Hello, and welcome to the wonderful world of Fantasy Grounds. How excited you must be, I know I was, at the prospect of expanding your Tabletop world. If you haven't already purchased a license, I have some advice for you.

Advice for players.

Fantasy Grounds goes on sale with some frequency on steam. Do not buy the ultimate as it pertains to those who DM only. A subscription is not cost effective if you plan on playing more than a year. So buy the Full License if your serious about playing.

Advice for DMs with a real life group.

The Ultimate license was made with you in mind, and is cheap for what it gives you. The power to recruit anyone, in real life or online, to your games. They will never have to buy or subscribe to Fantasy Grounds to play in your game. So Smiteworks is closing off more potential revenue sources than your ultimate license brought them in revenue. And you have this license for life. Meaning in 20 years even if you forgot, you can see it and go. Hmmm how bout a game. And pick up right where you left off.

Advice for GMs who do not recruit from real life.

You can totally get by with a full license. Unless your active in other gaming communities like Roll20 and wanna involve those friends in your FG, most people on the FG forums and game board can play in a game with a Full License DM. The ultimate gives no more features than the full. Only allows for free 2 play players.

On purchasing DLC.

Advice for Players.

You have no need to purchase any DLC. The GM will have everything you need to make a character and play the game.

Advice for GMs who own pdf copies of resource materials.

If you have a rule book or adventure in pdf format already, you Can enter it manually and forgo buying it off of the Store as a ready to go module. But this does some effort, so it depends on how lazy you are. Is a weeks worth of effort worth saving the 6 bucks, or 20 or 30 in some cases for 1-20 Adventures. If you are comfortable with computers, you can even get parsing tools, and use a text editor to expedite the process.

Advice for GMs who are just starting and own no pdfs.

First off calm down, its going to be ok. If you have saved your pennies, you can go the cheap route with lots of work. Or the slightly less cheap, but still pretty cheap route of buying the DLC as you need it. First off pick a system FG already has right off the bat, Pathfinder and 5e have SRD (System Reference Document) content included. So you don't have to buy the Modded Ruleset and have basic rules, enough to get by. Although buying a new Ruleset like Savage Worlds that comes with the Rules built in, will be cheaper than 5e after all is said and done, once you have the core books. Pathfinder is Paizo's version of 3.5 and is easy to get into for very little cost. And you need only buy the adventures themselves, or make up a homebrew for free. 5e is slightly more expensive as a GM as it is cutting edge current releases priced like they would be in a physical game store.

The cheaper route is buying any pdf you want from a reputable site. I useDMSGuild[www.dmsguild.com] and DrivethruRPG[www.drivethrurpg.com]. Many of the pdfs you buy on DMSGuild now come with FG modules.

I don't think you can get pdfs of 5e core rules other than the basic rules which are not enough for a GM. So your best bet is DLC. And it will cost ya. The SRD material doesn't come with a great deal of things, and you will be limping without the full modules. Which is you have the time, a scanner, and the physical books, nothing is stopping you from making your own using Par5e. Just don't go sharing it.

Pathfinder has OGL content already included with base FG, and a wide library of additional content available in the http://fantasygrounds.com forums. For a cash strapped GM this is the better choice.

When actually buying DLC

Buy what you need as you need it. Pick a single campaign to run, and get anything thats relevant. Then run that campaign. Don't be overzealous, and try multiple campaigns. You'll be paying for a headache. Check for user created maps, and tokens on the fantasy grounds forums before you buy.

Fantasy Grounds is a networking software that connects the GM's Host Computer to the Player's client computers. And when so many different computers talk to one another, there are problems. Specifically one problem. It is called Port 1802, and if your going to GM eventually your going to become an expert in Port Forwarding.

First thing.

Don't Panic, this is very fixable and will require no additional money to do so.

Second thing.

You are not alone, most peoples networks are not configured right of the bat to allow a program quite like Fantasy Grounds free access to the internet. Its special.

Third Thing.

The fix is not the same for everyone. It depends on what operating system, firewall, and router/modem you have. Most people will find it a simple matter.


Go to this screen you will notice here I have two different colored boxes. One outlining my internal ip address. And the other outlining the Run Test button.

Go ahead and hit the run test button. If it says success, congratulations you are done.

If it says Fail, you need to do some configuring. With your ultimate goal, getting that internal ip address to stay that number without changing. AS well as adding a rule to both your firewall, and your modem/routers configuration. Fantasy Grounds uses port 1802, so in your modem/router rule designate that port going to the internal ip address that Fantasy Grounds shows you.

How to do this varies, instead of explaining my system, which may be different from yours. I direct you to House of Healing[www.fantasygrounds.com]. You should already be a member of the forum, if not make a profile and post a topic after reading through the stickies or site searching for the answer. Title it Port 1802 (your operating system) (your router). And then give a brief description of what you have tried. Either the forums most active moderators, Trenloe and Damned, will walk you through (in teamspeak or Discord if necessary). Or the Developer DDavison will assist you.

As a GM, you are going to need to add Images, tokens, and modules. All of these things can be found in one inconveniently located folder, hidden deep in the bowels of your computer. Luckily there is a shortcut.

Notice where I have the red circle? That is a button, push it. It will open your Data folder. I recommend moving this folder to a more convenient location. I have mine located directly under C:

To move this folder, navigate up one folder in your windows address bar.

As you can see I already relocated mine. After you navigate up one folder, copy the entire Fantasy_Grounds folder, don't move or delete it. After copying the folder, place the copy anywhere you wish it to be. I find it convenient to be right under C: for easy sidebar navigation.

Once you have placed the folder you are not done. You need to start Fantasy Grounds and head back to the screen above. Locate the Settings button. And click it. You will see this box.


Notice the red circle? You need to set this folder to the location of your newly placed data folder. Once you've done that Fantasy grounds will pull and save to the new location instead of the orignal.

Oh and while I have setting pulled up, see where my handle is circled. This needs to be your login handle to fantasygrounds.com. It connects to the websites store so the names have to match. To get your purchased content updated in your system.

There are some additional things your going to find either necessary or just convenient to have. And there are many ways to do things, don't take the ones I present here as the only options available.

Voice Server

When your a player, you have to have multiple voice chat programs because DMs don't all use the same one. Now that your about to run your own game, you get to pick the one you want to use. FG-Con provides a free team speak server[www.fantasygrounds.com] for anyone to use. Details in the link provided.

Another avenue is skype, a popular choice amongst DMs and GMs.

I use Discord,[discordapp.com] I get my own free voice and text chat room that can act as a message board. And many other features.

Update: FantasyGrounds now has its own Discord channel, and it's very active.

https://discord.gg/VKbhkSt

It boils down to what your most comfortable with, chances are you have experienced all three while as a player. No matter which one you prefer, they all get the job done.

Mapping

I could make an entire guide about mapping for Fantasy Grounds. For now I am going to just stick with a couple different tools you can use to make your own maps.

First off, you want maps that don't have the grid already drawn on them. If you do find a map you really love that has a grid, don't worry when that grid doesn't line up. They rarely do... Luckily, there is a few options to get your grid lining up right. Valeros has a handy utility [www.fantasygrounds.com]program, which will do alot of the work for you.

Or

You can use a photo editing program to measure and resize the map so the grid is 100 px tall and wide. Check out this tutorial [www.fantasticmaps.com]on how to do just that.

Speaking of photo editing programs, the two big ones are GIMP and Photoshop. Which one you choose depends on your bank account. Photoshop[www.adobe.com] is available as a 9.99 a month subscription and is the superior program. But GIMP[www.gimp.org] is free and open source and capable of the same things just harder to learn.

Another populare choice is Campaign Cartographer. [secure.profantasy.com]

Whichever you choose, they both are capable of making professional quality maps in several ways. The easiest is using tiles on a grid. But there are many ways. The best advice I can give you is check out Cartographer's Guild Forum for their many many mapmaking tutorials. [www.cartographersguild.com]

Note on Images. When making a map, or ripping one from a pdf. Keep them as small as you can, and export as a .jpg. This keeps the file size small, and makes it easier for Fantasy Grounds to load them without locking up your system for a few seconds. Any image you have should never be larger than 2048 x 2048 pixels.

Tokentool

There are many ways to create tokens, the above mention photo manipulation programs being one. But there is also a simple utility program called token tool. I use and love it. You can get it at rptools.net download page. [www.rptools.net]

Note on Tokens. Any tokens in your FG tokens folder load into your Ram when your playing FG, many people find it convenient to put their tokens into a folder and zipping it up. Then renaming the .zip as .mod and sticking it in the modules folder. This way you can use the tokens, and they aren't chewing up memory.

Evernote

It is just a great program for campaign planning and research. It allows for web clipping so you can find a rule on an SRD website web clip it as an image and then stick it in your campaign's image folder for a quick rule reference. Or other things. Get it free at evernote.com

Note++, Par5e, And Autohotkey
As you become more comfortable modding Fantasy Grounds you will find these tools to be awesome. Notpad++ is a great program [notepad-plus-plus.org]for making and editing .mod files. When used in conjunction with Par5e[www.fantasygrounds.com] and AutoHotkey. [autohotkey.com] The script I use in Autohotkey for parsing can be found in post #12 by Xorn[www.fantasygrounds.com].

7-zip

Your going to need a file archiver, and 7-zip is open source and free. So if your tired of dealing with winzip trials. I recommend this one.

Streaming

At some point your going to notice one of the streaming sites, I like Twitch.com myself. And your going to wonder how to do that. Well, long story short. OBS or Open Broadcaster Software[obsproject.com]. Its free, and there is a tutorial [www.fantasygrounds.com]done by Vishera.

There are already great tutorials available for you to learn the ins and outs of module creation, Parsing, and entering the information. They are even linked for you in Fantasy Grounds itself, I have outlined the link in a black box.


So instead I will give you some planning tips, specific to Fantasy Grounds.

1. For site based adventures, save yourself some clutter and use Fantasy Grounds Map pinning to tack story entries directly to your map. You can do this with Encounters as well. This way you just have to open up a map, and wait for the party to go near the relevant pin. In the example below I have pinned The Cathedral to the town of Dinor, because that is where the town is located. You can see the red pin symbol on the map. Clicking on it brings up the story entry. To pin a map, just drag and drop the link.


2. For Event Based Adventures, you can still use map pins for combats to save yourself clutter. But the key to events, is how you organize your Story Tabs. The list is alphabetical, and any campaign will create several dozen story entries as it moves along. In the example below, notice how I have a series of numbers before the name of important entry. That is to keep those particular entries always at the top. They are my directory entries that link to other story entries in a planned out progression. You can further organize story entries by groupings. Just drag and drop the link onto the group name above.

There is also an option in the library menu to control which libraries you see on your sidebar. It's as simple as checking or unchecking the option.

And don't forget the hotbar at the bottom. You can drag and drop almost anything there. Even the next turn button from the combat tracker. Although it sometimes breaks, and needs to be redragged.


When it comes game time, I just select the chapter we are on from the story box, and follow the progression of links I prepared before hand. And shift between groups for what I need. So I am not constantly searching through Story entries.

3. For combats make up your Npcs, then put them into an encounter, pin the encounter to the map you will be using. Then link the map into the Story entry where ever you want it to be. Load the map drag the encounter to the combat tracker, and your ready to go in seconds. You can even pre place the tokens on the map to save more time in game. At the cost of Prep time.

4. Don't copy a pdf word for word, find the statblocks and make enter them in. Make or find maps for the encounters, and work out a story progression. Keep the Pdf open and refer back to it for the finer details of things.

5. You can use maps and images from the pdfs in non public venues. So no streaming unless you have user created maps. Or a purchased map pack with a license agreement that allows public display.

6. Same with tokens. Pull an image from a pdf and use tokentool to make your own token, but don't use those tokens in public venues.

7. When your running a published adventure, whether one shot or long campaign. Don't enter it into your game session. Create a new Session and name it for the Adventure and then enter it in, when you are done export it as a module into your modules folder. That way you can open it as a module in your library in your actual game session.

8. Before you create a new module, search through the forums for someone who has already done it. As long as you keep the material in your module to OGL content you can put it on the forums to share. This is stuff like monster and npc stat blocks, or tables, item lists, feat lists. Stuff without images and copyright material basicly.

9. Don't try to do to much or make some aspect overly detailed and perfect. Online Play flows differently than a real life group. Something you worked on for four hours will be casually overlooked by the majority of ADD riddled online players.

10. Even if you don't use Par5e you can still use the Autohotkey and script from above to quickly copy text from pdfs and clean it up before Cntrl V into Fantasy Grounds. It truly saves hours of direct entry. If you get nothing else from this guide, get Autohotkey and Xorns script.

Well, you have the basics down. You have your first session planned. All you need now is a group and a date. But how do you find other people to play with? There are several ways, all of them are annoying... I mean tedious... I mean user friendly and conveniently placed for you the DM.

Group Sizing

When you first start out, you will be amazed at the number of people who will be interested in playing. And you may feel like your leaving them out because you only have so many spots. Then you will consider a second group, such is your kind nature.

In a word, Don't!

Make an alternate list, and run one group. 2 groups will burn you out and you will quit inside a month.

Here is another good rule of thumb. If you invite 5 people to your first session, by the fifth session you may have two of those players left. And a crop of people who missed your awesome intro session and have no idea whats going on.

One strategy is to hold off on your long campaign, and run one shot games, in your preferred time slot, til you find a group of players that won't quit after two sessions.

Another strategy is to always be actively recruiting and employ an alternate list. Don't worry, just about everyone on that alternate list is going to see play time. I am not kidding, the player turnover is ridiculous.

Where to Advertise your Game

As far as I know there are two reliable places to find a game using Fantasy Grounds. One is the official Fantasygrounds.com website. The other is for 5 edition Adventure League games, alonlinetools.net

There is another website that offers scheduling for Fantasy Grounds games, but the administrator of that website and I are mortal enemies, so I will not be sending any business his way.

I have heard you can also find games on sites like Reddit, but have personally never gone
looking there.

Note to Ultimate License Holders, you can advertise anywhere you want. At your local red lobster via pin board if you want. Just have your players download the demo version, thats all they need.

Fantasy Grounds Forums and Calendar

Head on over to https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?40-LFG-Looking-for-Group and read through the Sticky posts. In one you will find the game listing template. Create a new thread and use that template. Describe your game, and the type of player your looking for. Then head on over to https://www.fantasygrounds.com/gamecalendar/dashboard.php this is the calendar dashboard. From here hit the Manage Campaigns link in blue. Now look for the Create New Campaign button.

Name your campaign, designate the number of players and write in the description. The entry box for the description is annoying in that you can only see one line and can't make errors. Include any relevant information. Submit. Once you have done that, you can copy the address and link it in your lfg post.

Why use the Fantasy Grounds Calendar and not another, say Obsidian Portal?
Well for one, by using the Calendar your not requiring your players to go sign up at another website, go through the process and jump through the hoops. The calendar page has a discussion function, and a place for you to make GM announcements. As well as a way for everyone to vote on game times.

Submitting the times takes some practice, you have to format the time just right. If you wanted 7 pm for instance you would put in 7. But if you wanted 7 am you would put in 07:00.

And by keeping with the Game Calendar you make future recruiting easier by toggling whether your accepting players or not. People searching the Calendar for a game will see that you are, and your times. And can then apply.

Online Players

Your first game, you will likely accept anyone that applies. Your second game your going to know what I am talking about.

Everyone has their different play styles, through the magic of the internet, which of those play styles ends up in your game is like russian roulette.

Do not be afraid to firmly deny a player's request. Especially if they are asking for something you don't directly know about. If they quit and play elsewhere because you wont let them do something. You are saving yourself some hassle of the whiny kind later on.

If you get a player that is more rules knowledgeable than yourself and they aren't afraid to exploit it. Do not be afraid to explain to that player, you do not care whether x is this and y is that. It is your game and his/her constant interruptions to gain slight advantage using the rules is disruptive. If that player quits, your saving yourself some future hassle.

If a player is listening to you explain your game, and they start asking for their own preferences right off the bat, or they won't play. Inform them they are welcome to look elsewhere, or pay you for your time in setting up a custom game for their highness.

Always include some simple instructions for new players to join, as a test. If an applying player doesn't perform the simple instruction, don't invite them. They will likely be a problem in the future.

If the Player likes your game, and doesn't like your choice of voice server or other random pointless nonsense. Don't feel bad when you tell him, tough cookies.

Basically if you get in the habit of capitulating to the many troll like players you will encounter, you are not going to have a good time. Be firm, run your game your way, and kick trouble makers early so your other players know you brook no nonsense that isn't part of the games intended nonsense.

Online players are many, DMs are few. They need you more than you need them. And watch out for the player bragging about having more than two games, they are likely flaky and join many games then miss frequently because of real life concerns.

Many GMs as a result of flaky players have a rigourous application process, including up to 2 hour interviews in which they have a 1 on 1 campaign to see if the player may be compatible. When I say don't brook nonsense, I am not kidding around. It get's out of hand fast.

And when you do find a good player, get their email, befriend them. A lot of times good players get a crap group and then fall off the radar for months. When you see a good player have away to invite them personally without going through the forums.