Recent reviews by Atropos

GM Forge is an exciting new application for tabletop gamers who use (or are considering using) a virtual tabletop (VTT) as part of their gaming sessions.

Bottom Line

GM Forge is absolutely worth purchasing now if you are (1) tech savvy, (2) a software developer (or hobbyist), or (3) excited for the potential of the platform and want to jump in early to follow its growth.

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Even if you don't fall in the first two groups, if you are excited about VTT you should strongly consider picking up GM Forge because of it's potential. A couple quick notes about me to contextualize my review:

• I mostly play D&D5e, some Pathfinder in the past.
  
• I have a lot of hours logged in Roll20, I have not used Fantasy Grounds.
  
• I mostly DM, but have player experience also. I love creating my own maps, tokens, and storylines.
  
• I have done 2 playtests of GM Forge with a party of players.
  
• I have spent about 20 hours writing a D&D mod (JS/HTML/CSS) within the GM Forge framework.

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Framework Features
Most of GM Forge's strength is in its fundamental design philosophy to create a platform and framework for designing and running VTT games that provides compelling modern features like Dynamic Lighting, Fog of War, world-building with Linked Maps and Area Transitions, and rich Journal/Storyboard Vignettes. These features are implemented at the platform level, and can be used across all games.

Community Driven Development
Secondly, GM Forge's strength is its open-ness. The platform is highly modable, open-source, and inexpensive. This encourages developers and content creators to opt-in to GM Forge as a set of tools they can use to power their creative gaming experiences. Already we are seeing great mods in development for a variety of game systems. The software uses Steam Workshop effectively, and over time the growth of GM Forge and the quality of gaming that players can have on the platform will be driven largely by the modding community!

Furthermore, the developer for GM Forge is extremely active and responsive in the Discord server, accepting feedback, discussing and prioritizing new features, and assisting community members with questions. This is being created by someone who loves tabletop games and wants players to have better and more competitively priced tools - a philosophy worth supporting.

Lastly, content creators in GM Forge can easily share or collaborate on their creations. Want to share a module you created with a friend so their group can also run it? Want to collaborate with another GM to build a homebrew world together? GM Forge makes it very easy to share World files so that you can collaborate and exchange content in this way.

Immersion

I feel that I can create more immersive gameplay experiences within GM Forge than I am able to do with Roll20. Systems like notes and linked maps go a long way to help with this, but this goes all the way to the basic application design. As a desktop client, GM Forge has better performance than Roll 20s web client when dealing with large maps with many tokens and dynamic lighting walls. Also, as a native full screen application, myself and my players are not getting distracted during our sessions by other browser tabs or notifications.

Furthermore, GM Forge has awesome features to make players and DMs feel in control of the game. Initiative rolls and action tracking is beautifully managed, allowing for hidden combat participants and more. It is possible to directly assign rolled damage or healing values to a token for easy and quick health pool management during combat.

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Incomplete Feature Parity
GM Forge has almost all the key systems that you would expect from a modern virtual tabletop, but there are some features which are "missing" from the perspective of someone migrating from Roll20.

• Collision - One of roll20's best features is preventing tokens from moving into areas blocked by a dynamic lighting wall. This is a feature that GM Forge is working to add, but as of the time of writing it's one of the biggest missing pieces for me.
  
• Audio Management Tools - GM Forge supports music tracks, but it is quite limited in its ability to configure how those tracks are played. In particular, looping and playing multiple audio effects simultaneously as a one-click playlist are not currently supported. Furthermore, GM Forge does not yet have integration with an audio sharing site like SoundCloud or FanBurst.

UPDATE: The above features (and many others) have been added to GM Forge since my initial review!


Networking Hurdles
As a game on Steam, prospective buyers will expect networking to be seamless - it's not. Since you are connecting directly to the host's (GM) session, the host has to be listening to incoming connections on the appropriate port. For folks with a router (which is basically everyone) - this means that the default security settings of your home network might block incoming traffic. Some simple steps to either port-forward, or use UPnP are required by the host (but not by the players). There are tutorials available for how to set that up - and it should only take you a couple of minutes, but I think it's a very important item for buyers to be aware of before making this purchase.

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Closing Thoughts
If you've made it to the end of this review, it's a fair guess you are being fairly thoughtful about this purchase. A couple of things that can help if you're on the fence.

1. Try the web demo at https://www.gmforge.io/. It's not as fully featured as the Steam game, but it will give you an idea of how some things look/feel.
   
2. Join the Discord server and peruse the discussion - see what bugs are being reported (and fixed), see what new features are being worked on. I suspect this will reassure you about the quality of community that is growing around GM Forge.

AC:O has really exceeded my expectations. I'm not a devoted player of the Assassin's Creed series, only dabbling in the early games, but Origins is much more of an open-world RPG and offers a really amazing mix of gameplay elements. The world is absolutely beautiful, blending Ptolemaic and Alexandrian archietcture and cultures into a rich world that is ripe for exploration.

The voice acting and character development is good and does a good job of alluding to the culture of the era without being overly appropriating or inaccessible.

There are plenty of opportunities for "wow" moments as well as humor and memorable spontaneous moments. I'm also encouraged with out Ubisoft is supporting weekly events with the Trials of the Gods, which are a fun way to add value for players who have already explored most of the game's content.

I have personally completed less than half the game at this point, but am full expecting to get 100+ hours of total value from this title which I would classify as really worth purchasing!

A real masterpiece of an RPG. From the perspectives of world-building, characterization, and gameplay CDPR really runs the table with Witcher 3. The environments are beautiful and believable, but also diverse. There are more memorable characters in Witcher 3 than in a handful of other recent RPGs combined. My only real critiques involve the occasional bugs which have taken a while to be fixed, but if you haven't picked up Witcher 3 yet, it's in a very stable place now. For any RPG enthusiast, even if you have not experience the previous two games in the series, this is a definite must-play.

OH, and Gwent!