that may have been done in that thread.

... you are free to believe what you want, that's your problem. i'll let actions and facts speak regarding my intentions.

... i am new to the forum, if i posted in the wrong place that is my mistake. i tried to reply to the other thread and realized it was locked, to opened a new thread instead. maybe i should have done more homework before posting, but that should be an issue easy to solve. also, i would ask you stop questioning my intentions and attacking my person, and instead actually discuss the topic. i didn't have anything i could use to address the issues claimed. so i only stated my experience and facts about universal experience or the software. ...

also, i feel like this needs to be addressed. i didn't come here to defend my favourite VTT. i decided to make an account and post to clear what is FUD or misleading remarks. and to help ANYONE who wants to learn about the topic, how the 2 vtts compare.

Your actions speak quite clearly. You read a post on a forum that you do not belong to. Took time out of your day to create an account on said forums, and have been spending your time to right the wrongs you see on that forum because you see those wrongs as harming your VTT of choice (which this forum is not about). Trust me, very few communities welcome unsolicited outsiders coming in to "help them". I will repeat one last time, that thread was closed for a reason. It is not appropriate for you to come here to right the wrongs of that thread.

thank you for making such a constructive post in the thread!
...

i hope the above 2 points can be of aid to you, even if you end up never touching foundry again, just for you to know.

This type of post is what we like to see here. If you can take the direction above and continue to add value with this type of post, you are welcome to continue posting here.

also, funny question considering FVTT has not official forums. support is done in real time.

FG also has real-time support, via Discord. But FG and the FG community pre-dates the existence of Discord and other tools that make real-time support feasible and when forums were by far the preferred method of support. The forums here are still the preferred method for some users, and remain very useful to the community. Some may consider the absence of a FVTT forums as a negative for that community. We do not consider the existence of an FG forum as a negative for our community.

... the foundry experience is far from perfect too. but it gets better daily.

That's good to hear. So does the FG experience for those that are actually using FG.

[HywelPhillips]

I hesitate to post something a bit ad-hominem, but... case in point. I refer you to the section in my reviews of the platforms as the original poster of the thread regarding my experience of a certain sub-section of the Foundry community.

Cheers, Hywel

[ddavison]

Just to comment on the ease of port forwarding...

It is often easy to do in just a few minutes and there is a lot of documentation available for most routers with a quick Google search. Despite this, it was probably our #1 support issue for around a decade. It didn't lessen as technology advanced and we added more users. In fact, it got worse as some carriers actively tried to block and obscure features like port forwarding within their router configs. Many thousands of people had very little issues setting up port forwarding, many thousands more needed help, and another whole set of people saw it as an impossible roadblock. For some users, it was not possible to set up port forwarding even with help from someone who was tech savvy. The biggest group of people who were unable to use this were people who did not control their router. If you had roommates, rented an apartment with shared Internet, lived in a dorm, or wanted to run from work (shame on you), then you may be prevented from accessing or modifying your port forward settings. This was a feature that we solved with Fantasy Grounds Unity. Our cloud service now facilitates the connections and provides NAT punch-through without any need for router configuration, VPNs, or monthly subscriptions to a separate hosting service.

Many of the other comparisons come down to personal preference and experience. Competition is good for advancement, and we will continue to advance the UI, performance, and feature set of Fantasy Grounds based on what we come up with on our own and what people see and like from competitors.

[strei]

Just to comment on the ease of port forwarding...

It is often easy to do in just a few minutes and there is a lot of documentation available for most routers with a quick Google search. Despite this, it was probably our #1 support issue for around a decade. It didn't lessen as technology advanced and we added more users. In fact, it got worse as some carriers actively tried to block and obscure features like port forwarding within their router configs. Many thousands of people had very little issues setting up port forwarding, many thousands more needed help, and another whole set of people saw it as an impossible roadblock. For some users, it was not possible to set up port forwarding even with help from someone who was tech savvy. The biggest group of people who were unable to use this were people who did not control their router. If you had roommates, rented an apartment with shared Internet, lived in a dorm, or wanted to run from work (shame on you), then you may be prevented from accessing or modifying your port forward settings. This was a feature that we solved with Fantasy Grounds Unity. Our cloud service now facilitates the connections and provides NAT punch-through without any need for router configuration, VPNs, or monthly subscriptions to a separate hosting service.

Many of the other comparisons come down to personal preference and experience. Competition is good for advancement, and we will continue to advance the UI, performance, and feature set of Fantasy Grounds based on what we come up with on our own and what people see and like from competitors.

UPNP is pretty ubiquitous nowadays and with that box checked things should just work without any setup for the vast majority. but of course not all. those will need manual portforwarding. which will be easy for most of those, and a nightmare for a fraction, due to how finnicky it can be and how bad some control panels are etc
then, like you said, there's the people who cannot do it at all, and for those, it is most definitively a problem. if they are proficient enough at following a tutorial they can use a hosting service for free and get around the issue, but i wouldn't call it easy for any user, especially the less tech savvy ones. i hope this improves in the future for foundry to become more accessible and grant better user experiences to these fringe cases.

[TheoGeek]

MY old ISP implemented CGNAT which basically makes port forwarding impossible. They did that without any real notice too...ugh.

[ddavison]

We supported UPNP for many, many years. It may have helped reduce the # of support issues, but it definitely did not solve it for our community. Aside from the technical issues, there were many people that simply did not want to mess with it at all. It was hard to convince them that it is easy in most cases. We now have different outlier tech issues, but we are definitely happy that port forwarding is no longer one of them.

[MrDDT]

We supported UPNP for many, many years. It may have helped reduce the # of support issues, but it definitely did not solve it for our community. Aside from the technical issues, there were many people that simply did not want to mess with it at all. It was hard to convince them that it is easy in most cases. We now have different outlier tech issues, but we are definitely happy that port forwarding is no longer one of them.

For most of the people I know this is what really brings them (and LOS) to FGU. I had massive issues with people not wanting to deal with port forwarding at all.

[strei]

I hesitate to post something a bit ad-hominem, but... case in point. I refer you to the section in my reviews of the platforms as the original poster of the thread regarding my experience of a certain sub-section of the Foundry community.

Cheers, Hywel

attacks on the messenger not the message was most of what was posted previously, but only my replies to those get moderation attention, as expected lol

in any case, let me address your initial post then.

That direction is lots of hackers making cool extensions/modules, with a core development process that concerns itself with supporting that first and foremost. The number of system-tweak modules on their system outweighs the number of adventures to run, which I think is illustrative of those priorities. It's a code-twiddler's paradise, not least because it uses the ubiquitous Javascript.

calling random developers hackers is something taken straight out of any political propaganda or smear campaign. maybe you are trying to use the term more literally and disregard the connotations and meaning it carries in present day culture, but it sets the tone for your perspective immediately. a guise of unbiased opinion delivering an agenda.
the design philosophy of fostering a thriving mod community is indeed a fundamental part of foundry, but this does not mean the number 1 priority is not the average consumer, which it is. and there's almost 2 years for development proving that. just having great API and a habitat for modders does not need to be mutually exclusive with aiming for the average user.

unlike roll20 and FG, there is no centralized marketplace in foundry. not understanding this isn't your fault however. and navigating the web space to find the products is certainly harder and more effort, a lesser experience, than having everything in 1 marketplace. but the number of adventure or compendium type modules, let's call it content modules, far outnumbers the feature modules by a scale of 10 to 1 or, most likely, above. the average foundry user has gotten used to just expecting foundry content straight from their favourite content creators. which are people living only from making content for VTTs in general, or even some, just foundry in specific.
it is also possible to port any content sold on roll20 to foundry. this is mostly effortless, not perfect but ok.
so to reiterate, while there is definitively a fault on the foundry ecosystem to be found in this aspect, the argument about content to feature module ratio and what it illustrates is fallacious and shows your lack of understanding of matters. FOSS by nature of being open and free, can be put anywhere, like the official module list. paid content needs to be gated. which hides it from the free official module list and not all artists wanted to use the premium partner program and chose to monetize their products directly, getting a bigger cut of the profits.

also, skyrim was sold 13 times, as in, different versions, up to a decade after it came out, unlike almost every videogame, because it is a "code-twiddler's paradise" despite it being a very faulty product. other similar products have long since barely moved units. Minecraft's success is also related to this. roblox is the biggest grossing platform of the day, because how easy it made making experiences on it to anyone wanting to.

1) Take a look at that screenshot of a game in progress. Does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of Fantasy Grounds. Combat tracker, chat window with results, the system rolling and applying damage, adding conditions to foes. Thing is, that's all done by third-party extensions. The GM for that game is running a WHOLE SCREENFUL - 40+ extension to get it to do what FG does out of the box. They are stuck on a much older version of Foundry because in all the newer ones, one or other of these extensions breaks or interacts in unpredictable ways with other extensions.

They have achieved the "crumbling edifice" state of software development where no-one dares change anything because of unexpected snowballing effects making the whole system stop working. Given that the program has only been available for 12 months, that's quite an achievement. I want the automation, but not at the expense of being stuck with a very out of date system that I cant change until the campaign has finished for fear of the whole thing collapsing! It's really heavyweight on the GM in terms of maintenance, and that's even running it on The Forge which offers to do a lot of this legwork for you. If you want to extract all the potential functionality from Foundry, you'll be doing a lot of maintenance.

they are stuck because they want to. there are often alternatives to 1 module, and without mention of what this feature was that was so important that help someone back, i can't speak much to it.
i can also recount the experience of many people who live on foundry's latest version, get regular updates and don't have extensions break almost ever. they don't update to major system releases on release day however. a healthy wait of 1 week, or a month for those more conservative, is usually the sane option. this while on dnd 5e, and having all features FGU has in terms of automation.

The Forge does nothing to help GMs with maintenance except make it easy to find outdate versions of anything. the same can be a achieve if a user backup their data before doing changes that might end in disaster. some would say this is basic computer practices, but i understand a lot of users do not do it. and some might be limited in their ability of doing it.

at the end of the day, foundry gives the user all the power in their experience. this is a blessing and a curse. because users who are more limited will have a more limited experience. and users will damage their experience without necessity as well, like in any software really. so while there is a fair distance to perfection in this aspect, it is also not the hell some love to portray. most user experiences are found in the middle, not matrix heaven and not installing 1000 modules, modules that clearly should not be mixed, updating on release day of a major revision with session 1h away and then panicking when 1 module breaks entirely.

Oh and as I predicted in my review last May, their system is already littered with abandoned modules produced in a rush of enthusiasm by someone with time on their hands, then left unsupported. Its a community of enthusiastic code-heads, not a professional company supporting these extensions as products.

so, on the previous point you praise The Forge for doing legwork for users, which is keeping outdated versions of modules. but now you fault the platform, foundry, for keeping outdated modules that were since abandoned. ok. and yes, the professional company supports the product, and integrates these extensions into the product, at their pace. if it is a 3rd party extension it is not given official support. that said, given how the most popular extensions have more support from enthusiastic code heads than most competitions official products if the user can sense how to discriminate they might have a better experience than on some other platforms...

2) No D&D official content outside the SRD. While some companies like Pinnacle and Free League are doing great things releasing commercial products for Foundry users, the elephant in the room remains the fact that for the most popular system of all, you can't get the content officially. If you want even the PHB - let alone stuff like Xanathar's or Tasha's - you are out of luck.

Instead, they have a frankly bizarre workaround which involves using an extension to scrape all the content from D&D Beyond. So first you'll have to have all that content on D&D Beyond, then you'll have to run some hacker scripts to import everything to Foundry, and if it changes I guess you have to do it again? This requires you to support a lone hacker on Patreon, and it makes me uncomfortable for several reasons. First and most important I am a content creator by day, and I think it is morally dubious at best. MAYBE the D&D Beyond terms and conditions allow it but I'm pretty sure it isn't in the spirit. I'd MUCH rather pay to own the content unambiguously. I want to pay, because I want to support a stable ecosystem which supports my platform of choice, my game of choice and funds maintenance and support in the long-term.

What're you going to do if WOTC pulls the plug on D&D Beyond? This all has a whiff of piracy to me regardless of how they are skirting the actual legal T&C.

what are you going to do if WotC pulls the plug on any existing platform? deals from 2 decades ago aren't going to hold on forever. while in all seriousness 5e will likely last a long time, WotC may make their own VTT at any point now and pull their content from competition entirely.

even the FG staff state competition is good. WotC, and Hasbro, are not agile corporations. any platform that is less than 15 years old is not getting their support. and this is their fault. Paizo, you know, from pathfinder, arguable the number 2 in recognition and being popular, have EVERYTHING in terms of core books in foundry.
you want to support a stable ecosystem? then don't be a them whims of corporations out of touch with the present that operate like a dictator. instead, help foster a healthy market where you can sell your content to any consumer on any platform easily and effectively. without also being gauged in a super high percentage of your sales price to be able to sell in a given storefront rather than a sensible %.