Getting into Fantasy Grounds
A while back I left Roll20 for a number of reasons, and I've picked up Fantasy Grounds as an alternative. I chose it because it's relatively well-known and a lot of people swear by it, and it has a nice ultimate package that allows anyone to join you without having to worry about their own subscription or the like.
It's also more "feature-complete" than Roll20 in terms of how it works as a tabletop simulator, though I haven't had a whole lot of time to spend on it yet.
That's something of a weird thing to say, because I know that in theory Roll20 does almost everything that Fantasy Grounds does, but it does it in a way that requires more intervention.
For reference, you can totally use Roll20 to fill out a character sheet and use macros (assuming that someone has made a character sheet–the same limitation applies to Fantasy Grounds), but on Fantasy Grounds you're able to drag class, race, and background options into a character sheet in 5e and have it "just work", though character creation isn't really built into Fantasy Grounds like it is on D&D Beyond: if you make a mistake it won't fix it for you in any way.
A rather sloppy combat test.
What really sells Fantasy Grounds for me is that it provides really slick high-quality features. It's not intuitive–I'd describe the interface as being sort of an apotheosis of late-90's UI design–but once you figure it out almost everything flows so quickly and simply that it's not at all difficult to use. Generally things drag and drop into place or are interacted with using a right-click context menu, and once you figure out that everything else comes together. It really feels a lot like the UI of Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil game, and is similarly complex until you get used to it.
I'm going to post more of a review on the weekend, once I've (hopefully) run my first game with it.
The one potential downside is that since it uses a host-client connection, you're more likely to have problems with connecting through to other players than you are on Roll20.
That is quite amazing! I've always wonder what options there are out there for people who enjoy this short of thing online without having to be in person.
Being able to play from your sofa, in sweats and unkempt, is great. No traveling for the game session (or having to clean your home before and after gaming). No one is bothered if your bag of crisps crackles or you light a cigarette. Giving notes to players without the others' notice is easier, no more boredom for uninvolved players if the group split: they can fluff a bit in the chat and the GM + active other players can read it. And with having chat logs you always know where you stopped last time or who was it that killed the endboss in the last campaign ;)
It requires discipline to keep players from talking at the same time, you have to emphasize more or differently, you have to describe a bit more. But I love it
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I forgot to mention that Fantasy Grounds has a pin system where you can drop pretty much any text/data as a pin, something Roll20 doesn't do and which is really nice for making a sort of Google Maps setup.
Fantasy Grounds is impressive and it's definitely worth the money. It's especially great if there is a character sheet for the game you play. Often you can upload your character file from a character generator and can start to play. If you are "only a user" - be it GM or player - it's lovely.
But the connection thing... First the GM has to host - you can't host for another person like other virtual game tables offer. And then FG needs IPv4 which is a real problem in Germany where a lot of people have IPv6 and you probably have to pay for the "business solution" with IPv4...
You can tweak and program a lot of things though it's not as easy as with Roll20 and the map making + using function of Roll20 is a dream. But I prefer Maptool to both of them ;)
I'm mostly just using Fantasy Grounds for D&D, so that's one of the places where it really shines. I haven't tried other stuff on it, but the 5e experience is really sleek, especially compared to Roll20's.
Connectivity is the one thing that's a pain about Fantasy Grounds. I had to reset my router to get port forwarding set up to get Fantasy Grounds to work (didn't write down the admin password, yay!). Fortunately, I have an IPv4 address, which helps. Do you know if the IPv4 requirement is current and/or how it interacts with the Alias system?
I think Roll20 might slightly edge out on maps a bit, but I use third-party stuff for maps anyway. I've used Maptool and don't dislike it, but there's something about Java apps that I really don't care for.