Pathfinder & Starfinder Home Gaming Guide

This will help many gamers. Thanks!!!

At last something good out of all this bad!
Thank you all very much!

MapTool is also a great VTT with almost a decade of support and it's free.

I’ve been trying Astral and it is really cool.

Very basic roll 20 intro

Make a roll 20 table

For organized play

Intro to PFS

Intro to SFS

Cosmic crittermanders discord For cosmic crit podcast, and a bunch of starfinder society stuff.

Use Foxit to fill out a chronicle sheet

I’ve been trying Astral and it is really cool.

I have found it easy to learn...not as intimidating as others...and a good price (we are all free atm)

Phenomenal work, this'll help loads of people.

Astral is pretty cool, but it is also requires a pretty decent machine to run. I tried running a session on it and once we got to a map with shadows, one of my players couldn't do or see anything. We went through the steps of turning on hardware acceleration in chrome and it still wasn't enough for him to use it. Kind of a bummer since my other players thought the system was wonderful. Back to roll20 we went.

We used Roll20 Sunday and it went well, learning the new system slowed us down, but it was a lot of fun. Definitely try out one of these systems.

Glad to see these online tools described AND people's experiences with them.

I have used MapTool + Discord (for audio) for months and found it to be excellent. It's free and in some ways better than Roll20.

What are people’s opinions on the best choice for someone who is extremely bad at computers?

Steve: I'd use Roll20 - MapTools is great (I use it for my own games) but I think it has a much steeper learning curve than Roll20.

Cheers. I think I have a subscription to that already from a PBP game, so that’ll be a good option, perhaps.

Astral v2 is pretty neat.

Was trying it on launch and wasn't good compared to current state.

Due to only meeting once a week, some of us are still playing Pathfinder 1 Adventure Paths.
How about some links to those Virtual Tabletops?
Also, which would be best for those of us who have never done anything like that?

The blog has a link to each one - generally, the first time the product is named, it’s done via link to the respective homepage.

Sorry, I misread. I thought those were all Second Edition.

We've never played online. I think we're not going to be using the dicerolling, chat functions, character sheets or anything else, so (I'm hoping anyhow) the system it's for doesn't matter.

All I want is for players to be able to see the map - then we're all going to skype and play just as if we were sitting around the table (I don't audit character sheets or dice rolls anyhow, so it's not really any different).

Is my Atari 800 XE going to run this or will I need one of those newfangled "floppy disc readers"?

This whole gaming-via-computers is scary for me. I’d love the comfort of a few 5”’ floppy disks.

^I remember those things -- try to put one in the drive in a hurry, and you'd kink it.

From EN World: Playing Virtually? Don't Miss These Deals

So far every link I have tried is for Pathfinder Second Edition. And none of them have a First Edition option.
It is like nobody wants to acknowledge the existence of First Edition.

So far every link I have tried is for Pathfinder Second Edition. And none of them have a First Edition option.

It is like nobody wants to acknowledge the existence of First Edition.

The Fantasy Grounds entry above says 'nearly every Adventure Path Paizo has put out is fully converted and prepared in Fantasy Grounds.'

Yes, the link takes you directly to a page where the search options were set to only show Pathfinder 2nd Edition content. If you change the search options, you can find Pathfinder 1st Edition as well. There's a massive amount of PF1 available.

I didn't bother checking the others, but I'm sure that Roll20 has PF1 content as well, as a friend told me he'd been running Strange Aeons on it.

So after looking around, I decided to go for Fantasy Grounds. It's a little over-specced for me, but given that anything is a massive learning curve, I figured I'd go for the one with huge functionality (and it does look really easy to bring up a map from an AP, populate an encounter, track hit points, initiative, etcetera etcetera...) I'm really impressed at how it looks and feel like I'm going to be able to grow into it.

What I wanted to pass on is the response when I encountered some technical difficulties. I can run fine using the FG server, but struggled to get my computer setup to enable PCs to log in to my computer directly and run it from there.

Posting about it on the forums, one of the IT/software gurus there spent a good hour or so going back and forth with me on the forums. He directed me to a bunch of good resources and I spent today trying out the various fixes (but unfortunately to no avail). Tonight (Saturday night our time). He remoted in to my computer and spent another decent hour and a half checking my work and then trying a whole bunch more clever things.

It was far, far beyond the technical help I expected and really reaffirmed my decision to go with Fantasy Grounds. I chose the Fantasy Grounds Unity (which is in beta) so the occasional technical glitch is not unexpected.

I was really thrilled by the technical response and am very optimistic about how it will all look once I've sorted these things out and learned how to use it properly. I might even keep using it here and there once we resume face-to-face gaming. The ability to quickly call up Equipment stats, maps, images and so forth is something I could see using even if we were all in the same room.

That's great! Good luck and happy gaming!

Well disappointing first experience. Players kept getting disconnected and couldn’t see the maps/pictures. :(

Skype was a bit stuttery too..

FG does seem to have a steep learning curve. If you can game with someone who knows it, that's the best. I'm a big fan of Roll20 myself. I've been using it since 2012 and I have over 700 hours of gaming in it. It really is only as complicated as you want to make it.

Roll20 has never worked for me. I’ve never understood why it’s so popular (presumably there’s some glitch or incompatibility with my computer).

I can get FG to do what I want (and the functionality as DM is awesome). The problem was people kept getting disconnected.

Roll20 has never worked for me. I’ve never understood why it’s so popular (presumably there’s some glitch or incompatibility with my computer).

I have seen Roll20 work on old tablets, so I can't help but wonder what the glitch is or what could be causing it. It's a very stable platform, so maybe you're just being punished by some obscure gremlin?

I don't know (I'm very ignorant with computers). I shouldn't have used such strong language though - I've hardly used it, just for a PBP over the last six months and once a few years back. I couldn't get the zoom to work, it regularly hung. *shrug*

I can understand it though. Other people don't report those problems and it's pretty cheap (even the expensive license).

No worries, man. First impressions are everything!

Fantasy Grounds sales this week, all 20% off:

Pathfinder RPG - The Tyrant's Grasp AP 6: Midwives to Death
Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Asylum
Starfinder RPG - Starfinder Armory
Starfinder RPG - Signal of Screams AP 3: Heart of Night

Just in case anyone does stumble across this, I thought I'd post my final follow up. I've just cancelled my subscription to Fantasy Ground Unity. If you do with with FG (which looks amazing) I'd strongly recommend going with the classic version not unity.

They describe it as a beta release, but in my opinion it's not at that level yet. There are one or two updates each week and I've been finding they are quite likely to result in a loss of functionality (or to stop you from connecting altogether). It also doesn't work to just not update - a previously stable version became unstable for me this week.

There are lots of people who report success with it, but they all know much more about computers than I do - it's not an easy, plug-and-play bit of software with occasional beta-level bugs. It needs a certain degree of technical knowledge just to get the basic connection up and running.

I believe that FG Classic doesn't have the same problems.

I've been playing on FG Classic and it seems a lot more stable than what you're describing. I guess a pandemic where tons of people are suddenly accessing your beta is not the best time to be developing software?

Doh!

I guess so. It might not be an issue for many but for me it was too much. Personally, I don’t think it’s at beta stage yet, but I’m not particularly experienced at using software in development - maybe I’ve just been lucky previously.

D20Pro only supports Starfinder?

Uhm...what?

D20Pro has supported Pathfinder 1 for almost nine years.

It is true that its PF2 support is still in development and is expected later this summer; however, it has supported PF1 longer than any other VTT that you reviewed. It is an officially licensed by Paizo, too!

It is fully compatible with Herolab Classic for PF1 and is routinely used in conjunction with that software for encounter and character import.