Which Virtual Tabletop Fantasy Grounds or Roll20

[FegPC]

Guys im new to RPG table top gaming. Ive been looking at D n D and PF2E.

How is PF2E on Fantasy Grounds? By all accounts Foundry is better for PF2E but im looking for anyones experience with PF2E on Fantasy Grounds.

Thank you in advance

[MaxAstro]

It depends a lot on how much you value automation. Fantasy Grounds has a lot of automation - more than Foundry for sure, although there are a couple few things Foundry can do that Fantasy Grounds can't. That's the biggest pro for me, especially since the FG2e crew is basically always adding more (Trenloe is an absolute machine in this regard, I can't count how many times I've requested a small feature and it's been added in less than a week). The module conversions are also professionally done, and often have a lot of the automation baked in - more and more as time goes on. The occasional issue slips through but overall it's very professional.

On the "cons" side, Fantasy Grounds is significantly more expensive than Foundry - mostly because the Foundry community does all the module conversions themselves as volunteer work, so they are free.

IMO you get what you pay for, but FG is definitely not the lowest cost option. Personally I find it the superior PF2e experience.

It's also definitely true that a certain subset of the PF2e community has a weird hate-boner for any VTT that isn't Foundry. Definite bias there.

[FegPC]

It depends a lot on how much you value automation. Fantasy Grounds has a lot of automation - more than Foundry for sure, although there are a couple few things Foundry can do that Fantasy Grounds can't. That's the biggest pro for me, especially since the FG2e crew is basically always adding more (Trenloe is an absolute machine in this regard, I can't count how many times I've requested a small feature and it's been added in less than a week). The module conversions are also professionally done, and often have a lot of the automation baked in - more and more as time goes on. The occasional issue slips through but overall it's very professional.

On the "cons" side, Fantasy Grounds is significantly more expensive than Foundry - mostly because the Foundry community does all the module conversions themselves as volunteer work, so they are free.

IMO you get what you pay for, but FG is definitely not the lowest cost option. Personally I find it the superior PF2e experience.

It's also definitely true that a certain subset of the PF2e community has a weird hate-boner for any VTT that isn't Foundry. Definite bias there.

Thank you for your insight.

Yes im looking for automation, cost isnt really much a concern for me. I was just wanting a nod that it works well with Fantasy Grounds.

Jeff

[MaxAstro]

Especially with the most recent update the automation is really good, and - very important to people like me who do a lot of homebrew - very easy to add your own. Actions like Treat Wounds and Demoralize can be handled in just a couple clicks, and you can also fully customize the automation if you want to account for house rules or just wanting to resolve things slightly differently.

Currently, because a major chunk of automation features was just added, there's a decent number of books that are still missing those new features, just because getting everything updated is a process? So like, if you grab a random feat in Guns and Gears it's less likely to have full automation than a random feat from the Core Rules. But like I said, the devs here are very diligent and more is being updated pretty constantly.

Plus - at least for me - it's easy enough to add automation by hand (just a couple minutes per feat) that at long as you just focus on adding automation to feats your players are actually taking it doesn't take very long at all to do it yourself. And the automation on the GM side - for monsters and the like - is really solid.

Couple things are a little janky - I'm not super happy with how poison is handled right now? Stages have to be applied manually, mainly. But poison is also very complex, and I believe I've heard Trenloe mention that better automation for it is eventually planned.

[Nyarly Dude]

For a lot of material it's impressively solid. And, despite FGU being a somewhat, hm, not super-friendly bit of software, I've run a small group of players through the Beginner's Box and now they're early into Abomination Vaults with two of the players never having used FGU before in addition to the entire group incl. me being relatively new to PF2e.

For some builds the automation may not be great yet (e.g. Alchemists don't really have support for their alchemical reagents and quick alchemy and what-not, so they could certainly use some love. But, for instance, it's nice to be able to set up a Summoner and have his HP and initiative automatically be linked to his Eidolon; otherwise this would be a pain to manually keep in sync.

Players can target NPCs with spells, roll the NPCs' saving throws with a button press, and then have damage etc. properly applied with another button, without the GM needing to apply the damage for them. Conversely, things can be set up so that players roll their own saving throws against NPC's effects.

I've got a hunter ranger in my party. He can have his PC target an NPC to mark it for Hunter's Edge (Precision); push another button to set up the bonuses for Hunter's Aim; and fire a bow. Range to target is automatically calculated so the range modifier if any is applied, status and circumstance and item modifiers get applied, the character sheet is already set up with attack modifiers for MAP for a second and a third+ attack, etc. If he hits and pushes the damage button, the extra precision damage etc. gets factored in, as do crits (FGU uses the optional rule of rolling twice the dice rather than doubling the result in the dice, because with the way that FGU is set up it'd be complicated to do it the default way), the target's resistances, etc.

With recent builds, a player can e.g. target an NPC for a Trip action with the specific activity having been set up on his character sheet by the ruleset itself, and DC will automatcailly be determined etc. with the results logged to the chat. Release 19 was a rather big advance for this ruleset.

[Nyarly Dude]

I'll also point out that there's some good community-made extensions for the ruleset.

e.g.
https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/576/view ("PFRPG2 GM Enhancements", paid, but inexpensive) has quite a few quality-of-life tools.

If your players want to use Pathbuilder to build their characters, there's an extension for importing those ( https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1187/view, "Pathbuilder Import", free). I would encourage you to use the in-FGU advancement tracker for leveling up, though, to automatically record when e.g feats were taken so as to be able to properly handle any retraining later.

There's other content that's more specific to particular use cases. If you want to run Kingmaker, for instance, https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1180/view will probably be worth the cost to save you a lot of time, since that subsystem looks a bit complicated.