Over the years as a roleplayer, I've used dozens of tools and built up quite a roster of tricks to make playing easier, especially when dealing with online games. One of the tools that I really have gained an appreciation for is Fantasy Grounds.
The reason why I'm so enamored with Fantasy Grounds is that it has helped me enjoy a game that I usually don't: Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm not some internet troll who thinks that everyone should dislike what I dislike, and I concede that D&D is one of the best designed games out there. It's just not my cup of tea; I think it takes too long to play and lacks some of the key features that I like in my games.
Why Fantasy Grounds Helps
I've talked in the past about not liking Roll20. It's not necessarily an awful thing, but I have concerns with their community management and I find their interface unduly difficult to use, given the fact that it continues to be very much the same as it was during its early days and has the hassle of a web-based influence that doesn't feel modern.
The result is that I always felt like using Roll20 was, at best, more or less equivalent to rolling dice the old-school way, and at worst a hassle as character sheets and other systems failed to work smoothly.
With that said, it's kind of ironic that I would turn to Fantasy Grounds as a replacement, because Fantasy Grounds reminds me very much of the sort of video games that I played in the 90's: a basic interface with custom themes that nonetheless are simply stretched over buttons and trays, context menus, and chat windows.
What it may lack in window dressing, it makes up for in raw power. My biggest gripe with Dungeons and Dragons is that it is difficult to keep track of all the records you need to remember, both as a GM and player. My gaming group loves it, but they're also chronic procrastinators when it comes to getting stuff done and often do not really read the rules (or remember them), so when it comes time to play the rules become an issue.
We've been using D&D Beyond for our in-person games, and it generally works pretty well. I'm a fan of it, but it's still something that has some minor issues; you need to predict what's going to be called for or search it up in the moment, which is more or less what you have to do anyway. The character sheets it creates are solid (albeit with limited opportunity for house rules), and looking stuff up goes relatively quickly.
Then I used Fantasy Grounds.
A screenshot of Fantasy Grounds. As you can see, I'm something of a tab/window hoarder, though I'm also trying to show off more stuff than I usually would have open during a game.
Lost in a somewhat labyrinthine maze of features is the killer feature of Fantasy Grounds: Complete interactivity.
This is really what D&D Beyond lacks: you don't get a whole lot of play assistance. Roll20 does this to an extent, but the interface is slow and I've found that it takes much longer than Fantasy Grounds to get the same outcome.
The interactivity of everything in Fantasy Grounds means that if I ask a player to roll an attack, they can drag that attack from a character sheet and drop it into the combat tracker. Dice roll, damage can be calculated automatically, and the math is done for us.
It really liberates the GM from having to worry about the numbers during play, except to check to see if a creature's close to dying and figuring out what they want to do when that happens.
Likewise, because everything is drag-and-drop, most of my players prefer Fantasy Grounds to other character creation tools (like D&D Beyond); they simply drop an element on a character sheet, and it appears. Classes and backgrounds pop up dialogue boxes for choosing options at key points like level-ups, and items, notes, spells, and every other thing you could think of (and a couple I've never cared to worry about, quite honestly) can neatly interact.
It's smooth and sleek, and while the interface may look like a relic of the past the interactivity feels like the next step in the evolutionary process of virtual tabletops.
How D&D Is Improved
One of my biggest gripes with D&D is that it doesn't do things systematically. Ironically, this is one of the reasons why I like Dungeons & Dragons Online as much as I do, because it's one of the few MMORPGs to make characters feel interesting and distinct due to all the complex layers of interactions, but there's something telling about why I love the video game versions of D&D but not the roleplaying game itself.
For starters, every spell and many character features have an interaction with the rules that is not analogous to other game elements.
Fantasy Grounds gets around this by being robust enough to handle the effects of more or less anything you want to look at. If you don't remember what a status effect does in combat (trivia question: what does the "Stunned" condition do?), you don't have to, because Fantasy Grounds will apply the effect for you.
Now, the other strength here is that Fantasy Grounds also lets you look everything up; you don't have to remember it, but you also don't have to be surprised by it. This helps because I think that there's this sort of strategic/tactical mismatch in a lot of D&D's play.
The reason for this is simple: You can plan what's going to happen, but in the moment human limitations get in the way of remembering everything. Having to track numbers and resources and all the abilities of a character get quite complex, and while there are lots of reference aids out there those don't really reduce the overall cognitive load, merely the need to recall particular information instead of referencing it.
Wrapping Up
Fantasy Grounds removes the human from the mechanics, but leaves the human in the storytelling and the play part. This means that while it may at times feel more like playing a video game with a narrator giving feedback than a traditional roleplaying experience with dice and character sheets and well-worn tomes, it leaves all the merits of roleplaying.
It also has a key advantage: Because people aren't busy worrying about what they're doing, they're free to actually tell stories. I've noticed that my players have gone from talking a lot about numbers and details to worrying more about the story, and so have I. The mechanical element's still there, giving that satisfaction that comes with a challenge and mastering a game, but it is perceived within the fantasy.
And that's what roleplaying is all about.