Trying out Fantasy Grounds in a Banestorm Camapgin
I was invited to play Radskyrta (Red Shirt, in old English) in a GURPS Banestorm campaign using Fantasy Grounds. I was interviewing +Doug Davison and a few times we mentioned the GURPS included ruleset.
Overall impressions after five hours of play:
The graphics are impressive. The player side of the interface handles things well enough.
It takes vaguely forever to load and distribute images and maps to everyone. A 1MB file took minutes. More than the five minutes we chose for a bio-break.
You still have to keep track of most of your own penalties, but the dial-a-mod box in the lower-left corner works great for ad hoc stuff.
The combat tracker and skills box, plus the drag-and-drop nature of die rolling, work very well.
All in all, I’m favorably impressed on the player side by Fantasy Grounds.
Session Highlights
Radskyrta’s most dangerous weapon this fight was his horse. He did two Move 16 tramples. AoA against Brawling+4 (14) for 3d+2 damage. KO’d two guys. I did hit someone else with a sword, and took one of my tramplees prisoner.
My compatriots did well. Loosing two dragons of the non-firebreathing and barely-tamed kind on some of our foes, while our blademaster carved up three at once.
All in all, it was a good demonstration that Fantasy Grounds and GURPS can cohabitate successfully.
See the full interview, with text transcript, in yesterday’s post.
Also, Geigermann has posted a short recap of the adventure on his blog as well.
The seemingly native GURPS support makes me cry a little. That is nice.
Native by virtue of hard coding work by people like Brian Ronnle and Eric Hill. But yeah, there's a lot of awesome there, and the video of the GCA–>FG export and direct import to the online character sheet is incredibly tempting.
You should see some of the gorgeous skins that "Gigermann" has created for this. If you join again on Saturday, Douglas, we should have Brian spin up the "Crusade theme" instead of the default one he used.
GURPS support for Fantasy Grounds originally started with the efforts of Graham Brand, this was later expanded on by Eric Hill with the enhanced extension everyone currently plays with. Eric and myself are working on the next release of a GURPS ruleset for Fantasy Grounds. This is a complete rewrite designed to capitalize on the new features in Fantasy Grounds v3 and should be available within the next couple of months.
Looks nice!
We've been using Fantasy Grounds+GURPS ruleset for almost four years now with this group. Though not perfect by any definition, we've never encountered a situation where the ruleset was a true hindrance to play—even the large-graphics issue can be remedied by using smaller images. And it continues to be improved (to the extent that the Online Policy allows).
Radskyrta's mad charge FTW! 😛
Does Fantasy Ground have a repository system like MapTool? Where you can put all the assets up on a website before a session and FG downloads all the images from there instead of peer to peer?
Not currently, no. Handling of the graphics is FG's biggest weakness, I think, and is well known to the developers. It will be improved at some point, I'm certain, but I have no idea what form that improvement will take. Surely they will take lessons from other successful VTTs.
Looks like a great tool, especially for a scattered group that formerly played in the same room, all of whom know each other and the rules moderately well. I wish I had the pull to make GURPS support halfway official . . .
So do we all, of course! :-
Yeah that would be great. Fantasy Grounds would be the way to go for commercializing it too.
As another of the players from that session – I'm Rigil, who played Gabe the blademaster – there's so much awesome into the system that I am legitimately considering implementing it into our face-to-face group for various reasons, not the least of which being the combat tracker (which auto-populates according to basic speed so I don't have to remember where everything is at) AND the amazingly helpful modifiers box. I also love the capability of letting just one player see an image which is obviously the same as "come over here and look at my screen, PC1. That's what you see."
Hope to see you again, Douglas! Radskyrta needs to ride again! 😀
I had fun siccing the dragons on bad guys. And very nearly on a party member.