Should SW look into adding key extension features?

[LordEntrails]

When I use no other filters, the most subscribed extension that comes up when searching on the forge is the Aura Effect extension at 5390 subscribers. Player agency shows up as the 9th most popular extension. I quickly looked through 5 pages of results (50 items) and each item still had above 1000 subscribers. Granted, some of the items were map/portrait packs but there were still many more than 7 extensions to be found in the top 50 items. I am not sure how to exclude maps from the search results.

EDIT: Upon closer inspection it may be more accurate to say the 8th most popular extension on the forge as out of the top 10 items one is a skin rather than an extension. I also noticed that Played Agency is the only item in the top 10 with the "any ruleset" tag. The rest are specific to certain rulesets.

Interesting. Not sure why I got different results, but won't argue I do know I filteres only on extensions so I would not get modules or themes or art packs.
The point is simple though and anyone can do the desired math, most GMs do not use extensions.

[madman]

Most GMs do not use extensions.

I would love to see the results of a poll on that.

[BushViper]

I use a number of TTRPG systems in real life, but online I exclusively play D&D.

That said, there are a handful of extensions that would result in me outright abandoning Fantasy Grounds if one of them stopped working. The additional functionality/quality-of-life that they provide are that high. Combat Highlighter is a prime example of an extension I refuse to play without. Tuning all the options to fit your taste can be a little annoying but once you get it tuned, it's like using a different platform. There was a two-week period when the extension was hosed and I came this <-> close to never logging in again.

Beyond that handful there are another dozen+ that would cause me an enormous amount of irritation if they no longer worked.

I'm not only one who feels that way. In fact, there are quite a number of us.

Extensions are written for a lot of reasons, but one of the primary goals is to provide a solution for a problem. FGU (despite how much I enjoy the platform) has a lot of mind-boggling inadequacies. Fortunately, extension creators have improved (or solved) many of those problems, but maintaining the solutions is a MASSIVE headache for both creators and users.

I know Smiteworks is a small company with relatively limited resources but addressing problems/shortcomings that the vast majority of the users agree upon would be a lot more useful than features like the recent work on the new map perspective. Every single person I have spoken to about it (roughly 35) has said it's "neat," but only 2 said they intended to use it. That feature is requiring a lot of precious manhours to develop and it isn't particularly valuable to the userbase. There are literally dozens of issues that would objectively improve the platform and require significantly fewer manhours to develop than video-gamifying TTRPGs and there's absolutely no debate about that. Creating a new feature is a lot harder than looking at someone else's working design and tweaking it so that it fits within your own framework.

I see a lot of excuses being made as to why more features from extensions aren't implemented and that's what they are - excuses. Of course, there are always exceptions, but no one is getting rich writing extensions and the vast majority of the developers would be over the moon to have their solution (potentially improved) and integrated into the base client. It's a win for everyone involved. Obviously, I'm not saying every extension needs to be added. Far from it. The cost/benefit needs to make sense.

P.S. I don't have the data to back it, but I suspect that the people that use extensions aren't the majority of users. I know a lot of people feel that they're too much trouble or they simply don't understand how they work. Some may not even know that they exist. Regardless, that's even more incentive to improve the base client because the plethora of solutions written by creators aren't being utilized by the bulk of users and it's a fact that the base FGU client is inferior to one with even a handful of the most useful extensions.

[damned]

I would love to see the results of a poll on that.

The pool would be skewed because most gms also don't use the forums much.

[johnecc]

I have been playing in a 5e game since Dec last year, and the GM does not use any extensions, and it has run just fine. I personally have around 50 extensions/mods, but don't really miss them in the game I am playing.

[BushViper]

I have been playing in a 5e game since Dec last year, and the GM does not use any extensions, and it has run just fine. I personally have around 50 extensions/mods, but don't really miss them in the game I am playing.

I don't think many people would disagree that a lot of extensions provide more benefit to a DM than a player. Looking at my list, more than half of the 80ish that I use don't directly benefit players, at all.

[Svandal]

Is there a good way of creating a backup of this version of fantasy grounds?
Could I make a zip file of all the files, and if an extension stops working we can all go back to that specific version of fantasy grounds?
Or would that create problems when hosting?

That could be an ok fix for us with our mix of extensions.
Only one of our multiple extensions provide more benefits to automation than the previously 6 years of fantasy grounds updates combined (not including extensions) so in my mind having this kind of backup would be a really good safeguard. We play pathfinder 1st edition.
And it will not work to say to everybody do not update, at some point somebody will update.

In this case even if something breaks we can just go back to the previous "safe" version and play that for the next x years before considering to update again.

[Zacchaeus]

No, there's no way to use a previous version.

[Lazybones1969]

I use extensions quite reluctantly, because they break so often when a major update to the FGU software is pushed through. If that didn't happen so frequently I would probably use more of them, as some of the ones I've looked at seem to add a lot of convenience for the DM. Most of the ones I do use were suggested by my players. I would love to see some of the ones that automate basic functionality (the spell tokens in Critically Awesome Essentials, cohorts in FriendZone, the extra advantage die in Elvish Accuracy, paladin auras in Aura Effects, etc.) added to the basic system. I know the Forge has an automated update system, but it doesn't work very well for me (I bought CAE before it was put on the Forge, and I have to go to the forums for FriendZone updates as the current updater can't update the Forge version for some reason).

[LordEntrails]

Is there a good way of creating a backup of this version of fantasy grounds?
Could I make a zip file of all the files, and if an extension stops working we can all go back to that specific version of fantasy grounds?
Or would that create problems when hosting?

That could be an ok fix for us with our mix of extensions.
Only one of our multiple extensions provide more benefits to automation than the previously 6 years of fantasy grounds updates combined (not including extensions) so in my mind having this kind of backup would be a really good safeguard. We play pathfinder 1st edition.
And it will not work to say to everybody do not update, at some point somebody will update.

In this case even if something breaks we can just go back to the previous "safe" version and play that for the next x years before considering to update again.

Not really, but sort of. Each and every person would have to keep a backup of their FG Installation and FG Data folders. And then if they accidentally update or you decide you want to revert as a play group then restore to the backup. Even though people should have backups of their computer data, most people don't and when they do get confused by file versioning and trying to restore to the correct point in time.

From a practical point of view, this is effectively just not clicking Update. Or doing a Revert if someone does.

New content/purchases may not be available, because they often use new capabilities and won't run in older versions.

It also means that often people would not be able to play in other games that are updated (unless they Update/Revert) because sometimes the FG Client is not backwards compatible.