{"id":1986,"date":"2020-06-01T01:54:25","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T05:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/?p=1986"},"modified":"2020-06-01T02:46:47","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T06:46:47","slug":"fantasy-grounds-unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/2020\/06\/01\/fantasy-grounds-unity\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasy Grounds Unity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It feels like a lot has happened, both in my personal life and in the world, since my <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/2019\/05\/06\/celestial-winter-session-sixteen-fin\/\" target=\"_blank\">last post a little over a year ago<\/a>. As I noted I&#8217;m now living in another country and at the moment in person tabletop is not an option here. Now that we&#8217;re settled and over the initial transition I&#8217;ve been looking into virtual tabletop as a way to continue some friendships and maintain the hobby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the past, I used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rptools.net\/toolbox\/maptool\/\">MapTools<\/a> for virtual tabletop but while this open source option is feature rich on the &#8216;user friendliness&#8217; scale I&#8217;d rank it as <em>hostile<\/em>. In our last campaign using it &#8211; which admittedly was half a decade ago &#8211; we struggled with the UI and regularly had major connection issues that ate away session time. Many recurring problem stemmed from MapTools&#8217; reliance on Java.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After doing some research, I decided to go with the new Unity version of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fantasygrounds.com\/home\/home.php\">Fantasy Grounds<\/a>. The primary appeal of Fantasy Grounds to me, as compared to it&#8217;s main competitor Roll20, is financial. It has a &#8216;once and done&#8217; payment option while Roll20, at best, allows you to pay by year*.  Basically, Fantasy Grounds has a higher upfront cost in exchange for <em>no ongoing cost<\/em>. Fantasy Grounds also allows Game Masters to host free players &#8211; a critical feature &#8211; though there&#8217;s incentive for players in multiple campaigns to pick up a Standard license.  It&#8217;s also my impression that Fantasy Grounds has better support for <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/paizo.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Paizo&#8217;s<\/a> product line and I knew that I&#8217;d be running Pathfinder 2e. The new Unity version adds stability, compatibility, and important features (such as line of sight) that were lacking from the dated classic version of Fantasy Grounds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>*It should be noted that Roll20 has a free version but that storage space is extremely limited. It&#8217;s not a good option for a Game Master.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I looked into other options such as <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.astraltabletop.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Astral Tabletop<\/a> and <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/286160\/Tabletop_Simulator\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tabletop Simulator<\/a>.. But I kept coming back to Maptools, Roll20, and Fantasy Grounds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m assembling a small group now to play a Pathfinder Society adventure &#8211; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/paizo.com\/products\/btq01zna?Pathfinder-Society-Scenario-100-Origin-of-the-Open-Road\" target=\"_blank\">Origin of the Open Road<\/a> &#8211; and then we&#8217;ll get into a new homebrew campaign. I&#8217;ll begin sharing material on these but, unfortunately, I won&#8217;t resume painting miniatures anytime soon. I left my miniatures in storage with family in the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It feels like a lot has happened, both in my personal life and in the world, since my last post a little over a year ago. As I noted I&#8217;m now living in another country and at the moment in person tabletop is not an option here. Now that we&#8217;re settled and over the initial&#8230; <\/p>\n<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/2020\/06\/01\/fantasy-grounds-unity\/\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[69,70,71],"class_list":["post-1986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tt","tag-fgu","tag-pathfinder2e","tag-vtt"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/FGUPaizo.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8aZ1W-w2","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1986"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1992,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986\/revisions\/1992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaihaku.net\/roleplaying\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}