Announce text & FOW

Greetings,

After several days of side-by-side comparisons between d20Pro, FGII, and Battlegrounds, I am happy to say I believe d20Pro is getting my money.
Here are my observations for those curious or in the same quandary:
- Battlegrounds - A confusing mixture of extremely clever features and horrible UI. I LOVE the ability to use dynamic and static FOW at the same time... but pretty much everything else, while done generally well, fails to compare to either d20Pro or FGII. Battlegrounds was eliminated.

- FGII - I find FGII very complex to use in comparison to d20Pro, but it is also a tad more powerful and extensible. Like that it has addable rulesets, a ton on commercial modules and add, and robust scripting. If I had one major complain about FGII, it would be the wretched way it handles FOW (Fog of War). One loads an image, then applies a mask to it (FOW). In play, you unmask the portion you want the players to see.. and here is the issue - it immediately unmasks (giving you no opportunity to fix a mistake) and the unmask tool is a freeform "lasso" tool.. difficult to be precise with. Also easy to unmask areas you didnt want to reveal, which of course are immediately sent to the players. Conversely, the very best thing about FGII is that one can have their entire adventure prepared inside FGII.. GM instructions, notes, "read-aloud text", whatever.. with internal hyperlinks between related pieces of info. The "read-alouds" are boxed, giving a visual que, and the whole box can be dragged to the chat window and dropped to "announce" that text to the players. That rocks!


-d20Pro - I love the UI! To me, it feels more like playing a game than FGII (which seems more like...work). Combat is MUCH easier to manage than in FGII, and its extremely easy to add material on the fly in d20Pro. I do however, have a couple of complaints/feature requests for d20Pro... First, whats up with the way you implemented the "announce text"? Very cumbersome to have to flip over to another app, select text, copy, flip back, paste, then announce. How about adding a tool to the Library where, like creatures and items, I can have my pre-produced text snippets all loaded.. and insert to chat with a simple double-click? Given the beautiful way you handled creatures and items, I would think a library of text items wouldn't be too hard.... While you're at it, you could improve on FGII's whole "Story" concept in the same tool.. Store these text items in their own Library.. a double-click Opens the item for GM view/edit.. and has an Announce button if I want to send that text to the chat window. That way, I can store all my notes and such along-side my "read-alouds".. and only send the ones I want to send to the chat window. Now, that would be cool!
My second request is referenced elsewhere on these forums and I hear you're working on it, so I wont elaborate, just add my vote.. please give us options for dynamic as well as static (or both) FOW. Thanks!'

Overall, I find that d20Pro best meets my needs, is easier to use, quicker to master, has better combat controls, and of course looks a lot prettier. If that isnt enough, it's significantly less expensive as well. d20Pro FTW.

Thanks for listening,

Gerry

p.s. Please continue to develop extensibility for alternate rules (such as 4e).

 

Thanks, Thurigan. I looked at that handout feature, but it doesnt appear to be able to use text files, only images (bmp, jpg, png, etc). While I could certainly take the text I wish to display and save it as an image file.. that would add a lot of steps to the process. I could always make my text HTML, put it on my web server, and link to it as a web-handout... and just not share it with the players if it was Dm-only info.

As I stated originally, the issue isnt a deal breaker, but I think it would be a VERY handy feature, especially if one could use it for non-"announced" text as well... like for my Dm notes, outlines, etc.

 

I'd never heard of the "snipping Tool".. thats handy! Thanks for the tip!