A Fan Review of the 2D20 Conan Fantasy Grounds Ruleset by Nerd Eye Industries.

 

I said I was going to do this review, and I feel now I have played Conan enough with this Ruleset to give it a fair review.

I will be breaking this down into several categories. 

Appearance/Layout, Information, Features, and User Friendliness. Each category I am ranking out of a total of 5.   At the end, I will total the number and get the score out of 15. 

So, lets get this started.

This is a Modiphius Game converted into a Fantasy Grounds Ruleset by Nerd Eye Industries 

Appearance/Layout.

On the surface, the look of the ruleset looks pretty sharp. The Icons are nice, and the coloration and simple desktop image is clear and not cluttered. 

The design of the Character sheets also looks nice, along with the NPC stat cards. The color and layout of the core rules is also very attractive to look at.

The simple clear icons, the colors and textures used. I think are really nice and in my opinion, manages to capture the feel of a classic sword and sorcery game for Conan.

But there are several concerns with the fonts being hard to read on some monitors. The problem can be rectified somewhat with changing the Scale in the FG user settings, but this could cause a drop in visual alignments and text being cut short.

In the actual Core Rulebook module, there are a plethora of other visual issues when reading the rules. There are many copy and paste errors when they directly copied and pasted from the PDF leaving many characters appearing as symbols through out. If there was any quality assurance or editing done to this product when it was released, I was surprised that this was missed and allowed, as there are so many in the final product that is being sold to the public. Below is just 1 sample of the appearance of the core module. And this is through out the entire module. And after being on the market for so long.. I really suspected this to be fixed by now.

Another concern is the visual appearance is the weird uneven and out of alignment of the text in the skills and attribute boxes. If there was a pattern to it, then yeah I could accept that. But it just appears to be a random alignment. This really hits you hard if you like things looking tidy. But it just seems messy if you ask me, and can look so much better if given the time to clean it up a bit.

Score, 3 out of 5.

Information 

The rules are all there in the Conan rules module. Which can allow you to play the game and build characters, look at equipment, spells and Talents

Tables of Talents, Caste and all the other tables are accessible to allow you to build characters in a straight forward manner. There are links to talents that you can drag direct to character sheets, which makes character creation fairly simple.

The only real issue I have with this, is the rules are in massive data dumps. Which means, looking for information can be hard if you do not know have some idea on what section of the book it is found in. Forcing you to scroll through, in some spots, many pages. Or, if you want to have a quick link to a particular portion, you need to link the whole entire chapter. But that's more of a feature issue.. If there was more links, I would give it 5 outta 5.

Score 4 our of 5. 

Features and User Friendliness

Now, this is something that I really struggle with, when it comes to finding something to be good. But there are some. From the player side, many of the issues do not hamper the game that much, or are just minor issues that by themselves are manageable. But from the GM point of view, it can get cumbersome and unpleasant. 

The character sheet, is in fact really simple to understand and the information is laid out in fairly acceptable way, but using this character sheet in a game for anything other then a visual reference can get confusing and frustrating. 

I feel like the developers had an idea to make it work, but then stopped halfway through and left it, leaving many basic features missing that you can find in many other and much more affordable rulesets. 

Again, the appearance of the ruleset looks ok, but it fails to capture basic features needed to play the game efficiently.

We have an armor section, which allows you to keep track of where armor is located on various areas of the body, but no shield portion, and no quick way of having to roll cover dice when using the shield in a defensive way.

Every item in the ruleset is given a individual encumbrance, but the inventory section does not track its totals. So, a person needs to enter the item description to find the value, then do this for all other items to get the total encumbrance. 

The character sheet tracks wounds and trauma, but there is zero automation when a player is rolling skill dice. Which forces the GM to manually remind the player each time to they roll the dice, to add the level of wounds or traumas to the difficulty of the dice.

  

Players are able to add or remove momentum from the momentum pool, but players can not interact with the doom pit.. The players should be able to indicate they are giving the GM doom for what ever reason. Instead this ruleset forces the GM to again manage something else.

Generally speaking, there are many places which forces the GM to become the book keeper for the player, and it quickly can become to much.

They have a good way of tracking fortune spends for adding dice to the dice roller, but there is no other way to track an expenditure on other types of fortune spends. Players can also add fortune to their own character sheet with out the GMs knowledge.  "Sneaky players"

When it also comes the momentum counting, this burden falls on the GM. On a real table, this is not an issue at all. Using some form of dice or token to count momentum. In FG we do not have this option. When the momentum is tallied, it should be placed into a counter in which players can spend momentum, when this is done, it can then be transferred to the momentum pool. Right now.. its left to the GM to manually keep track of it somehow and tell the player what is left after they spend the momentum. Its an overload of book keeping. (if I could make a suggestion to the developers. Just add another momentum counter to the bottom of the desktop. and then have a button which allows all the unspent momentum move over to the pool, to the max of 6 as the rules state)   This would allow players to count off their expenditures and transfer over when they are done. All nice and trackable in the chat window and less for the GM to deal with. My idea is suggested below in the picture.

When it comes to the use of the NPCs during combat, its not so bad. Having to click the attribute and then the skill bonus to set the TN is not bad way of doing it. In fact, it kinda helps the GM to learn and remember what skills do what. So, I like that. This is debatable with others, but I stand by it. But I do wish there was a better way of adding D20s to the roll other then having to click on the little yellow dots. And it needs to have the ability to roll more then the 5 dice.. Especially when it comes to MOBS. But the little yellow dots are so tiny! 

This leads me into the biggest issue this ruleset currently has.

The combat tracker, frankly put, belongs to another game system entirely. It fails to track which character has acted or reacted in anyway. It does not handle squads or mobs at all. The only real good thing it does is give you a list of who is in the combat. I have stressed this before in the forums, also in direct communication. It feels like the developers did not even attempt to capture the way combat is handled in the rulebook by giving customers a tracker that can only handle combat for DnD like clones. Its shoddy and poor at best, and feels rushed and unfinished. (Although the design and appearance of it looks awesome.) 

Also said in one of my direct communications to the developers. "How can you expect for players to play the game, if the ruleset does not support the rules of the actual game" This below is all you get.. for a premium costing ruleset. This is a fail in my books.

Score 1 out of 5 for features and user friendliness. ( I could be convinced to score it a 2 out of 5, but that's the most I can go)

Closing remarks.

I love the 2D20 Conan rules. Love em! I really like using Fantasy Grounds. And I really wanted to love playing the official ruleset on Fantasy Grounds. 

But not until some of these major issues get fixed. This ruleset has been officially released since April 2020, and very few of the major things have been addressed or fixed. Although, the developers are saying they hear us, and they are working on it.. with only minor things fixed to this point. 

Realistically, they should be calling this a beta release and drop the god awful price its being sold at. Its a sad perspective I have, when I say that there are homebrew Conan rulesets already developed by fans that are ultimately better then what is being sold. My own ruleset being the lowest of all of them all. The thing is, the fan based rulesets are very similar in functionality and shows they were made by fans to try and capture the feeling of the rules. This one.. fails to hit that mark.

But the final thing is, I do believe that this Ruleset will be good at some point, and I hope some point soon. The developers who I have been speaking directly to seems genuinely concerned about making the changes for the players. I guess its a matter of working on other properties and not so much on this one. But that statement is just speculation on my part. 

Am I saying to buy or not buy it. If you do not mind spending the money for something not finished yet, sure by all means. But if you buy this expecting it to be a smooth transition from tabletop to virtual tabletop. You might not be so happy. Fantasy Grounds is a powerful tool and can do a lot of things, but that power is not utilized in this product. But if suddenly they said, we are selling the basic ruleset for 10 dollars, with no rulebook module. I would say sure.. great deal, and would accept it for what it is.. but this deserves better treatment if its attached to such an iconic property as R.E Howards Conan. 

Many of the issues stated above can be somehow shoe horned into the game using manual means by the GM or its players. But its just "Les Nesman" Band-Aids all over the place making everything look homemade. 

Essentially, I want less "Nessman" and more "Conan"

Final Score.. 

8/15

53.3% 

But even with this score, the game is still fun, conan is fun and in tonights game, the group had a blast fighting for their lives on a disabled sailing ship. So, that's the most important fact.