İncelemeler

• gamedeal user

  Mar 30, 2021

  It's very hard to find a game during the pandemic in my time zone. I play solo games instead. I like the automation to save me from looking up stat blocks and calculating all the combat stuff. I enjoy solo RPG more than RPG video games, because it's not about defeating an AI, it's about enjoying immersion in a well written module. Playing solo gives me the confidence to understand the basic mechanics setting up the character sheets and then just forget about them while I focus on the story. There are phenomenal stories available in the Fantasy Grounds module format. When the pandemic is over I plan to have a large FG based game room in my home for my friends to enjoy. I look at this as more than just a VTT. FG offers tools to create stories with realism and enough balance to keep the experience unpredictable. I look forward to new capabilities like lighting effects and individualized perspectives. The continuous development and improvements assures me that my investment is well worth it.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 29, 2021

  This is simply the best virtual tabletop that I can find. Note that this isn't a game, per se. You cannot play this directly. Rather it is a virtual table top that allows a Game Master to run an online Roleplaying game, be it Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or something else. It also really requires a chunk of DLC to run, basically the detailed rulesets for whatever system you are running, but it is really, really good at what it does. I rate it well above Roll20, the largest beast in this forest, and I prefer it to Shard, Foundry and Astral, though each of those has some strengths. FGU simply does it all, all of the mechanics are simply built in. You no-longer need to remember to, for example, apply advantage for poison saves for dwarves in D&D 5e, because of dwarven resilience. FGU knows that the character is a dwarf, knows that they have advantage on poison saves, and automatically applies the advantage and then tells you that advantage was applied as a result. It means that as a GM, I can focus more on how I assist the players in telling the story and less on the bookkeeping. Just great.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 11, 2023

  I heartily recommend Fantasy Grounds. It is the best and most powerful Virtual Tabletop in production today, and I am a proud supporter and user. However, there are some unsettling things happening in the industry right now, and VTTs are in danger of becoming obsolete. I'm a Dungeon Master, and I have been looking long and hard at publishing my own intellectual property and my own supplements for a game that has been open source for the last 22 years. Open source means that no one has the right to it, and everyone can benefit from it. It has taken me years of research, rote memorization, musing, and digging deep and hard into myself to perfect a craft that I have come to love. I love it because it is one of the best mediums of self-expression that there is, and because it can be a deeply intimate and spiritual experience with people who you care about in a story where people overcome their problems and good overcomes evil. Now a greedy corporation called Wizards of the Coast wants to update this Open Gaming License to flip the tables. This new agreement would require me and all content creators who use any part of their system, or anything too similar to it, to pay huge royalties and sign away the rights to their intellectual property. Any custom characters, places, nations, cultures, entire campaign settings written for such a system and marketed as compatible could be taken and reprinted, redistributed, and resold without paying the author a single penny. And to add insult to injury, this new agreement allows Wizards of the Coast to terminate the license at any time, yet they retain all rights to the author's intellectual property. Finally, the previous Open Gaming License is terminated, and any content made under it is retroactively brought under the umbrella of this new license. And that means that Wizards of the Coast owns most of the intellectual property in the Tabletop Roleplaying Game industry, because Dungeons and Dragons is the biggest game in that sphere by far. Even worse, it means they can terminate the sale of competitive product lines by terminating the license that the product is built upon. This is a grab for a monopoly, make no mistake. Wizards of the Coast may legally have the right to do this because of how the original Open Gaming License was worded, but it was not the intended spirit of that document. Any nerds reading this post, I call upon you to vote with your dollars and exercise your right to boycott Wizards of the Coast if they confirm and enforce the new OGL that is now in circulation as it is presently. It is an unacceptable change in the structure of the hobby, and it will lead us down a path of exclusive microtransactions, skins, proprietary virtual tabletops, and phasing out the tradition of pen and paper over playing from a phone. To allow this to happen will irrevocably damage the gaming community. Don't go down this path with them. If you have any sympathy for the countless artists who earn their livelihood from this industry, please leave a like and share this post, and then head down to this link and sign the petition: https://www.opendnd.games/ Thank you for reading, and may you have success in every check.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 18, 2020

  I originally wrote this as a post on the forums, and then realized it makes a decent review, so here it goes: First, if you're going to buy into Fantasy Grounds, I highly recommend getting Unity rather than Classic. Unity is much easier about connecting to for DMs and Players, and has a lot more functions, and will continue to grow from now with new features. As a DM, I have the Ultimate edition, which means my players only need the demo. Here's my advice (if you're going to commit to Fantasy Grounds (FG)). 1. Take some time to play with it on your own and get used to it, learn where everything is and what everything does. 2. Watch tutorial and gameplay videos to learn how it works. There are tons of videos about character creation, combat, setting up maps, and a whole lot of other things. 3. There is a group called Fantasy Grounds College. They offer free "classes" on their discord channel. Take a few. Even experienced users can learn a lot from those. 4. Feel free to ask questions. 5. Whether you're looking for a group as a player or as a DM, learn how to post an "LFP" looking for player or "LFG" looking for group on the Fantasy Grounds forums, the FG discord, or special discords for your game or area. For example, I joined The Filthy Pig Inn and Tavern, a discord group for Australia, NZ, and East Asia, and so I'm currently playing with group with two people in Japan and four more in Australia. 6. Look not only at the DLC on Steam, but also check out the Fantasy Grounds store and the DMs Guild website. DMsGuild has a TON of extensions and modules and adventures. Fantasy Grounds has add-ons or mods called "extensions" and "modules" that can automate almost everything in the game. The advantage of FG over tabletop roleplaying is that because FG automates so many things like hits, saving throws, and spell effects, my players and I can just focus on the roleplaying. How does it work? As DM, I bought an adventure "Lost Mine of Phandelver". FG organizes the story, the NPCs, the encounters, and the maps with "pins", so that as I'm looking at the story, I can click a pin and BOOM, I have the map. Click a pin on the map and I get a description of the room. Click a pin on the description and I get the enemies in the room. Click a button and the enemies are now on the combat tracker (which keeps track of initiative). Click a button, and initiative is rolled for everybody. Great organization. As a player, I'd be able to see maps and images my DM shares with me, and freely move my character on the map. With Unity, the map sets line of sight for each character, removing "fog of war" as they move thought the map, creating a cone or wedge to show what they can see and uncovering enemies only as they would become visible to the character. Likewise, as a player, I won't even know that a secret passage is THERE if I don't detect the secret door and open it. When I attack, I can roll the dice and damage is automatically deducted from enemies. I can target enemies as well. There are also walls, that mean I can't move my character across a wall even accidentally (unless I set up the Line of Sight walls wrong, lol). All in all, it's a great experience, and it gets SO much better with modules and extensions. The only downside is that it can get EXPENSIVE because there's so much quality content. It gets like pokemon "Gotta get 'em all!" lol. But if you have self-restraint, that shouldn't be too big a problem.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 29, 2021

  Their motto is prep less, play better. Which is ironic. I had high hopes for Fantasy Grounds, I've always watched the videos of how it's played in youtube, and I made out of my way to save for it. Unfortunately, I found out fast that it isn't that friendly if you're not willing to purchase the other books. So let's say you used your $150 to buy the Ultimate license, what now? Guess what, you need to spend a lot of time preparing monsters, items, especially homebrews ones. The tokens cannot be edited directly from module monsters, so you need to duplicate it, then take some from the asset. Speaking of asset, you can't even access other assets from other campaigns you've made, so you need to duplicate it cluttering your storage. Now how about UI. Well good luck, half of the stuff here you won't even know about unless you're willing to sit down and watch an hour long youtube tutorial, granted you find one that's up to date since they've changed this so much. Don't get me wrong. It has some powerful features, such as putting in text in spells will normally automatically detect it and will program the dice for you. You can also just drag your hit or damage die to a token and it automatically calculates the damage. There's a lot of cool things about it too. However as it stands, and due to its price; I do not suggest this if you aren't willing to spend more, or at least invest an insane amount of time preparing for that few seconds of convenience in game.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 3, 2021

  As with Fantasy Grounds Classic (FGC), Fantasy Grounds Unity (FGU) has plusses and minuses. IMO, it is the best of the VTTs I've used, but none of them are really user-friendly, and FG is no exception. Right now, it's the best pig in the sty. But if you want to put together a group of remote players, it's a good solution. It does not include communications software. Based on personal experience, I recommend using Discord in conjunction with FG, as it is designed for and optimized for gamers, and it allows you to maintain multiple, persistent chat logs, as well as providing easy voice-channel hopping. Overall, it's an improvement on Fantasy Grounds Classic, notably because the age of the older app was rendering it problematic (being a 32-bit app, it would frequently CTD if you loaded too many images). I haven't seen that problem yet with FGU. Pros - It has some good QoL improvements over FGC. - 64-bit engine improves stability and performance substantially over FGC. - The new Cloud Server hosting service is easy to use, and unlike FGC, you don't have to mess with port forwarding. - If you're willing to use other people's rulesets and content, it's easier to use than other VTTs. - It's pretty versatile once you know how it works. Cons - The devs are still implementing some features that are already present within other VTTs, but it's mostly feature complete. - Steep learning curve. Check out YouTube contributors for advice on how to use it properly. - Not cheap. Not only is the base engine expensive, but then you have to buy content modules (or code your own). Getting 5E mostly fully functional with an Ultimate license and all of the core sourcebooks ran me about $250, and that was with a big sale). But as the axiom goes, you don't always get what you pay for, but you rarely get what you don't pay for, and most other "free" VTTs will also require you to fork out the same cost for the same content (minus the base engine of course). - The UI is just not intuitive. (It wasn't in FGC either.) It largely relies on R-click enabled radial menus. I guarantee you will be Googling to figure out how it works. Thankfully, there are a lot of Internet resources, including YouTube channels like Fantasy Grounds College that are very helpful in that regard. - Even with well-developed rulesets, you will still need to do a good bit of tweaking to automate tasks. Some third party developers have produced extensions that will help reduce the burden, but the decent ones (such as Rob Twohy's extensions for the 5E ruleset) require an added investment. - If you try to do anything that deviates too far from existing rulesets, you will be cutting code. Thankfully, it's just XML, but your only real hope if you're not a professional developer is to reverse-engineer other's scripts (the way the architecture is laid out, there are multiple cross-file dependencies, and none of them are well documented; good luck).
• gamedeal user

  Aug 31, 2020

  I'm a big fan of the Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop. I've tried a couple in my time, including Roll20 and Foundry, and I feel that while they all have their own good points (Roll20 handles community better than any other, and Foundry is very mod-able), but Fantasy Grounds most easily handles all of the stuff during a Tabletop Game that I actually want to pass off to a computer so I can focus on actually running the game. Fantasy Grounds Unity is a 64-bit rebuild of the original which features superior networking capabilities and MUCH better asset-handling, especially for images and tokens, which are supplemented by Unity's rendering engine, allowing for some cool bells and whistles previously exclusive to Roll20, such as weather effects, line of sight and dynamic lighting. Also of note is the fact that it has been built to be backward compatible with your entire Fantasy Grounds DLC library, so all previously purchased assets are still usable in this release. The only downside is that the program doesn't support all systems. While it does handle local favourites such as Dungeons and Dragons and Savage Worlds, the lack of a Shadowrun ruleset does make me sad. While still in early access, if you are a Fantasy Grounds user, or just looking for a VTT that handles rules-crunch better than its' competitors, I wholeheartedly recommend this VTT.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 17, 2021

  This program is amazing, and I highly recommend it. First the cons: There is a learning curve. The basics run like any other program, but the specifics take some time and a couple of Youtube videos to figure out. It's not complicated, and nothing more than any other program these days. The cost can be a bit high for casual gamers. Also if you are a hardcore role player you've probably already spent a couple hundred dollars on books or digital pdf's etc. To get the most out of this program, especially if you DM, be ready to spend another couple hundred dollars. OR, be ready to spend A LOT of time inputting all the info yourself. Again it is not beyond what you would spend in the life time of a game these days. Have you ever added up the costs of all those DLC's you bought over time for your favorite game? Now the pros: Once you learn your way around, the sky is the limit with this program. I use it for D&D, and it streamlines so much, helps me keep organized, and allows me to focus on roleplaying and making the adventure more fun. It's simple to purchase premade module adventures and upload them if that's your thing. I prefer to create my own and this program helps save a lot of time creating (if you bought the books, which I did), all the charts and tables for monsters, treasure, etc are at my disposal. You come across an occasion bug, but they are still actively making the program better, and with so much info and rules I'm surprised I haven't seen more. I really like how it saves everything as you go. No more losing two hours of your life when the power goes out randomly. Lastly, and this might just be me, but I love rolling the dice. At the very least you can play Yahtzee using it, which I have, lol.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2021

  DRM Nightmare. Like you have to sign up in multiple places. So the a * * hole design goes. (1) Purchase Fantasy Ground from Steam. (2) Sign up for a Compulsory account through FantasyGrounds.com (3) Get a Key from Steam to put into the FantasyGround launcher (4) THEN you have to link the your steam account through FantasyGround. Enjoy the suckage because you cant access the content you paid for. Seriously, I can't access 30 modules. Some person told me how to "access my" paid for content. You can't not with out a monthly subscription. So I have to pay a monthly subscription to access the stuff I bought and paid for. Just going to call a turd what a turd is.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 29, 2021

  I use it and I dont think its horrible, but my god is this software user unfriendly, its unreal. Cant recommend something that gives me so much trouble, work and agony. I love to play Pen and Paper RPGs. FGU is a good solution to buy something once and gather around strangers or friends to play. As an Ultimate license GM I cant recommend it though. Everything needs to be coded.....even such simple things like themes are a hassle. There is no easy or quick solution to implement the stuff you absolutely need. A background image for a thematic evening is going to make you tear your hair out. - You have a PDF rulebook and want to use it in FGU? Nope, unless you screenshot every single page and clutter together some Frankenstein Image folder. Trying to copy the text and paste it in blocks to FGU? All the text is now misaligned and unreadable. Even the in-app bought rulesets have unreadable text and weird glitches. - Easily implement rules or easy dice strings like - sixes are successes? Nope. Hope there is a mod that includes your favourite ruleset or otherwise its almost impossible or waaaaaay too much work to create one (its coding, like I am coding my own game!!!) Fuck, look at Sophies Dice here on Steam, you can easily set up specific dice rulesets and use them quickly. That is Unity too!!!! - Special dice are almost impossible to implement, want to play Shiver RPG? Cant do, because of the special dice and unique faces. Its easier to set this up in 10min in Tabletop Simulator, where you can import the rulebook PDF as well! - The rulesets you can buy here are so broken, never patched and lackluster. The great artwork that is in these rulebooks is completely butchered here and lost. Plain text only with single img files inbetween....lifeless and an insult to the creators of those books. Often times the FGU version costs more than the rulebook itself.....some systems although present, are in such a low quality its baffling, like in the ALIEN RPG, the map is so low res....it cant be played. - charactersheets are so friggin hard coded its almost impossible to create something workable for anything else besides DnD. MoreCore mod helps, but is also not a great solution, why is it so complicated to include an easy "Create-a-sheet" mode? Why is it not as easy as dropping an img file onto a dice to make a custom dice? - made a complicated map with line of sight and lighting options in a ruleset and tried to export it to another rulesystem....nope! Cant do that, cant export to another dice system! - if the ruleset you wanna use uses cards, like poker cards.....forget it! Only the bought Savage Worlds has a card system, that absolutely sucks and makes no fun. You cant implement your own cards. FGU is almost exclusively designed for DnD. After years of trying to adept and to create stuff for it, I give up. I give up and returned back to Tabletop Simulator.....and oh my god is it so much better! If you plan on to play anything else other than DnD or Pathfinder, forget it!