Doug Davison's page

Good luck with everything. That is a lot of good stuff.

SmiteWorks/Fantasy Grounds has been working 100% remote since 2009 and we have been blessed with employees living in several different states. We have even had a number of our employees move from one state to another and it is always nice that they can move freely and still remain happily employed with our team.

While I do personally miss the camaraderie of working together in the same physical space that I had with other work environments, we still very much feel like a team.

The Fantasy Grounds version is available for $9.99 off if you already own the PDF here at Paizo.com and synced your account.

Starfinder Pact Worlds for Fantasy Grounds

The Fantasy Grounds version is available for just $6 now if you already own the PDF here at Paizo.com and synced your account.

Kingmaker AP 1 for Fantasy Grounds

The rest of the Kingmaker series is available as well.

You can play Starfinder on Fantasy Grounds using the built-in CoreRPG or PFRPG rulesets and community extensions if you like with no additional purchases. The Starfinder ruleset and Core Rules conversions are pretty nice improves (we think) and represents roughly 6 months of software development by SmiteWorks with many more months planned to continually add greater and greater features. Those features and graphics may or may not matter to you as much. We generally encourage people to check it out and then if they are unsatisfied, they can request a full refund within 30-days.

Great, now do the same for Roll20 [or D20Pro]
Paizo allowed us (and other VTTs) to license the material and they support us by providing us with raw text and graphic assets we can use. The actual building of the product in a digitally interactive format is up to each individual licensee. I can't speak directly to the amount of effort required by each licensee to roll out new conversions, but that's generally why you don't just see each company with everything instantly available or for super low prices.

Re: Prices
Final prices for those of you who already own the PDFs:
$50 for the Starfinder ruleset (required for the items below)
$30 for Alien Archive (optional)
$7 for each Dead Suns adventure module.

For those without the PDFs, you get it for $59.99, $39.99 and $22.99 each but you can sync to get the PDF added to your Paizo account for free.

Even at $50 for the Starfinder ruleset, it will take a lot of sales to recoup our investment. Adventures and supplements help with that ROI in the long run. Like with everything else, supporting things you like to see financially means that you'll see more of those things in the future. Whether that means FG, Roll20, D20Pro or none of the above is up to the consumers.

I know that you guys just released this but I've got to know, is there an ETA for curse of the crimson throne??

We have a little rework left on this one but I expect it will come along quickly. The review process has been pretty smooth, so you are probably looking at the first 2 adventures arriving in the next 3-4 weeks.

You don't have to buy any of the core books to play on Fantasy Grounds. Pathfinder is OGL and there are lots of built in content and community content available, along with the ability to enter your own data. The ruleset itself has been included from the beginning of of when Pathfinder was first available as a game. Initially it was an option for 3.5E campaigns and we eventually spun it off into its own ruleset. We have videos on each store page that show you what the official versions have and you can determine if that is something you would like to optionally buy to enhance the game or not.

Fantasy Grounds has been available since 2004 and has been growing every year since. In addition to enhancing your play experience, buying add-ons we sell tells us and the publishers that license the content to us that you support these efforts.

There are several VTTs out there and they all have strengths and weaknesses. We encourage open discussion about where we rate compared to competition on our forums. Our fans have supported us over the decades and allowed us to grow the number of people working on the product and producing content. Ultimately, support whichever one you like.

Others in this thread have already described a number of the unique features in FG, but the short summary is that it has very good automation, good character and campaign management features, a history of producing great licensed content, full-time employees that enhance the product and provide customer support, more publisher licenses than any other VTT and the 2nd largest user base. We offer a full refund for any purchase made within 30 days, including subscriptions. You can try it out and compare it with your favorite VTT and then get a full refund if it doesn't satisfy your needs.

With regards to refunds of Paizo products, please note that we may need to coordinate with Paizo on any products if you activated your free PDF. That portion may or may not be available for refund, so don't sync your account and get your free PDF if you are still on the fence.

Building your own content from PDFs is still fully supported. We just added more functionality to allow you to build your own class and race data since there is obviously a huge back-catalog of PDFs available for Pathfinder and we only have the Core Rulebook and Advanced Players Guides ready. The same is true for NPCs.

There is a video up on each of our store pages that shows you a walk-through and you can decide if the convenience and nice to have features makes it worth getting the FG version done for you already.

If you are new to Fantasy Grounds, here is a quick primer on licenses available for the core software:
Ultimate license - DM pays either $149 or $9.99/mo and players pay nothing (players run Demo client)

Standard license - Player pay $39 or $4.00/mo and any of them can DM if they choose.

For Mac users, we have a new simple installer available on our website and also from Steam. Choose Downloads > Mac OSX Installation from our website menu. http://www.fantasygrounds.com

Once the products are available here on paizo.com, they will be listed at the print price minus the PDF price if you already own the PDF.

We have just updated our website so that if you follow the sync instructions in the link below, you can notify our site with a list of the PDFs you already own and get the full PDF price discounted from the final price you pay on our website. That means that the Rise of the Runelords FG version will only cost you $18 if you already own the PDF.

http://mailchi.mp/fantasygrounds/official-pathfinder-launch-for-fantasy-gro unds

We've made good progress so far. Here is a brief update. We have not set up an ETA for the releases, but they are close.

In Review:
Pathfinder Core Rules
Bestiary 1
Kingmaker 1
Kingmaker 2
Rise of the Runelords 1
Rise of the Runelords 2

In Development:
Skull & Shackles
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Wrath of the Righteous
Bestiary 2

Starting Development Soon:
Advanced Players Guide

Fantasy Grounds works well as in offline mode. You can run 2 instances of the program and connect the second one as a player to localhost. Many DM's will then drag that display to a 2nd monitor, connected TV or projector.

There is also an extension that auto-scales the map to fit the full display.

The DM then uses their local display to manage the combat tracker to track intiative, effects, NPC and PC health, etc. and then keep track of the party inventory, awarding of XP, coins, etc. The map reveal is handled manually though by cutting away the mask as they explore. We don't yet have the dynamic lighting to automatically do that.

There are a handful of DM's I know of who bring it with them to conventions and game stores where they don't have an available Internet connection.

Link: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?33834-Map-resize-to-TV -resolution-for-Face-To-Face-games

Within Fantasy Grounds, if you load a map into your campaign and use it during play, it is shared when you choose the Share option and is only accessible to players during the game. When they disconnect, they no longer have access to the image.

The official Pathfinder modules for Fantasy Grounds will contain the maps optimized for online play with grids pre-aligned, combat encounters with NPCs preplaced so they can be added to the map, visibility set, random HP rolled (if that option is enabled), initiative set and added to the combat tracker all with a single click. All the room contents would be linked to the map as a Pin so that you can pull up the room description, contents, encounter and treasure by clicking on it. After combat, you award the treasure parcel and XP and let it divide everything for you. If you already own the PDF, you can build all that stuff on your own. What we will essentially be selling is the convenience of having everything ready to go for you.

Here is a community extension to create a creature entry from a stat block that you can use to quickly enter NPCs, complete with spells.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?34199-CreatureGen-Exte nsion-Import-Stat-blocks-on-the-fly-with-populated-spells

Fantasy Grounds offers a 30-day 100% money back guarantee, so you are welcome to give it a try and then decide if it meets your need. All of the VTTs take some time to get the hang of them, but there are plenty of video tutorials, help documents and dedicated forums for each system that would be very open to helping out someone new to the environment.

Best of luck with whichever option you decide to go with.

As someone who has been in IT for a long time and who currently runs their own servers, my hat is off to the IT team as well. I've seen numerous sites crash and burn with much less of a spike than what has been generated by the super successful Humble Bundle. Meanwhile, you've managed to keep up the core system and continue to work through the massive new load of requests.

For the business side, congrats again on an amazing success. I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of final numbers roll in from it when the dust settles. As it stands, it's been a hit from the first hour or so that it was launched.

We are still interested and willing to carry Pathfinder RPG Adventure Paths and other conversions for Fantasy Grounds. We visited with Paizo at Gen Con again this year to discuss details and shared some thoughts on the subject with Mike Kenway, the new person in charge of licensing. I can't speak for Mike directly, but he seemed very open to the idea at the time.

We believe that people should be able to play any and all game systems they enjoy and we currently support D&D, along with Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Castles & Crusades, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, Mutants & Masterminds and more on our system officially. We support Pathfinder and Pathfinder Society Gaming with OGL content only at the moment, but we would love to support it in an official capacity. I personally try to play several different systems and that includes playing in a Skull & Shackles campaign and a Council of Thieves Campaign.

I'm still unsure why WoTC and Paizo don't simply license their products out to third party VTTs and then focus on their core competencies, which is putting out compelling content and rules. How will the ROI for a Paizo built VTT will ever stack up what it could be with licensing, especially when you consider all the other things that could be getting done at the same time if you didn't have those resources tied up.

I think there is a lot of overestimating of the market and underestimating the resource cost. A lot of large and otherwise successful companies have made attempts at custom building software solutions that already exist simply so they can control its development and usage. This basically puts the ability to use the software in the hands of the company building it. If the project or service gets scrapped, you lose it. For the few problems that do exist for peer-to-peer games and software installed on your own system, at least with those you still own all your stuff.

On top of that, these attempts fail quite often. Even when they somewhat succeed, they fail to consider that while they are busy building their own solution, the target has moved and they still have an inferior solution to what is available externally.

As a career software developer, consultant and business owner, I've seen a lot of smart and savvy business people make very poor business decisions about software. How much money you have available to invest does not guarantee success. Using similar software does not mean you will be able to design it or be successful at directing others on what to build.

Your product is GREAT but useless to me because I'm on OS X. These other solutions including MapTools are platform independent.

I JUST eliminated the Windows 7 install (via Paralells) on my mac and got back several GB of much needed space and I dont want to have to buy another piece of software (like say Crossover) just to run FG. You guys have been pretty admant in your choice NOT to have a mac version so...

Not at all. We love Mac. It just isn't something that is easy to completely switch to after you have a large and solid code-base. Instead, we've explored other options to deliver it to our Mac user base and we now have a growing number of users who successfully run FG on Mac and Linux without Parallels or any other paid add-on. We specifically write code and test on Mac through Wine to ensure that every new version is fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

We've recently dedicated an entire section of the FAQ on how to run on a Mac with detailed steps to set up and run over Wine, WineBottler or Crossover. The third option requires a third-party purchase, but the first two do not. Furthermore, we've recently been experimenting with wrapping everything needed to install and run Fantasy Grounds as if it was a native OS X app. The app version includes all of the Wine re-distributable model. The only problem with that approach is that it inflates the initial download to around 250MB, which is a bit much for some users. It's still probably something we'll be doing soon though because it is relatively small compared with other full-game downloads like you will see on Steam, XBLA or PSN.

I use WineBottler personally on OS X for FG and for a number of other Windows-only games that I enjoy. We brought a Mac with us to Gen Con last year to show how smoothly it runs and we've been bringing one with us to various conventions since then.

Here's a link to FAQ:

And the simple instructions for getting WineBottler running. I highly recommend it even if you use it to run games other than Fantasy Grounds.

The easiest way to get the latest WineBottler release installed onto OS X is to use either MacUpdate http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33367/winebottler or directly from the developers website http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/.

Installing WineBottler 1.2.3
1. Open the download WineBottlerCombo_1.2.3.dmg file to mount it
2. When the disk image window opens, drag the Wine and WineBottler apps to your Applications folder
3. Close the and unmount the disk

That's it, nice and simple.

Fantasy Grounds tries to provide a complete replacement for gaming around the table. It is great for GM prep, campaign tracking, creation of adventures for sharing with others and for running a game real-time with connected players. We've been told that the combat tracker alone was worth the price of admission, but we've recently added in a bunch of new enhancements like a game calendar to track the passage of time and log events in your campaign, a party sheet which allows a quick party at a glance view for GMs, party-wide rolls such as Saving Throws or Skills checks, party inventory, Experience distribution and tracking for encounters and quests, easy to use pre-placement of tokens and monsters on maps for encounters, import of PFG characters from HeroLab and many more features.

Here are two links to screenshots of the new party tracker screens.
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen3. jpg
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen6. jpg

Before you go with another solution, you should check out the demo for FG and play around with all the tools available to GMs. We've got tons of videos out on our site and on youtube as well. We have almost 24,000 users and over 18,000 forum members who are always looking for new converts.

Regardless of which solution you choose, playing online is very doable these days.