Intro to Fantasy Grounds

Play across a virtual table top? No thanks. I think the personal interactions we share across the table in person are way too important to my enjoyment of the game. Also, every program I've seen strikes me as lame and clunky. I don't need the table (virtual or not) to make the game any harder to play. In fact, Lisa and I tried playing D&D with someone across the internet once and it was incredibly lame.

It's not verbatim, but that's about what I had to say when Mark asked me if I'd consider playing an RPG with him over a virtual table top. It was last year some time, and I was still living in Mebane, but my move to Fayetteville was on the horizon. We hadn't played anything in person since early December the year before and didn't have any plans to play anything before my move. Our RPG time was fading and wasn't likely to restore itself; the victim of another friendship becoming long-distance.

Fast forward to March of this year. I find an article on Kotaku (which I can't seem to find now) that's initially about 5th edition D&D but quickly spins into a review about a virtual table top called Fantasy Grounds. While I'm sure the article went into quite a bit more detail, I remember exactly two things I took from it: Fantasy Grounds could automate all the grindy parts of D&D combat and it was available on Steam.

I was immediately enthralled. I jumped into forums, Steam reviews, and YouTube posts about Fantasy Grounds looking for the one bad review which would turn me off of the software. When I didn't find that after a few hours of searching I contacted Mark to see if he was still up for a game. He was.

After I proved to myself that I had more than a few adventures in me and we had a crew of potential players together, we discovered the first (and possibly largest) downside to Fantasy Grounds - it isn't cheap.

The licence for the tabletop software is $40 per player or the GM can invest in a $150 licence that will allow him or her to connect to an unlimited number of trial users. On top of that is the cost of the license for the game you want to play. The license for D&D 3.5 and D&D 4 are included, as are a few other systems like Fate and CoreRPG. But I wanted to run 5E. That's another $50 per book - $50 for the PHB,  $50 for the DMG, and $50 for the MM. It's important to note that buying the book licenses for 5E aren't technically necessary to play 5E via Fantasy Grounds. The mechanisms and SRD are already included. Buying those three licenses just cuts down on the typing you're going to have to do. I invested in the PHB license to ease character creation, so my total investment came to $130 - a copy of FG for me and one for Lisa, plus the PHB. If you add in what the other players paid for their software our grand total came to $290.

How are you feeling? Hot flashes? The vapors? I know; it is pricey. But hang tight and I'll tell you about how it's been totally worth it.

How long does it normally take a new D&D group to make their characters? I mean, I generally assume our first session will go long and we might have all the characters made by the end of it. Between sharing the books around, looking up stats for weapons, armor, and spells, and copying all the information you need to your character sheet - not to mention the time it takes to just make the decisions a player needs to make to create their character - making a group of new characters takes forever.

That's where Fantasy Grounds got its first chance to impress me. You want to be a Tiefling Thief? Open a fresh character sheet, drag Tiefling onto it then drag Thief onto it. Then go over it and review for accuracy. It's not a perfect system, but I'd estimate that 80-90% of the things you need recorded on your sheet have just been recorded for you, including little automatons like popup windows asking which class skills you'd like to take. The same thing went for gear and spells. Drag magic missile onto your character sheet and all the information you need appears.

Everyone did their characters separately, because I wanted to avoid wasting a day that everyone could show up at the same time, but I'd estimate that I spent less than four or five hours total walking folks through the process.

Wait... how is that faster than usual?

Well, because almost all my players made their characters in different sessions. I had three experienced D&D players make their characters in less than an hour each. I also had two players who had never played any form of tabletop game make their characters together in about two or three hours. Naturally, we spent a lot of time chatting about what each of their decisions meant and would mean as the game rolled out. Had everyone been online at the same time, I'm fairly confident that we still would have wrapped up in less than four hours. The experienced players would have had their characters all done in the first hour and then would have spent the rest of the session helping out the newbies.

I'm very confident that a player who is experienced in the game they're playing and the Fantasy Grounds interface (yeah, there's a bit of learning curve there) can get a new or low-level character created in no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

This is getting a bit longer than what I normally like to post, so I'm going to wrap it up now. Sometime later this week I'll tell you about how much I love tokens and maps and combat in Fantasy Grounds.