GM Forge - Virtual Tabletop Reviews

Not user friendly, abandoned by the developers, and really shouldn't be on Steam at all. It's pure abandonware, and every function is hidden behind websites that no longer work, Support for this game doesn't exist.

When you talk about VTTs you always compare with Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. So how does GM Forge compares to those two ? [b]+ It's cheap[/b], no subscription, 25 euros for the GM and free for the players. [b]- It's WIP[/b], features are added every couple of weeks, with this quick development, bugs appear, in a few months all the features will be released and the developper will be able to focus entirely on debugging, I hope so... [b]+ The GM hosts the server[/b], you have all your resources locally, no need to host it with limited space or to depend on a third party server. [b]+ It's damn easy to mod[/b], with the recent updates the sheets are made in HTML, CSS and you can script with JS for additionnal features, JQuery, Bootstrap, a pleasure for any web developper. [b]- Only one developper[/b], today GM Forge depends on the work of one developper. He is very active, does not count his hours but he is alone and if he has to give up for a reason, GM Forge is done. [b]+ Promising features[/b], nothing new, but I would like to think that it takes the best of both Roll20 and FG, Roll20 for its clean UI, simple of use, and FG for the adaptability, you can customize everything, automation, and redact amazing notes with interactive rolls, sharing portraits, conversations... I recommend this software to every GM, even if you don't use it. Purchasing it now supports the developper, and will increase the chances for it to become the perfect VTT, it has an amazing potential. The technology is good, the philosophy is promising, and the community is building progressively.

The lack of support is really killing this VTT. It wants to be good so badly, but the aging software is, after 90 hours, actively fighting me at every possible point. Right-click menus closing immediately, lag to the point my players are seeing my rolls before me, unresponsive to selections, and just recently, throwing me off my game map when I try to select tokens in combat to figure out which one is active. I can't keep using this product and I can't recommend it to anyone else. If you're curious about this VTT and you see this review; just make a Roll20 account and save yourself the inevitable headache.

QUICK BUYER INFO: - This VTT is the program which gives you some very basic tools to start making things yourself. [u]This means you have to code everything yourself in either HTML or JSON just to get it working.[/u] There is some pre-made content that can be downloaded in the Steam Workshop for a few systems like D&D 5e, but if your content is not there, you must make it yourself. There is potential here but as of currently, I cannot recommend the purchase. I bought this hoping for an alternative to Roll20 with just a one-time purchase, but it is rather buggy and feels incomplete. I have logged over 10 hours on this already of simply trying to set up my own character sheets. In order to get this working, you MUST watch their tutorials videos (which are currently incomplete) and do the rest of the work yourself. At a 30 dollar pricetag, I didnt expect to spend so much time merely trying to get it useable. Perhaps later on there will be more bugs fixed and more pre-made content to easily download. Consider carefully. If you are willing to put the effort in to code character sheets, layouts, and macros, this may be for you.

I got this to assist with my Pathfinder tabletop gaming and found the user interface to be unwieldy as well as hard to learn. It also crashed often. If there had been a good user tutorial or the menu was more user friendly, it might have been ok.

The tool is a beta test at best, and honestly shouldn't have been sold on steam outside of anything but early access. You may see i have "740+" hours on record, well this is because of me having to work around a major issue with the product. Which was the product had a 50/50 chance of loading in the first place, and sometimes would make buttons disappear from the screen when it ran. This was a known issue at the time but was never even looked into for fixing, apparently it just was just terrible if a campaign file went above a 4x4 map. As a result i ended up just turning the tool on and once i got it working never shut it off for weeks on end, because trying to get it working the day of a session could take anywhere from 1-5 hours of just starting/restarting/refreshing. My favorite part being that the tool also didn't allow you to utilize the main screen; even on the host machine you needed to access it from the browser. This was partially because the tool wasn't made for a modern OS so once the memory usage climbed above 512 MB it would just have more and more bugs pop up. But the true slap across the face was for the $30 price tag the receive little to no support from the dev and eventually resulted in them saying they were too busy to work on this "side project". I find this annoying because i'd at best would've payed $15 if i'd known it was a "side project". There's much better products now like FoundryVTT who effectively made a similar but far and away superior product to this.

Even when it was not abandoned it was not worth it, only because I spent time preparing a session for my players I couldn't refund this, since you can't have X amount of hours in the game and ask for a refund. Foundry VTT is probably the best alternative to this that is under development and has a great community, its what I use now, I have weekly 5 groups if that helps with something

First things first: this product is abandoned. Its last update was in 2018, almost 3 years ago at this point. I will say, I actually tried this product back in 2018 when my group was looking to switch over from Roll20. Though I desperately wanted to leave Roll20, we only ever played one session on it. I have pretty good internet, but on a self-hosted server, the loading times between scenes were absolutely awful. Like, multiple minutes in some cases. That, combined with the fact that this product hasn't seen any support, means we never came back. Which is a shame, because the UI was much cleaner, it had a lot of cool features, and it was probably a better product - it was just too clunky and never got fixed. If you're looking to leave Roll20, check out Foundry VTT instead. It's a similar application, a one-time purchase, but actually gets regular updates and has an amazing developer community.

I really want to like GM Forge, but it's just plain unfinished. I didn't mind the small bugs and slow performance until I ran into a game-breaking issue that persists even after a restart - maps not loading or allowing new tokens to be placed. Once a map breaks, there seems to be no way to fix it other than to delete it and remake it from scratch. That's not a huge issue if the map is just a background image, but it could mean losing hours of work once you add to it in-app, like by drawing walls for the dynamic lighting. This is the main reason I can't recommend this virtual tabletop in its current state, but I'll give a more detailed overview of the pros and cons since I think it has great potential. [b] PROS [/b] [list] [*]Not subscription based [*]Packed full of features, some of which are innovative (e.g. the ability to place map markers with links that allow you to move between maps) [*]Dynamic lighting / fog of war [*]Flexible asset creation system [*]Workshop has compendium mods that contain a lot of easy to import content (spells, monsters, items, etc.) [/list] [b] CONS [/b] [list] [*]Tons of bugs, some of which are game-breaking [*]Slow performance [*]Unintuitive UI [*]Its future hinges on the willingness of its sole developer to keep it alive [/list]

To start off, I'm going to say that this is a bit more complicated than Roll20 and not necessarily a required upgrade. If you buy this, you're going to want to meander around and explore the game before you boot up and prepare to go gung-ho into a campaign. It's not very direct on how to utilize and make your way through, but after a few hours of dabbling with it, it becomes very straightforward. I'm still learning what all there is to do with this game, but with the last several hours I've used it-- I have to say that it's a very a fluid and pleasant experience/upgrade from Roll20 and I look forward to using this to play my campaign with my group this weekend. If you can get your ports forwarded and find your way through their systems, you'll probably be extremely satisfied with this purchase. Hard to beat a 1-time buy for a whole group that offers unlimited replayability, free assets, and an entire workshop ready to be used over the next several years. If you are going to be playing a tabletop online, this is the program to be doing it on. 8/10