So here's a big info dump on how the D&D Battlegrounds project is progressing. I got good news and bad news, but ultimately even the bad news stem from good news, as you will see, so in the end it's all good. But let's start from the straight-up good news that are easier to explain and understand.
The straight-up good news is that danjiro's group, D&D3, which is the Pathfinder group, will be starting this Sunday at 3:30 PM UTC, and I'll be playing with them as player, taking the fifth slot in the team (the others are ChevRage, Robomoo, ExiledOne and Archonus). I've never played as player before, and with dan as DM and the
War for the Crown campaign, which is all available on Steam and whose first part we bought as Fantasy Grounds DLC, it'll basically be like playing a videogame, but better. I can't freakin' wait. (We are setting up a location-triggered music list, and there is also a sound system we can plug in where, when you swing a sword or cast a fireball, it plays the appropriate sound, plus background sounds for forests or busy taverns, etc. Not sure if we'll have this up and running by this Sunday, but it's coming eventually. Like I said, exactly like a videogame.)
Fantasy Grounds - Pathfinder RPG - War for the Crown AP 1: Crownfall (PFRPG)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/8327 ... all_PFRPG/Paizo wrote:As Taldor's entire capital city gathers to celebrate, few realize that conspiracy and royal rivalries are about to shake the empire to its core! When a high-minded cabal of senators and nobles tries to steer the nation away from disaster, Emperor Stavian III orders a bloodbath in the senate halls, trapping neophyte spies inside layer upon layer of magical security. As tensions rise and the emperor falls, can the heroes escape the forgotten halls beneath the senate and save the heir to Taldor from an assassin's blade? And even then, can anyone prevent a civil war that will tear one of the Inner Sea's oldest nations apart at its rotting seams?
It appears to be a grand urban campaign of political intrigue, with more role-playing than combat according to dan, so it should be a perfect introduction to videogame people to see what proper D&D can do that the videogames can't. I'll be livestreaming the whole thing on Twitch, so you're welcome to join us and take a look, though note that we won't be interacting with viewers in the stream chat. That'll be forbidden for the entire D&D Battlegrounds project. There just won't be time for people to parse all the information in the game and at the same time chat on Twitch. But the viewers are free to chat between themselves.
And by the way, there is still an open slot in this team if a sixth player wants to join us, though not if you've already joined teams 1 or 2; I mean a brand-new participant. Talk to me to add your account to the site, and talk to dan to roll your character if you're interested.
So let's talk now about my groups, groups 1 and 2. Things here start getting messy, now that I have an idea of how Fantasy Grounds works. Originally, I had imagined that the program just takes in a few numbers, say your strength, intelligence, etc. and your hit points, and that you roll the dice in the program but calculate the math in your head, and then manually subtract hit points from the wounded and whatnot. In actual fact, however, the program does pretty much everything. Which means that you must enter, not only the players' stats, but also all the enemies', which is a ton of extra work because we are talking about dozens of enemy types PER SESSION. And then, when the player chooses to attack an enemy, the calculations happen automatically and the program tells you the result. So the program must know ALL the rules, including the Dark Sun-specific rules, because that's where groups 1 and 2 are situated. But the extra Dark Sun rule changes are massive. And Fantasy Grounds doesn't have them. No VTT has them. We're talking TWO extra rule books: the psionics book, that permeates everything that happens in Dark Sun because every player and nearly every enemy has some psionic ability there; and the Dark Sun rulebook that includes non-metal weapon rules, piecemeal armor rules, defiler magic rules, heatstroke rules etc. etc. And that's without even mentioning that Fantasy Grounds doesn't have any of the Dark Sun races, and some of the classes. I would have to manually enter or even program all that stuff in. I had no idea how much work we're talking about. To give you an idea, if you go to the Fantasy Grounds forum, there are threads where people are talking about converting the psionic rules for YEARS and nothing's been done yet. By actual programmers. I just don't see how I could do it myself, let alone before this weekend. Take a look at this thread for example:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/s ... ark-Sun-2egoodmanje wrote:Someone with a lot more free time than me should convert Dark Sun for FG. I'll buy it!! Lol
hawkwind wrote:i think someone has to the psionic book which would be a major undertaking
goodmanje wrote:Yea, I was noticing that. Would have to code support for the psionics system. Bummer....
If you read the whole thread you'll see some people saying they've done some conversion work, but you'd have to contact them and hope they give you the files, and then hope that they've done a GOOD job in the conversion, and then learn how to use it, etc. It is a LOT of work, and success isn't even guaranteed. Frankly, it's overwhelming, and you know I don't get overwhelmed easily.
Now compare my predicament with danjiro's. I bought the first out of six parts of the campaign for him,
Crownfall at €22,99, and he bought the Pathfinder Core Rulebook at €45,99, granted with slight discounts due to the recent sale, but it's still a considerable expense for both of us. But now he has all the rules and races, classes etc. coded in. He has all the enemies of the entire adventure. He has the descriptions to every area pop up automatically when you enter it. He has all the combat maps premade with the enemies pre-placed. All the players have to do is click attack, and the program does everything. And there are no extra rules in this adventure to worry about like psionics, etc. Moreover, consider that dan has used Fantasy Grounds before. Not the latest version, Unity, but he has run games with the older version. So he already knows how to use the program, he just needs a refresher, and then to study the adventure. He should have plenty of time to get all that done by Sunday. In my case, though, I am nowhere near the point where I can even start preparing for the TWO adventures I was supposed to run this weekend. I am swamped just trying to figure how to add Athasian muls and psionicist character sheets into the game lol.
Now there is a "quick" solution to all this. We just play Pathfinder with my groups too. I buy the PF Core Rulebook on Steam, so that's another €45,99, and then I buy as DLC the other two campaigns currently available for selection in the Pathfinder overworld on the Battlegrounds site:
Rise of the Runelords, and
Carrion Crown.
Fantasy Grounds - Pathfinder RPG - Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path Anniversary Edition (PFRPG) €54,99
https://store.steampowered.com/app/6270 ... ion_PFRPG/Fantasy Grounds - Pathfinder RPG - Carrion Crown AP 1: The Haunting of Harrowstone (PFRPG) €19,99
https://store.steampowered.com/app/7278 ... one_PFRPG/The first is more expensive because it includes all six chapters of the campaign. The second includes only the first chapter (and the rest can be purchased later separately).
This would solve all my problems. Every aspect of both the rules and the adventures would already be coded in, and all I'd have to do is click some buttons. With one caveat: I don't know the Pathfinder rules, I only know AD&D 2nd Edition, so I would have to learn these rules, which wouldn't take long, but I certainly wouldn't be ready for this weekend. The upshot is that I wouldn't have to learn these rules VERY WELL to get started, since the program would be handling most of it. But it's still some work to do because special situations arise that need judgement calls, and you don't want me pausing the game for half an hour while I read the rules. Moreover, half of the game is role-playing, and that includes rules too that I presume are not coded into Fantasy Grounds. So I would definitely need to do some studying if we chose this path, but it would be manageable, and at the end of it we'd be guaranteed to have a great experience.
However, this would mess up the entire Battlegrounds project, because we'd be confined to whatever DLC is available on Steam, which might look like a lot at first—1748 DLCs lol—but some of it isn't D&D, and even those that are are a fraction of what exists in print. We would not be able to play in MOST of the worlds and systems, if we stuck to DLC. No Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Birthright, etc. etc. Even Ravenloft they have almost nothing (just
Curse of Strahd, as far as I can see). Even Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, where they have some stuff, they have maybe 1% or 2% of what exists, and what they don't have is precisely the best stuff. Only for Pathfinder and 5E they seem to have almost everything. And while a lot of that stuff is great, without Planescape we can't even connect the worlds together properly. So basically, the DLC-only path is a dead-end and would kill the project. Ultimately dan and I HAVE to learn to input all that stuff in, including somehow rules, not just adventures.
However, Dark Sun is the absolute HARDEST of those rules and settings to code in. So it looks unlikely that we'll be able to play it right away. It would make much more sense to ease gently into Fantasy Grounds by first running DLC stuff, and then after a few months of that, slowly learn to add stuff in, and move into easier, normal settings like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, before advancing to tougher stuff like Planescape and Dark Sun.
So this is what's going to happen. This Sunday I join danjiro's group as player, and I begin to learn the Pathfinder rules, since that's what he's running. It's much easier to learn the rules as player than as DM, and I'll begin the process on Sunday. Then by Monday, we'll know exactly how Fantasy Grounds works, and we can make the call of whether to move the other two groups to Pathfinder, and just buy the DLC to start easing ourselves into Fantasy Grounds. Another option would be to start the other groups in the Forgotten Realms, where there are no psionics or weird rules, and where a few 2E DLC do exist that we can start on. That way I will already know the rules, and I won't have to add any material manually to play. That would be the fastest way to guarantee we can play the week after, and have a good time. And then we take it from there.
So basically, the Battlegrounds project WILL be launched this Sunday at 3:30 PM UTC, for group 3. Groups 1 and 2 should wait until Monday when I will make the decision on what we'll do. Ultimately, I believe that even this bad news is good news because it means that, when Fantasy Grounds is set up properly, it works even more like a videogame than I had originally thought. At the start, it will take us a while to learn how to use it, so the game will probably run slower than it would if we were playing in person, but once we become proficient at it, then speed and smoothness will pick up, and I expect a few months later it will be much faster than in person, not to mention smoother and more immersive with all the extra features available. We'll just have to be patient and put all the extra work in to make it happen. And when I say "we" I mean dan and I. The players won't have to do any work, they'll just have to be patient.
So follow our adventures with dan's group on Twitch on Sunday, and look out for an update from me in this thread on Monday. And if you have any questions or suggestions in the meantime, post them in this thread. And finally, don't forget we have one open slot for Sunday, for anyone who is interested.
Gosh I can't wait to play. I hope dan doesn't botch it somehow. No pressure there, dan. The entire
Insomnia community is counting on you.