Does Arkenforge directly support Star Trek Adventures?
In this case, its not just Modiphius: they would have to get clearance from ViacomCBS.
Sadly they don’t.
But the Scifi material that is comming out can be used for several scifi rpg’s.
Also using animated content is super.
Most of the vtt products have complicated themselves right out of my interest.
A map with the ability to hide things the players cannot see and an easy way to move markers for PCs, NPCs and items of interest.
A way for every one to talk to each other.
All the other stuff is just unnecessary blather.
Dice rollers and virtual PC/NPC/Stat Blocks are simply irrelevant. We all have those physically.
I bought/subscribed to a few of the pay versions as well as tried the free ones and they are so caught up in bell’s and whistles that you never actually get to the map and tokens.
@Spence try out the magnificient PlanarAlly, a free and opensource virtual tabletop. It’s pretty barebone, focusing on a map (including line of sight) and movement/display of tokens. It can be upgraded with stats etc. but keeps this out of the way if one does not want to use it. Reducing all the clutter while staying pretty mighty is a design goal, I think.
It’s under active development so the documentation lags behind actual development. Plus, it’s designed with primarily Dungeons & Dragons in mind, but getting the grid out of the way is a thing of three or four clicks.
It lacks all that communication things, though. So you’d need to use some (voice)chat programme separately. But, to be honest, most of us are already using some so I never saw the point in integrating this kind of stuff into VTTs.
Are the grids adjustable? I play games that use hexes as well as squares. I’d love to find one that would simply allow you to drop in a map and then drop a grid over it. Not really a deal breaker though, as long as you can remove the vtt grid. I have a map maker that I can use to add grids to the map itself. Though the ability to turn it on and off during the session can be helpful.
Yes, it is adjustable in scale and presentation. It works best with a squares-grid, but supports both flat-top and pointed-top hexes. Snapping behaviour can be weird with hexes, though, as this is currently only experimental. Of course the grid can also be simply turned off/invisible.
I’d recommend to click around at planarally.io a bit, for a quick glance at the UI, look at this site in the Tutorial section. Again, it is under active development, sometimes neglecting documentation a bit (it’s open source and the dev does this in their time off), so it might also be an idea to go to one of the public servers (there are at the moment two providers known) and click around a bit.
Keep in mind that this is a hobby project some guy is doing in their time off. It’s pretty neat and works well, but might have some random quirks to confront you with. But in summary, I totally love the software and use it myself when I dm/gm.
Back to the matter of Fantasy Grounds…has there been any forward movement on this project?
@MisterX Thanks
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Ok…little or no clear specifics on Fantasy Grounds. I keep hitting a wall between The Developer being Vague about the Time Frame and Modiphius, albeit understandably, not having answers. Plus it still needs to go thru Fantasy Grounds for checking and its been suggested that Paramount may claim time have its own say. All very frustrating for a campaign set that, 6 months ago, was supposed to be almost ready for Beta. Going to give this other system a go this weekend though. I like the graphics I’ve seen.
It is very bewildering to me that some fancy clicky-things of a third party decide over whether one plays a certain roleplaying game, or not. I remember days when we had just some pencils and a few sheets of paper, were lucky if one of us had a copy of a rulebook – and still had a truckload of fun and great, great stories. I am completely baffled that, these days, one obviously chooses a roleplaying game by VTT support and not by the stories it offers.
But I might simply be a different generation of gamer. Who knows?
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I’m actually with you on that. I’ve been playing since the 70s. Its an interesting point.The thing is, we’ve had to more and more rely on a Virtual Table Top to keep games going. I’m quite sure our group would have disbanded by now if not for the virtual option, and this goes back a few years before Covid. As the players get older its harder to carve out time to have, and for the past year its really been impossible for safety reasons. True, alot of the extra bells and whistles of a Virtual Top aren’t technically required, but they become useful to offset the fact that you no longer have a ‘live’ setting, which I think can be off-putting to the player. The difficulties presented for running online require a V-Top of some sort to soften the experience for the player, but that just makes the setup more intensive for the GM. You really need to pre-prep games alot. An officially support tool would help alot there.
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Okay, then it’s simply different experience. I share most of what you say (including the problem of time and distance, sadly). And you’re perfectly right, having a VTT supports play a lot (note that I am not a big fan of VTTs in general).
When I compare STA to the other system I GM, the latter feels super intense on preparation, with half-a-page-long stat-blocks for a minor foe, making me to experience STA very lightweight and fast. This leads me to often just look at the paper before me or the PDF in another window/tab instead of typing everything into the VTT. But I should not have generalised that, please accept my apologies.
Having said that: Yes, a tool would help. Definetly.
Does any body know what will be released as VTT content?
Is it only VTT support on fantasygrounds (RPG system) or are we getting VTT content.
With VTT content I mean Star Trek (varius species) related tokens (top down), object, displays (LCARS), furniture (biobeds, tables, chairs, alcove,…), textures, tiles,…
Is there an official answer?
I’d asked a similar question early on at the developer’s site and never got an answer. I’d love to see some TOS era maps or tiles. I’ve tried to create some using combination of Illustrator and Photoshop but have had to learn more about using both.
I started using star trek online for object content.
Top view printscreen, then using the lasso tool cut and paste the object (tokens, furniture, LCARS, biobed,…). It takes an enormus amounth of time.
I also started learning Blender to make new 3D content which I make PNG iamges of.
I silentely hoped that I would inspire others to do the same, so that we could combine our efforts.
Even created Gif images of Lcars computers.
Below you can find a couple of examples what I’ve tried to make:
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Great work on the objects.
Any official updates from Modiphius on Star Trek: Adventures in Fantasy Grounds to help celebrate First Contact Day?
This isn’t official, but from what I have been able to gather, they were close to beta. Then the big FG update hit that changed a lot of things hit. Top priority was to rulesets that were already released, ie Conan. Recently, they got Conan fixed, and now their attention has returned to STA.
I’d asked a similar question early on at the developer’s site and never got an answer.
I’m not pointing a finger at anyone, but the developer has been asked, it seems once every 3-5 days. Why answer if they currently have nothing to report?
I’m just looking for a time frame. And, yes I know this still has to go back though FG for approval ( and maybe Paramount to boot.) I know alot of it is the nature of program development, but Its just disappointing its taken this long.