Wizards of the Coast and Fantasy Grounds Team Up for Virtual D&D
April 12, 2015 by stvitusdancern
Wizards of the Coast and Fantasy Grounds, have teamed up to bring D&D to the virtual tabletop environment on Fantasy Grounds.
Now you and your friends can get together no matter where you are and have a few rounds of exploring and fighting your way to glory and riches! With the D&D module for Fantasy Grounds, you will have access to the rich environment that many people have come to love in the past 30 plus years, now you will be able to do it virtually.
Yes, I know that virtual tabletops are nothing new, but this is the first time that WotC have given this their blessing and are supporting the project with modules.
You can create custom characters and have your own DM guide you through strange and wonderful worlds, all the while trying to get your party into sticky situations and see how you all can get yourselves out. Another nice extra built into this, that no matter what edition of a player you are; 3.5, 4 or 5th you will have access to the rules within the program.
So, when your group of stalwart adventurers want to get together and play but are spread around the world, you now can have everyone sit at the table and play. The virtual table that is.
Will you gather your party from the four winds and take on a new adventure?
"You can create custom characters and have your own DM guide you through strange and wonderful worlds, all the while trying to get your party into sticky situations and see how you all can get yourselves out"
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Very Cool. I am into it, but the only problem I foresee… Kind of a steep price point for virtual books, and so many to purchase too. This is a great idea, and can bring back game groups who have moved across the country from one another to game together once more. I would like to see some Price reduction, considering there is a a lot to buy to get started, I fear they may price them out of business.
Wizards of the Coast have worked on D&D before in the 90’s with Baldur’s gate & Icewind Dale on the PC games.
You are correct, but those were stand alone PC games. This is just a tool so you can play pen & paper D&D virtually. It is not a stand alone game per se.
I’ve had Fantasy Grounds for a couple years now and it’s great. I only wish it had integrated voice chat (but you can get around that by running a chat server in the background). The reason the additional content packs are relatively expensive is because they have pulled apart the entire contents of the books and built them into the FG format.
I’ve looked into 3 RPG clients currently available and here is a brief subjective comparison of the differences (as of a couple years ago).
Roll20 is a free to use tabletop program that integrates video chat (uses google+ if I recall correctly). It has lots of nice features including working out LoS for each character or monster provided your game map has the LoS data embedded in it. A lot of “virtual tabletop RPG maps” you buy these days will come with versions suitable for this. Roll20 isn’t bound to a specific game system which is nice but it also means if you play one or two systems exclusively you don’t get the kind of customization you can with the system built into the software. The reason I chose not to go with Roll20 was the lack of storage. I wanted to create whole adventures and even campaigns and to use Roll20 I’d need a subscription to get the necessary storage space or I’d have to store/organize all the files locally and load/unload them during the game. This might not be a deal breaker for others but it was for me. The video/voice chat is undoubtedly the strongest point for Roll20.
Fantasy Grounds is a dedicated RPG client. You can get a trial version for free and the cost per user is relatively low. There are group discounts and you can buy more expensive licenses that let you host games for anyone whether or not they have a licensed copy themselves. Fantasy Grounds does not have voice chat, which is its greatest weakness in my opinion. You can run a voice chat program in the background to get around this. Fantasy Grounds is system specific (the default system is 3.5 OGL). This means that the full mechanics for what ever game you are playing is built in. The reason the system packs and adventures are relatively expensive is because they contain the full contents of the book versions but fully integrated into the software. For example if click on a spell on your character sheet the full text from the book pops up for you to reference. If you want to quickly set up a battle you just open the monster “book” and drag the monsters onto the map. Fantasy Grounds tracks the initiatives, HPs, knows what dice to roll for their attacks and saves. It knows when you roll a crit and will roll the extra damage dice automatically. I encourage you to go to their site and watch the demo videos to get an idea how this all works. There were a few reasons I went with Fantasy Grounds. The data is stored on my local machine but managed by FG software so when I start a game session all the players clients DL the necessary files. I can build dozens of encounters, full adventures,even an entire campaign and FG lets me use what ever I need when I need it and does the syncing with the players seamlessly. I also like that the rules are built in. You as GM can override anything but the mundane things get handled without your needing to micro manage. You can get rules packs for Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, World of Darkness (i think) and a few others. D&D 3.5/pathfinder OG versions are built in defaults. There is a thriving community of modders who do custom rules and module conversions as well. I’ll definetely be picking up the D&D 5.0 additions. I actually was searching through the FG forums looking to see what the community had done for converting 5.0 and now here it is all official and polished and complete!
The newest RPG tabletop simulator I have found is Tabletop Simulator (available on Steam). It’s pretty impressive so far but still in development. It’s more of a simulator for general gaming than RPGs specifically but people are starting to add lots of interesting content. I assume the various wargame and RPG companies will figure out whats going on and a lot of the IP violating mods being created will be taken down. I can’t recommend this one for a full RPG session just yet but I think it shows a great deal of promise and I follow the development and mod workshop on steam regularly. It’s pretty inexpensive, if you find it on same its just a few bucks. Definitely worth checking out especially for card/board gamers. There’s even some wargame mods like Bolt Action done with plastic army men figures. All mods are free to download via the Steam Workshop btw.
Fantasy Grounds’ development language is LUA. Which in general if you want to mod it you have to be a decent programmer, but it is possible. That doesn’t mean that you have to be a programmer to add weapons and items or develop a module, only if you want to modify the mechanics of the system.