I wanted to get some feedback from those of you have been using D&D VTT (Virtual Tabletop) gaming (e.g. Roll20 & Fantasy Grounds) to provide me with some insight. I am about to start my first PUG on a D&D VTT service. I have been playing D&D for awhile but always face to face, and with my friends.
I am a player in this VTT adventure, So i would to hear from you what your thoughts are about being in one. Did you love it, hate? What should i be aware of? Any tips tricks you have to make it a very fun experience. i normally DM so this will be a nice change. Depending on how it goes i might try DMing on it later. so if you have any tips regarding this as well i would love for you to include them.
I have also included a poll just to see what you all thought about it.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions and fill out my poll
Speaking specifically to the VTT (not the adventure or roleplaying) it can be anything from an enhancement to a detriment, especially if everyone is used to playing around a table. When I think of the most enjoyable games I've had as a player on a VTT, obviously story and all the players play a huge role. But... if you're on a VTT, and the DM has taken time to set up sounds, music, handouts, artwork, dynamic lighting, and detailed maps, and can pull all that off without it bogging down the game it makes a huge difference.
In other words, anyone that has had that kind of experience would love it, but someone that had technical issues, no cameras, no artwork/blank maps, etc might feel like it gets in the way of a "true" D&D experience. ("True" meaning in person as a comparison)
I am using Astral right now. It has been free for April to do the pro version so I am trying it.
At this point I will probably sub to it after April is over. I find it feature-rich enough for my needs and relatively user-friendly as these sorts of things go. It's not designed how *I* would design a VTT but then, none of them are.
I found Fantasy Grounds to be an unusable and counter-intuitive mess, and yes, I did pay for it and for the PHB there... and after messing around with it for a couple of days I gave up and never went back to it.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I use Roll20 with Discord for my online games. I use the Beyond 20 Chrome extension though so what I have to use Roll20 for us really just moving things around on a map and the chat for output of the rolls etc. I long for the day when DnD Beyond has their own VTT so I can finally be done with Roll20. It's been adequate and it's certainly more user friendly that Fantasy Grounds but it's very fiddly.
One thing Astral does not have right now is video/audio chat integration. They had it for a while but took it out in November (I think) due to some issues they were having with it. No word on when it will be put back in.
Also, as a note.. according to announcements in the Astral discord, they are experiencing much higher server load than in the past and have been working to scale up their systems, but some folks are reporting laggy behavior. Supposedly the primary times for this are when you'd expect, 5-11 PM eastern time (which, of course, is when I play -- 8-11).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
After doing a lot of research on my own, and based on some of your feedback I wanted to give you an update. I think Roll20 if I’m using the free version which I have used simply for like maps and tokens works great.
However I think that if I’m going to spend money on premade modules and dynamic lighting it seems that fantasy grounds is the best bang for the buck.
With that said I wanted to know if anybody can give me any tips and tricks to go from roll20 to fantasy ground. As well as what is the best way to integrate DND beyond into fantasy grounds?
Secondly, what money should I invest into fantasy grounds besides purchasing the ultimate edition. Are there must have rulebooks right away if I’m running a premade adventure by wizards? Or can I just buy the premade adventure and then just run it without any rulebooks?
In addition for my players they’re only using roll 20 with the beyond20 extension, for all intents and purposes will it FG be the same experience for them or should I just go full on fantasy ground characters?
lastly any advice on running fantasy grounds, tips and tricks that will make me using it less painful?
thanks again for your input and suggestions as well as filling out my poll
There is no Beyond to Fantasy Grounds integration as far as I know. So your players will not (to the best of my knowledge) be able to scrape their character data into FG. They will have to manually create the characters in FG starting from scratch (adding skills, typing in stats, etc.).
You will have access only to SRD material (i.e, the basic free stuff) in FG plus the adventure content you buy, unless you also purchase PHB, DMG, and the like from FG directly. So "must haves" would depend on what you want in your game. Do you want to use a monster from Volo's? Then just like here, you'd have to buy Volo's. Or else, you have to do the labor to manually import its stats into FG, just like you'd have to do in Roll20, Astral, etc, etc.
I believe Roll20 also has dynamic lighting and pre-made modules so I am not sure why FG is the best bang for the buck, unless FG charges less per item. I am not up on FG or R20's price structures, since I use Astral.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Someone in a fantasy grounds gave me this link that I wanna share with you guys it’s not an integrator, but at least it’s a character transfer so I thought that was cool.
I think there's a newer scaper than that ... but need to find it.
The lack of a link to D&D beyond is a pain - I get Wizards want to do there own - but they really need to get there finger out - we don't even have the dice yet lol and I'm really not buying all the content again
Wizards does not own D&D Beyond. It's an independent company just like Fantasy Grounds or Roll 20.
Consequently, there is no reason for them to "play ball" with the other companies, as they are competitors. In fact, financially, D&D Beyond has every reason to make it as difficult, if not impossible, for you to use their data on someone else's VTT. If they allow that then you don't need to buy Beyond's, when they come out with it.
I think there's a newer scaper than that ... but need to find it.
The lack of a link to D&D beyond is a pain - I get Wizards want to do there own - but they really need to get there finger out - we don't even have the dice yet lol and I'm really not buying all the content again
Not that it changes any of the context here, but keep in mind that DnDBeyond is not WotC, they are two different companies.
I use Astral. It's pretty good, as far as I can tell, but it's the only VTT I have ever used. The learning curve for me was a bit steep for a couple of days - I have no programming experience, no Photoshop experience, and no previous VTT as I said - but once I grokked the core concepts, it worked well. The Dynamic Lighting is, frankly, a game-changer for me as a DM who started in 1980 with *Basic* D&D.
Why did I pick Astral out of all the others, with no previous experience? Because they cover D&D 5e, Pathfinder, and Pathfinder 2e. Plus, online reviews were decent all around.
Also, their Discord support channel is very responsive!
I used Astral the last 6 weeks or so because it was free for the pro version.
It's pretty good, but I'm not sure I want to pay up for it. From what I have seen the Foundry VTT has more features and is probably going to be more to my liking. The disadvantage compared to Astral is whereas everything in Astral is online, Foundry is hosted on my machine. It remains to be seen if I am able to figure out how to port forward through my firewall to let my play group connect up. I had this problem with Fantasy Grounds and even though I opened ports like they said, no one could get into my game. Now with FG, I did not like other things about it so I had no incentive to futz with it. But Foundry is more appealing so I will fight with it a bit and see if I can get it to work.
The main issue I have with Astral is how they store (or really don't store) the character sheet data. It should be stored as a database object but it's really not - it's a bunch of text fields instead. There is a little data stored on it but, not enough. And as far as I know, Astral doesn't actually "know" anything about D&D so it doesn't know, say, what a "Fireball" does unless you manually tell it. Whereas Foundry, FG, and Roll 20 (among others, I presume) knows how a Fireball works and if you use it, will apply everything correctly.
Doesn't matter if you don't use it like that though.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I totally get why people don't like FG. It feels like, I dunno, maybe a computer desktop that you'd hack in a 90's cyberpunk game? It's clunky and unintuitive and it feels I have to create my own workflows to get anything done. Then there's the Unity beta, stuff is still broken, you have to buy the VTT again if you upgrade. But... I find that there's a lot of utility guff running under the hood that I've come to appreciate.
There are a couple things that work for me - the one off, no-subs cost is much more appealing to me than similar VTT's, and like DDB I can buy everything for the group and share it out within the campaign (the others don't have to pay a cent). The ability to load books in and out, and the additional content available from DMG and other creators means that I can tailor the desktop to exactly what I need for the session. I can duplicate monsters out of the MM and modify them to suit, add them to shortcuts, and they have their counters on their sheet for adding to maps. Showing and hiding buttons lets me simplify the screen, and I can pick the simple grey theme to further declutter everything.
I've used Roll20 for a couple years, and it's clunky and not pretty, but everything works. My DM, however, hates the way the map manager works, and from what he's described, I can't blame him. I'll also say we've never managed to get the audio to work for everyone, so we usually use Discord or Google Meets for audio.
My in-person campaign has been using Astral since mid-March and I want to set it on fire. I hate it. The only reason we're still using it is because the DM agreed that we only need to use the character sheets to set things like darkvision and an icon for the token. If I had to use the character sheet as an actual character sheet, I would be out of there. It's set up like an editable PDF, but doesn't autoscale text or adjust box size or allow for half of the features that a character can have. The magic comes pre-set to assume you're a wizard, and if you're anything else you have to manually edit all the equations. I couldn't even get through setting up my sheet without going to the DM and complaining, so there's probably other issues as well. I also think that some of the control buttons or key commands in-game aren't intuitive or poorly placed (it's really easy to kick yourself out of the game trying to open your character sheet to add a status token -- none of which make sense, but do they make sense on any of the services out there?).
I wanted to get some feedback from those of you have been using D&D VTT (Virtual Tabletop) gaming (e.g. Roll20 & Fantasy Grounds) to provide me with some insight. I am about to start my first PUG on a D&D VTT service. I have been playing D&D for awhile but always face to face, and with my friends.
I am a player in this VTT adventure, So i would to hear from you what your thoughts are about being in one. Did you love it, hate? What should i be aware of? Any tips tricks you have to make it a very fun experience. i normally DM so this will be a nice change. Depending on how it goes i might try DMing on it later. so if you have any tips regarding this as well i would love for you to include them.
I have also included a poll just to see what you all thought about it.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions and fill out my poll
Speaking specifically to the VTT (not the adventure or roleplaying) it can be anything from an enhancement to a detriment, especially if everyone is used to playing around a table. When I think of the most enjoyable games I've had as a player on a VTT, obviously story and all the players play a huge role. But... if you're on a VTT, and the DM has taken time to set up sounds, music, handouts, artwork, dynamic lighting, and detailed maps, and can pull all that off without it bogging down the game it makes a huge difference.
In other words, anyone that has had that kind of experience would love it, but someone that had technical issues, no cameras, no artwork/blank maps, etc might feel like it gets in the way of a "true" D&D experience. ("True" meaning in person as a comparison)
I am using Astral right now. It has been free for April to do the pro version so I am trying it.
At this point I will probably sub to it after April is over. I find it feature-rich enough for my needs and relatively user-friendly as these sorts of things go. It's not designed how *I* would design a VTT but then, none of them are.
I found Fantasy Grounds to be an unusable and counter-intuitive mess, and yes, I did pay for it and for the PHB there... and after messing around with it for a couple of days I gave up and never went back to it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I use Roll20 with Discord for my online games. I use the Beyond 20 Chrome extension though so what I have to use Roll20 for us really just moving things around on a map and the chat for output of the rolls etc. I long for the day when DnD Beyond has their own VTT so I can finally be done with Roll20. It's been adequate and it's certainly more user friendly that Fantasy Grounds but it's very fiddly.
One thing Astral does not have right now is video/audio chat integration. They had it for a while but took it out in November (I think) due to some issues they were having with it. No word on when it will be put back in.
Also, as a note.. according to announcements in the Astral discord, they are experiencing much higher server load than in the past and have been working to scale up their systems, but some folks are reporting laggy behavior. Supposedly the primary times for this are when you'd expect, 5-11 PM eastern time (which, of course, is when I play -- 8-11).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks for the input and your experiences. This is very helpful
After doing a lot of research on my own, and based on some of your feedback I wanted to give you an update. I think Roll20 if I’m using the free version which I have used simply for like maps and tokens works great.
However I think that if I’m going to spend money on premade modules and dynamic lighting it seems that fantasy grounds is the best bang for the buck.
With that said I wanted to know if anybody can give me any tips and tricks to go from roll20 to fantasy ground. As well as what is the best way to integrate DND beyond into fantasy grounds?
Secondly, what money should I invest into fantasy grounds besides purchasing the ultimate edition. Are there must have rulebooks right away if I’m running a premade adventure by wizards? Or can I just buy the premade adventure and then just run it without any rulebooks?
In addition for my players they’re only using roll 20 with the beyond20 extension, for all intents and purposes will it FG be the same experience for them or should I just go full on fantasy ground characters?
lastly any advice on running fantasy grounds, tips and tricks that will make me using it less painful?
thanks again for your input and suggestions as well as filling out my poll
There is no Beyond to Fantasy Grounds integration as far as I know. So your players will not (to the best of my knowledge) be able to scrape their character data into FG. They will have to manually create the characters in FG starting from scratch (adding skills, typing in stats, etc.).
You will have access only to SRD material (i.e, the basic free stuff) in FG plus the adventure content you buy, unless you also purchase PHB, DMG, and the like from FG directly. So "must haves" would depend on what you want in your game. Do you want to use a monster from Volo's? Then just like here, you'd have to buy Volo's. Or else, you have to do the labor to manually import its stats into FG, just like you'd have to do in Roll20, Astral, etc, etc.
I believe Roll20 also has dynamic lighting and pre-made modules so I am not sure why FG is the best bang for the buck, unless FG charges less per item. I am not up on FG or R20's price structures, since I use Astral.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
FG has a one time subscription Roll20 is only monthly, and the modules are about half the price than Roll20
Ah well then... there you go.
But there is currently no method of integrating this site with FG, so I guess you win some, lose some.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Ok that is good info. thanks. I do enjoy Beyond20, so that is unfortunate.
Someone in a fantasy grounds gave me this link that I wanna share with you guys it’s not an integrator, but at least it’s a character transfer so I thought that was cool.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?41885-Character-Converter-for-D-amp-D-Beyond
I think there's a newer scaper than that ... but need to find it.
The lack of a link to D&D beyond is a pain - I get Wizards want to do there own - but they really need to get there finger out - we don't even have the dice yet lol and I'm really not buying all the content again
Wizards does not own D&D Beyond. It's an independent company just like Fantasy Grounds or Roll 20.
Consequently, there is no reason for them to "play ball" with the other companies, as they are competitors. In fact, financially, D&D Beyond has every reason to make it as difficult, if not impossible, for you to use their data on someone else's VTT. If they allow that then you don't need to buy Beyond's, when they come out with it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Not that it changes any of the context here, but keep in mind that DnDBeyond is not WotC, they are two different companies.
I use Astral. It's pretty good, as far as I can tell, but it's the only VTT I have ever used. The learning curve for me was a bit steep for a couple of days - I have no programming experience, no Photoshop experience, and no previous VTT as I said - but once I grokked the core concepts, it worked well. The Dynamic Lighting is, frankly, a game-changer for me as a DM who started in 1980 with *Basic* D&D.
Why did I pick Astral out of all the others, with no previous experience? Because they cover D&D 5e, Pathfinder, and Pathfinder 2e. Plus, online reviews were decent all around.
Also, their Discord support channel is very responsive!
Anyway, I hope that helped.
Cheers!
I used Astral the last 6 weeks or so because it was free for the pro version.
It's pretty good, but I'm not sure I want to pay up for it. From what I have seen the Foundry VTT has more features and is probably going to be more to my liking. The disadvantage compared to Astral is whereas everything in Astral is online, Foundry is hosted on my machine. It remains to be seen if I am able to figure out how to port forward through my firewall to let my play group connect up. I had this problem with Fantasy Grounds and even though I opened ports like they said, no one could get into my game. Now with FG, I did not like other things about it so I had no incentive to futz with it. But Foundry is more appealing so I will fight with it a bit and see if I can get it to work.
The main issue I have with Astral is how they store (or really don't store) the character sheet data. It should be stored as a database object but it's really not - it's a bunch of text fields instead. There is a little data stored on it but, not enough. And as far as I know, Astral doesn't actually "know" anything about D&D so it doesn't know, say, what a "Fireball" does unless you manually tell it. Whereas Foundry, FG, and Roll 20 (among others, I presume) knows how a Fireball works and if you use it, will apply everything correctly.
Doesn't matter if you don't use it like that though.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks for your update, I am trying out fantasy grounds for the next few weeks on my premade campaign so I’ll report back my findings.
I totally get why people don't like FG. It feels like, I dunno, maybe a computer desktop that you'd hack in a 90's cyberpunk game? It's clunky and unintuitive and it feels I have to create my own workflows to get anything done. Then there's the Unity beta, stuff is still broken, you have to buy the VTT again if you upgrade. But... I find that there's a lot of utility guff running under the hood that I've come to appreciate.
There are a couple things that work for me - the one off, no-subs cost is much more appealing to me than similar VTT's, and like DDB I can buy everything for the group and share it out within the campaign (the others don't have to pay a cent). The ability to load books in and out, and the additional content available from DMG and other creators means that I can tailor the desktop to exactly what I need for the session. I can duplicate monsters out of the MM and modify them to suit, add them to shortcuts, and they have their counters on their sheet for adding to maps. Showing and hiding buttons lets me simplify the screen, and I can pick the simple grey theme to further declutter everything.
I've used Roll20 for a couple years, and it's clunky and not pretty, but everything works. My DM, however, hates the way the map manager works, and from what he's described, I can't blame him. I'll also say we've never managed to get the audio to work for everyone, so we usually use Discord or Google Meets for audio.
My in-person campaign has been using Astral since mid-March and I want to set it on fire. I hate it. The only reason we're still using it is because the DM agreed that we only need to use the character sheets to set things like darkvision and an icon for the token. If I had to use the character sheet as an actual character sheet, I would be out of there. It's set up like an editable PDF, but doesn't autoscale text or adjust box size or allow for half of the features that a character can have. The magic comes pre-set to assume you're a wizard, and if you're anything else you have to manually edit all the equations. I couldn't even get through setting up my sheet without going to the DM and complaining, so there's probably other issues as well. I also think that some of the control buttons or key commands in-game aren't intuitive or poorly placed (it's really easy to kick yourself out of the game trying to open your character sheet to add a status token -- none of which make sense, but do they make sense on any of the services out there?).
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep