
There are well integrated sections to help you organize your story, including text formatting that allows you to transfer flavor text easily and efficiently from your story entry into the chat box. Unlike Roll20 and VT Fantasy Grounds serves as an excellent Role Playing organizer as well.

This is what separates Fantasy Grounds and justifies its price tag. The way it compensates for the difficulty is by making it so much easier for you to get a group together and play D&D and not just the combat portion. That is another thing that must be mentioned, if you are planning on being the Dungeon Master for your Fantasy Grounds group there is a steep learning curve that you must hurdle before you will be able to start anything, but it is well worth it. If this all sounds a little too technical, you are right, but fortunately there are a plethora of easily accessible tutorial videos and a lively online forum to help you through your woes. You can use all the PDFs you already have stockpiled in your computer and parse their information using programs like the “4e Parser” to scrape the data from them for use in the program. For example, it allows you to target your intended victim, roll hit dice automatically with specific weapons you have equipped, and calculate your success and damage based on actual stats from actual D&D books. Like Roll20 and VT it does an excellent job of simulating combat and laying down the rules for the Player Characters in the game. The major issue is that programs like Roll20 and VT turn D&D into roll playing games instead of role playing games.Įnter Fantasy Grounds II, a desktop application that has been around on the internet for a few years and has recently ended up on Steam. Unfortunately they fall short when it comes to telling a story and creating a realistic world. These programs are excellent for the combat simulation that is such a critical component to Dungeons and Dragons. Roll20 and Virtual Tabletop are usually the first two to come to my mind. There is no shortage of tabletop simulators designed for D&D.


So in this review we will look exclusively at the application itself and some of its strengths and weaknesses as an application for playing D&D. It is difficult, if not impossible, to summarize a game as vast, varied, and labyrinthine as Dungeons and Dragons, it would be similar for me to try and summarize the plot of Star Trek… all of it. You come upon a steam supported virtual tabletop that facilitates role playing as well as it does combat.
