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Hey all, I don’t know if it has been asked yet but I am curious,
Will there be Roll20 support for 2e right at launch?
I hope so because I had to move to a different province here in Canada and my gaming group back in my previous province is dying to play 2e as soon as it is released.
I wouldn't bet on it by launch, in a few weeks maybe, but at launch is...unlikely
You probably have to share characters sheets in a dropbox folder or something like that for the start
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Hey all, I don’t know if it has been asked yet but I am curious,
Will there be Roll20 support for 2e right at launch?
I hope so because I had to move to a different province here in Canada and my gaming group back in my previous province is dying to play 2e as soon as it is released.
I highly recommend trying out Fantasygrounds instead for Pathfinder 2e. It will have launch day support and what they did with the playtest was really quite impressive already.
(And they have done more since then, we just don't get to see it yet)Plus, books will be cheaper there and the automation of FG really suits PF2e a lot.
Oh and in the near future we are getting FG Unity (kickstarter ended in may, due for beta testing in the next couple of months, release after December)
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I second the pitch for Fantasy Grounds. The all in cost is cheaper, FG is more feature-rich (for sure as of Unity), and the ownership is more responsive to the customer-base.
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From Roll20 Blog.
At the moment, Pathfinder 2 (which we will be supporting on launch day of August 1!) is the major focus
FG is definitely cool, but people play where their GM/players prefer. :)
Good to hear both options will be available!
I'm having trouble finding it on their website, if I wanted to use Fantasy Grounds, would every single one of my players need a license?
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I've never used it, but it says on the site under Demo "Play in a game hosted by Ultimate"
So i think that if the GM has Ultimate, the players can all join via the Demo.
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Fantasy grounds... I looked on the steam page and ... whoa... wtf, so many dlc...that is the first game which has more dlc then that f#&$ing train simulator - I know you don't need them all, but I couldn't find s#!# between that all
I've never used it, but it says on the site under Demo "Play in a game hosted by Ultimate"
So i think that if the GM has Ultimate, the players can all join via the Demo.
That's right.
Thanks, I saw the comparison table, I just wanted to make sure that was the correct interpretation.
Seems pricey, the free features for roll20 worked great for PF1, I'll have to see how PF2 is when it releases on roll20 to see if a switch is worth it.
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I'm relaly happy with roll20 and pay my subscription for all of my campaigns, so I can't switch out right now. Let's hope we get a good sheet early. We had one for the playtest day 1 (even if it sucked).
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Thanks, I saw the comparison table, I just wanted to make sure that was the correct interpretation.
Seems pricey, the free features for roll20 worked great for PF1, I'll have to see how PF2 is when it releases on roll20 to see if a switch is worth it.
The license is a one-time cost. When you link your account at Paizo, you get a discount on any Paizo product you own equal to Paizo's pdf price on any products you own the pdf for. Any products you don't have the pdf for allows you to relink to your Paizo account and get the pdf included in the list price.
I see you're an adventure path subscriber. Provided you have the pdfs, all the AP modules will cost about $7 each after the sync discount.
This gives you rules automation, all images, maps, stories, encounters, tables, monsters, treasures, xp awards, etc. already imported and ready to go. For $7 apiece, it's a real bargain.
Rulebooks are a bit more expensive, both on account of all the imported content, and part because of the reduced cost of rule pdfs causing a greater gap in the price between pdf and physical book price (whici is where FG pricing comes from).
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Hey all, I don’t know if it has been asked yet but I am curious,
Will there be Roll20 support for 2e right at launch?
I hope so because I had to move to a different province here in Canada and my gaming group back in my previous province is dying to play 2e as soon as it is released.I highly recommend trying out Fantasygrounds instead for Pathfinder 2e. It will have launch day support and what they did with the playtest was really quite impressive already.
(And they have done more since then, we just don't get to see it yet)Plus, books will be cheaper there and the automation of FG really suits PF2e a lot.
Oh and in the near future we are getting FG Unity (kickstarter ended in may, due for beta testing in the next couple of months, release after December)
WHOA! I had no idea that FG was doing a unity project. My main issue with FG originally was the fact that half my players play on Mac and the Wine emulator that FG suggested crashed one of their computers ;D
We might just transfer over if Unity is going to mean multi platform support.
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Does Fantasy Grounds still not have Dynamic Lighting? It's a hard no for my group if that is not an available feature.
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Dynamic lighting is a core feature of Fantasy Grounds Unity, which completed a very successful (10x) Kickstarter a couple of months ago.
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So check back in when it Betas, hopefully in December, roger that. Thank you Reckless for the straight answer.
I will note that I was very unimpressed with the Playtest support that Roll20 put out. It was consistently buggy, slow, and incredibly unwieldy. Realistically, I suspect that I would have been better off doing everything manually.
I will also note that I've been slowrolling my transition over to Fantasy Grounds, especially since Roll20 has consistently gotten less and less effective for my group.
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So check back in when it Betas, hopefully in December, roger that. Thank you Reckless for the straight answer.
Should be releasing around December this year, alpha is next month.
Some nice features from unity are
I am a GM so I go with what makes the process faster and smoother for me (heck I use the program for in person campaign management, so that should say a lot -laughs-)
As for the dynamic lighting, it is doing a few cool things but does lack one feature roll20 has (currently)
Cool Features:
- Fog of War: as you explore places you have already explored will be darkened with a fog of war like effect that hides tokens but still shows the map layout they have already seen as they adventure.
- Built in door definition: Doors can be defined by the GM but can be right clicked to be opened and closed.
- "Terrain" definition, blocks line of sight from the far edge only and can be turned on and off with a right click. So if you have pillars they will shed shadows but you and the players can still see the pillar artwork.
- Lighting map from mask, you can import a black and white mask that will auto generate the dynamic lighting map.
- Lighting map bleed, you can set a bleed amount so that the edges of walls are visible without changing how much of the wall is blocking line of sight. (complex to explain without images, but basically if you mask off a square you can set it so 10px inside of that square is still visible but the corners of the square will still generate shadows)
Missing Features
- It is purely line of sight on release, no radius of light initially (said to be coming after release, but not there for release)
- No coloured lighting.
As for pricing
- Standalone licenses: Function in perpetuity (although unity requires a different license, it cost me $50 to upgrade from ultimate to unity ultimate. Less for people who bought it recently.
- Subscriptions: Same as roll20, any products the GM has purchased will be shared with the players regardless of the edition they purchase though.
Buy it on their site rather than steam, steam doesn't allow for them to sort their "DLC" packages properly. If you must, just purchase the main program on steam and then buy all addons on their site, everything gets synched between the two each month and you link accounts anyway.
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Does Fantasy Grounds still not have Dynamic Lighting? It's a hard no for my group if that is not an available feature.
Honestly my favourite feature one of the other posters had mentioned so far is getting a discount on modules if you have already purchased a PDF on the Paizo website.
I tested it with Giantslayer the other night and it worked perfectly. Only $7USD extra for a fully setup moduel with maps and creatures.Apart form lighting effects, the cost deduction for PDF's alone and pre setup is more than worth it.
especially if you don't have as much time to prep as you would like.
The Unity version looks like it will have a nice set of resources to create maps.
As for the monster designer, no, that's more the purview of Hero Labs.
I use FG to create all of my NPCs and monsters (really I need to to ensure that their stat blocks work with Fantasy Grounds built in automation features; ie recharge, Concentration, saves, damage reduction, immunities, etc).
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But would be able to implement those monsters easily?The Unity version looks like it will have a nice set of resources to create maps.
As for the monster designer, no, that's more the purview of Hero Labs.
Can't answer that until we see the ruleset. But for PF1, it parses the monster's attacks, AC, saves, resistances, and some other stuff automatically for you (and I expect the same from the PF2 ruleset). Things like breath weapons I have to manually code. Spells get parsed with mixed results. Spells that are pure damage or inflict a standard condition usually get parsed properly, but more complicated ones need manual work.
There's a user-made extension for PF1 that lets you just drop a text statblock in a box and it codes the monster or NPC for you. I expect someone will come up with one for PF2 eventually.
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So check back in when it Betas, hopefully in December, roger that. Thank you Reckless for the straight answer.
You're welcome. I think you'll be really pleased with what FG delivers. I'm a happy user of the current version and backed the Kickstarter to help launch FGU. I prefer if people have real understanding of what's being offered and when.
I'm almost certainly going to be buying into Fantasy Grounds when I start Age of Ashes, which I'm running as an online game. I've been using MapTool for a long time, mostly because of its extremely feature-complete lighting and vision system, but I'm so tired of having to create every map manually.
Especially since Paizo is occasionally a bit... let's say "lackadaisical"... about things like grid lines. >.>
FG is the only way I could run a game like PF2. It automates everything so you can focus on playing the game instead of tracking bonus stacking issues, conditions and upgrading/degrading afflictions.
Also, the community tends be to, IMO, a bit better for a GM than Roll20. I find consistent players on FG. On Roll20, I come across more flakes. Finally, Roll20 has more "paid GMs" which is annoying. More people on FG tend to run games without charging others.
Some relevant links for interested parties.
Dynamic line of sight preview
https://youtu.be/Qv1becqKVRY
(This has evolved a little since then,and it doesn't show how you can trace a black and white image for dynamic line of sight)
Examples of what I am talking about
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smiteworks/fantasy-grounds-unity/posts /2548916
The tile based drawing tool
https://youtu.be/CoxEyNzFoio
(Video is old, not sure what the current feature looks like. They did show it off a little in some of the kickstarter set of videos though)
Although I would like to again mention, nice features but only the tip of why I would recommend FG. The automation and organisation is a huge boon. The combat tracker alone is a godsend.
I wouldn't be happy running 40-100 npc combats without it, not unless I was using some sort of handwaving atleast.
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Finally, Roll20 has more "paid GMs" which is annoying.
I've never understood the disdain some people seem to have for paid GMs. At a certain level, games only exist because a GM elects to spend a significant amount of personal time making them happen, often primarily for the enjoyment of their players.
The idea that it is somehow "wrong" to ask to get paid some small amount for that work confuses the heck out of me.
I dont think its wrong. I think its annoying. There is a difference! I want to play and I dont want to pay.
On Roll20, there are tons of pay to play adverts. On FG, less so. *shrug*
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I'm almost certainly going to be buying into Fantasy Grounds when I start Age of Ashes, which I'm running as an online game. I've been using MapTool for a long time, mostly because of its extremely feature-complete lighting and vision system, but I'm so tired of having to create every map manually.
Especially since Paizo is occasionally a bit... let's say "lackadaisical"... about things like grid lines. >.>
I've found that throwing the map image on the background layer and using the built-in resizer tends to work pretty well. Basically you draw a box on the map, tell Maptool how many vertical and horizontal squares are in that, and it resizes accordingly. After a quick adjustment to align roughly the middle of the map to Maptool's grid, it's generally close enough that no one will notice the slight variance in alignment that are mostly near the edges.
But yeah, it's still a hassle to have to do that, and set up vision blocking, and whatnot. There's a lot of functionality (like doors) that I really would prefer having a generic implementation supported by Maptool directly instead of being fobbed off into nests of macros.
I've used Hero Lab to manage combats for a long time, and right now Hero Lab Online doesn't have that functionality and otherwise hasn't been particularly stable/functional/full-featured to me for the playtest, so I finally broke down and implemented initiative/HP tracking in Maptool for the playtest. PF2's comparatively simplified conditions and whatnot make a detailed combat manager less necessary overall.
I haven't checked out Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 in a long time, though. Last I saw, they felt like big steps back in the "virtual tabletop" functionality (vision and lighting in particular), and the other functionality was largely redundant to how my group played (generally in person with real dice and player sheets). The trailers for the new Unity version of FG look okay, but...that's obviously not the version that exists now.
I'm willing to pay for a good tool and the data entry (lots of money spent on Hero Lab and associated modules) that can save me a ton of time, but FG always has looked like something wouldn't save me time if I wasn't automating lots of rolls, and my expectations for commercial software are just higher. I don't want to pay for software that hasn't managed parity (on what I consider core features) with decade-old versions of a barely-supported open-source tool, never mind the current versions.
I dunno. What am I missing, FG users?
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Roll20 for me by a long shot. its extremely user friendly and I dont have to buy all my content twice. It can do anything fantasy Grounds can do and more but it doesn't do it for you. If you have the expendable cash and want convenience fantasy grounds seems cool but damn is it confusing with all the downloads and licenses. I just prefer the easy of Roll20.
Very glad to hear they will be supporting it day one.
I've found that throwing the map image on the background layer and using the built-in resizer tends to work pretty well. Basically you draw a box on the map, tell Maptool how many vertical and horizontal squares are in that, and it resizes accordingly. After a quick adjustment to align roughly the middle of the map to Maptool's grid, it's generally close enough that no one will notice the slight variance in alignment that are mostly near the edges.I'm almost certainly going to be buying into Fantasy Grounds when I start Age of Ashes, which I'm running as an online game. I've been using MapTool for a long time, mostly because of its extremely feature-complete lighting and vision system, but I'm so tired of having to create every map manually.
Especially since Paizo is occasionally a bit... let's say "lackadaisical"... about things like grid lines. >.>
I do this, but some maps are so bad that it's honestly not enough. The vertical lines in particular are often very inconsistent. Other pet peeves are maps that I have to "split up" because the grid for submaps doesn't line with with the grid for main map or maps where the grid "fades out" or is obscured by decoration in places that make it hard to align. I've also seen maps where the "player view" of the map still has secret doors marked on it, which is super frustrating.
It's a major thing I hope PF2e improves on; virtual table tops are a lot more common nowadays so hopefully Paizo recognizes the importance of this kind of attention to detail.
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How good is Fantasy Grounds for homebrew? Does it have an in built map editor, npc or monster designer?
It's got a learning curve, but it's decent. As with most software, the more time you spend with it and mess around, the more clear everything becomes.
Maps are easy, as you can just import from an external source and apply a grid (and when Unity ships, map construction via tiles will be supported to make that even easier).
NPCs and Monsters, you can just fill in the fields in the app once you get the hang of where to put what. You can also import from HeroLab if you want more detail.
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Roll20 for me by a long shot. its extremely user friendly and I dont have to buy all my content twice. It can do anything fantasy Grounds can do and more but it doesn't do it for you. If you have the expendable cash and want convenience fantasy grounds seems cool but damn is it confusing with all the downloads and licenses. I just prefer the easy of Roll20.
Very glad to hear they will be supporting it day one.
I am a little confused by everything you said there. For PFRPG you don't have to buy anything twice in FG - if you get the module from them, you get the actual Paizo PDF for free (in addition to the built-in full text from the book built into the FG module itself), and if you own the PDF, you get the cost you spent on it discounted from the cost of the FG module.
As for licensing, there are only two things to know - either you need a Full version for your GM and either full or lite versions for each player (lite if they only play, full if they ever want to GM), or the GM gets an Ultimate version and the players don't have to buy anything. This is VERY similar to the Roll20 "GM must have a Full sub to host games with all the features turned on, players can play for free" model. I don't see how it's that hard to grasp, especially for someone who can obviously grasp something as complex as the rules of PFRPG.
The idea that it is somehow "wrong" to ask to get paid some small amount for that work confuses the heck out of me.
Four people paying for the privilege of playing a game with a fifth person (who is also playing a game) feels a little bit shady to me, but I guess if people are willing to spend money on it it's their business.
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Roll20 for me by a long shot. its extremely user friendly and I dont have to buy all my content twice. It can do anything fantasy Grounds can do and more but it doesn't do it for you. If you have the expendable cash and want convenience fantasy grounds seems cool but damn is it confusing with all the downloads and licenses. I just prefer the easy of Roll20.
Very glad to hear they will be supporting it day one.
I am a little confused by everything you said there. For PFRPG you don't have to buy anything twice in FG - if you get the module from them, you get the actual Paizo PDF for free (in addition to the built-in full text from the book built into the FG module itself), and if you own the PDF, you get the cost you spent on it discounted from the cost of the FG module.
As for licensing, there are only two things to know - either you need a Full version for your GM and either full or lite versions for each player (lite if they only play, full if they ever want to GM), or the GM gets an Ultimate version and the players don't have to buy anything. This is VERY similar to the Roll20 "GM must have a Full sub to host games with all the features turned on, players can play for free" model. I don't see how it's that hard to grasp, especially for someone who can obviously grasp something as complex as the rules of PFRPG.
As for the buying it twice. I subscribe from Paizo, so I get the PDF for free already from them. I then can take my free pdf and bulid up my adventure in Roll20 for no added cost. To do the same thing in Fantasy Grounds I have to buy it again. If I did not buy physical books, with I prefer and like to collect then that wouldn't be as prohibitive but I do so it is. The licensing also bugs me. its just one more tacked on cost that seems like just another cost barrier. After all that yes the price is comparable but in my case its far more expensive than playing on Roll20 for simply the cost of my sub and a little work which by now is minimal, especially if you use the officially supported sheets with all the macros done for you.
Though Fantasy Grounds is a nice service for my case its just easier and less expensive to get virtually the same results.
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You don’t have to buy it again in Fantasy Grounds. You can input that data yourself (this is true even of the rules and supplements). However, this can be labor intensive for full automation (although I’ve got pretty quick at inputting the effects that enable the automation). At any rate, for those of us that do use Fantasy Grounds it comes down to Do I want to spend several hours prepping this AP, or do I want to pay SmiteWorks $7 to do it for me?
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As for the buying it twice. I subscribe from Paizo, so I get the PDF for free already from them. I then can take my free pdf and bulid up my adventure in Roll20 for no added cost. To do the same thing in Fantasy Grounds I have to buy it again. If I did not buy physical books, with I prefer and like to collect then that wouldn't be as prohibitive but I do so it is. The licensing also bugs me. its just one more tacked on cost that seems like just another cost barrier. After all that yes the price is comparable but in my case its far more expensive than playing on Roll20 for simply the cost of my sub and a little work which by now is...Roll20 for me by a long shot. its extremely user friendly and I dont have to buy all my content twice. It can do anything fantasy Grounds can do and more but it doesn't do it for you. If you have the expendable cash and want convenience fantasy grounds seems cool but damn is it confusing with all the downloads and licenses. I just prefer the easy of Roll20.
Very glad to hear they will be supporting it day one.
I am a little confused by everything you said there. For PFRPG you don't have to buy anything twice in FG - if you get the module from them, you get the actual Paizo PDF for free (in addition to the built-in full text from the book built into the FG module itself), and if you own the PDF, you get the cost you spent on it discounted from the cost of the FG module.
As for licensing, there are only two things to know - either you need a Full version for your GM and either full or lite versions for each player (lite if they only play, full if they ever want to GM), or the GM gets an Ultimate version and the players don't have to buy anything. This is VERY similar to the Roll20 "GM must have a Full sub to host games with all the features turned on, players can play for free" model. I don't see how it's that hard to grasp, especially for someone who can obviously grasp something as complex as the rules of PFRPG.
Understood. I guess it's just a matter of what's more valuable to you, your time or your money. If you have a lot of the former and not a lot of the latter, I won't disagree under any point.
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As for the buying it twice. I subscribe from Paizo, so I get the PDF for free already from them. I then can take my free pdf and bulid up my adventure in Roll20 for no added cost. To do the same thing in Fantasy Grounds I have to buy it again. If I did not buy physical books, with I prefer and like to collect then that wouldn't be as prohibitive but I do so it is. The licensing also bugs me. its just one more tacked on cost that seems like just another cost barrier. After all that yes the price is comparable but in my case its far more expensive than playing on Roll20 for simply the cost of my sub and a little work which by now is...
Right, you don't have to buy it again at all. I've converted several pdfs myself (including recently We Be Heroes?). It's pretty much copy and paste into story entries and formatting box texts, stating up monsters and treasure bits, etc. Not really any more or less work than doing it in Roll20.
Saving yourself hours of work for a $7 investment is a plus[EDIT:for time-poor people]. Especially since you can go in and edit the stuff for your specific campaign you are running without changing it for any other campaign you'd run using the same module.
Being able to drag all treasure parcels to the party inventory and then have people drag the items they want to their character sheet is a HUGE plus when it comes to weapons and armor, keeping track of who takes what, and easy sell off (1-2 mouse clicks) of the remainders, etc.
Being able to target your party members with bless, click the effect button, and having FG keep track of that bonus for the next 3 levels because you're 3rd level and then dropping the bonus off, huge plus.
Lots of other things, but I'm all for as many platforms as possible supporting play.
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I dunno. What am I missing, FG users?
Potentially, only that, through either an free community extension or a core feature (I forget which), you can set it so you and/or your players can enter manual die rolls.
This, combined with the other functionalities, such as timed buffs/debuffs and conditions, target selection (for ACs, Saves, Damage, healing, and aforementioned timed debuffs/buffs), and nice features like the treasure tracking I mentioned in the previous post, editable story telling, preloaded images (maps, images, and handouts), note storage.... oh, I but I do go on, where is the time?
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I dunno. What am I missing, FG users?Potentially, only that, through either an free community extension or a core feature (I forget which), you can set it so you and/or your players can enter manual die rolls.
This, combined with the other functionalities, such as timed buffs/debuffs and conditions, target selection (for ACs, Saves, Damage, healing, and aforementioned timed debuffs/buffs), and nice features like the treasure tracking I mentioned in the previous post, editable story telling, preloaded images (maps, images, and handouts), note storage.... oh, I but I do go on, where is the time?
Don't forget the pre-loaded encounters on the map with the text up and ready to read/display in the chat, the monsters on the map and loaded into the combat tracker with initiatives rolled and ready to play in a couple of clicks. That was always one of my favorite convenience features of their adventure modules.
For adventures with player resources (such as races and weapons from the APs in Starfinder), they come included with module and ready to be shared with players in one click as well, without having to give them access to the whole adventure.
Players can actually build their entire character with just FG and a calculator (since FG doesn't track spending) - not just filling out a character sheet, but full automation with drag and drop from a specially shrunk rulebook with only the parts of the rules the players will need so you aren't wasting time while they download the whole thing.
These are fairly easy to implement yourself as well, but every little bit of time saved is worth it for me, and every question I don't need to answer is time saved. :)
FG users,
Curious if there is a way to copy and paste monsters from the pfrd onto tokens? Perhaps macro that allows for this? Any other ways to import monsters/npcs into tokens other than HeroLab? Thanks!
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FG users,
Curious if there is a way to copy and paste monsters from the pfrd onto tokens? Perhaps macro that allows for this? Any other ways to import monsters/npcs into tokens other than HeroLab? Thanks!
If it's a monster directly from the PFRD, then most of them should be in the free PFRD ruleset. You can drag one from the list into a new encounter, then drag whatever token you want to use for it onto the entry that gets created, and them make whatever edits you want to make. Then you can drag the modified version into the combat tracker when you want to use it.
NPCs are trickier, but work more or less the same way - drag a base creature in, edit it, drag an icon onto it, and it's ready to go. The tricky part is any special abilities they have won't be coded, so you may have to manually do some stuff with the adjuster tool under the chat bar to rolls as needed if you don't know how to get that deep into the FG engine to set them up ahead of time.