Don't Founder - The Roll20 Veteran's Guide to Foundry's FabU

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

This guide is intended for FabU players on the new Roll20 sheets who are switching over to Foundry’s Project FU. There will be several individual posts, each one talking about a different aspect of the experience.

• General navigation
• Characters and Journal Entries
• Character Sheet Specifics
• Combat Basics

Quick advice:

• When in battle, use the on-screen action menu to do your stuff
• When not in battle, a combination of Favorites, the Hotbar, and the Overview tab should have 95% of the stuff you care about
• There’s no separate “Edit” mode you have to worry about, just go to the right tab and add/edit/remove stuff

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

General navigation

The actual arrangement of buttons and the overall feel of the UI may be very different, but Foundry is organized a lot like Roll20. For example, the row of buttons, top right on Roll20 (Chat, Journal, etc.) are very similar to the vertical stack of buttons on the right of the Foundry screen.

Chat boxes are pretty similar, with one exception. In Foundry, if you don’t have any of the side buttons activated, chat messages will briefly show up at the bottom right of the screen and then disappear.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

Characters and Journal Entries

In Roll20, there’s a single journal containing all of the PCs, NPCs, items, etc.

In Foundry, it’s almost the same. You want the “Actors” button, third button down.

You can see the PCs listed individually. For everyone else, click on “the Emissaries of Harmony” in the Actors sidebar.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

Character Sheet Specifics

Note that even if something is on a different tab, you can often click the Star () button to mark it as a “Favorite”. Favorites show up on the Overview tab of the sheet.

Shared Sheet Top

Both sheets put the basics (HP, MP, IP, level, resistances, attributes, etc.) at the top and will show this information regardless of which tab you’re on.

Specific Sheet Elements

Bonds: Meta tab (Roll20), abbreviated on Overview and detailed on Notes tab (Foundry)

Classes: Classes tab (Roll20 and Foundry). Click on a Class name to collapse or unfold it, showing individual class skills.

Equipment: Backpack tab (Roll20), Items tab (Foundry). To change what’s equipped, click on the “Equip?” column. Left-click for Main Hand, right-click for Off Hand or to unequip.

Experience Points: Meta tab (Roll20), “XP” on the shared sheet top (Foundry)

Fabula Points: Meta tab (Roll20), “FP” on the shared sheet top (Foundry)

Frequently Used Checks: Conflict tab (Roll20), Group/Attribute/Open/Opposed buttons on the shared sheet top (Foundry)

There’s no way to predefine certain attribute combinations, e.g. “Persuade” or “Dodge”, as Roll20 does. You choose icons for both attributes to roll, then enter the modifier and difficulty values if any.

Inventory: Backpack tab (Roll20), Items tab (Foundry). To use an item, use the on-screen action menu or Actions > Inventory on the Overview tab. To spend IP manually, edit it on the top right of the shared sheet top.

Other Items: Backpack tab (Roll20), Items tab (Foundry)

Rituals: Conflict tab (Roll20), Spells tab (Foundry)

Spells: Conflict tab (Roll20), on-screen action menu, Actions > Spell on Overview tab (Foundry). The Spells tab lets you edit these.

Weapons: Conflict tab (Roll20), on-screen action menu, Actions > Attack on Overview tab (Foundry). The Items tab lets you edit these.

Hotbar

There’s a hotbar at the bottom of the Foundry screen. You can drag weapons, spells, class abilities, etc. down to this bar for frequently-used stuff.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

Combat Basics

I want to roll one of my attacks or spells

Go to the on-screen menu (top left) and choose Attack, Skill, Action, etc. Pick whatever you’re trying to do. The result will be posted into chat.

I want to reroll one or both dice, use a bond, or otherwise affect the roll

Right-click on the result (e.g. “16 vs. DEF”) and choose the appropriate option from the menu:

I want to use a Fabula point

You don’t have to manually edit the value, although you can. You can open your character sheet and just click on “FP”. It will prompt you if you want to use a Fabula point, so just click Yes.

I see a button that says “Apply Damage”, do I do that?

No - the GM will do that for you.

I need to rapidly switch my equipment

Go to the on-screen menu (top left) and choose Action > Equipment. Choose the gear you’re changing, then click “Switch Equipment”.

I want to update my own HP, MP, or IP

You can either edit these values on your sheet, or right-click on your own sprite on the battlefield, then update the appropriate number.

I took a status effect, how do I mark that?

Right-click on your sprite on the battlefield, click on the “Assign Status Effects” button (top right), then select the status you want.

[insomn14 (Mike)]

How do I see the World Map?
In the top left hand corner of the screen is the Scene Selector. It will have whatever screen you are on listed there.

If you click the down arrow to the right of that, it will bring up a list of scenes you can move to. You should have two always active: Landing Page and World Map. Battle Scene is the currently active scene, so it will also show up allowing you to come back to that scene whenever you’re done.

[Dave (***Dave Hill)]

I am sure we will fumble about and forget and ask stupid questions, but (a) this guide helps and (b) my sense is that this is all better laid out than what we’ve had. (Was this something you modified, or did from scratch?)

Anyway, thanks for this, and for the migration effort. I am sure it will also be a fun experience.

[garrett (Bill Garrett)]

@Dave

this is all better laid out than what we’ve had

Two of the key things about the layout are the on-screen battle menu (Attack etc.) and hotbar, and the Favorite/star system.

The menu and hotbar mean you don’t need your sheet open at all for a lot of combat tasks. The system is smart enough to do damage and healing itself, and you can use these things to choose your own combat actions on your turn.

Favorites covers spells, skills, and anything else a character uses frequently. You can both drag stuff onto the hotbar and mark it as a favorite, they’re two different things. But it’s still a neat way to pull things to the front of the sheet even if you don’t.

Finally there’s a lot of stuff hidden behind a right-clickable context menu. When in doubt (“how do I mark damage”, “how do I reroll”, etc.), try right-clicking on the thing to see if something comes up.

[insomn14 (Mike)]

@Dave

Was this something you modified, or did from scratch?

So the only thing I did was trim down the options in the on screen menu. By default, attack includes every weapon in your backpack and I switched it to only equipped items. Similarly the skills originally had everything in the skills and features tabs, but I took them down to just stuff that isn’t automatically done for you (for instance, the Trimaldis’ Adrenaline and Indomitable Spirit).

[insomn14 (Mike)]

So, let’s go through something that is probably going to come up a lot: the start of combat. The first thing we get is a notification that the Trimaldis can make an Attack, Hinder, or Objective action with a bonus equal your Skill Level to any checks you make with those actions. (Mizzle also gets to apply Mirror, but we’ll ignore that for right now.)

Clicking on the button in the chat will apply the bonus as an Effect to whoever we have selected. Normally you will only be able to select your own character, so don’t worry about anything that would effect anyone other than your own character.

Now that we’ve clicked on the button, you can see the Trimaldis now have a new status icon on their sprite. That means everything worked correctly.

Next we need to decide what we want to do. Attacking is always useful, so let’s attack the Axe Knight. Step one is to hover over their sprite with our mouse and hit the T key to target. We’ll know it worked if you now see arrows pointing at the Axe Knight.

If the key doesn’t work, you can also right click on the Knight and select “Toggle Target State,” which should look like a bullseye.

Now that we have our target selected, we go up to the Action Bar in the top left and hover over the Attack options at the top. The Trimaldis only have one weapon equipped, the Magitech Cannon, so that’s an easy decision. (Below the Magitech Cannon is Barrage, which will just pop up a chat box to announce our intent to use the action and a button to subtract the 10 MP from the Trimaldis. The only difference between using Barrage and what we’re doing now is that we would be selecting two targets instead of just one. The system doesn’t have any logic to keep us from doing that sort of stuff, so we’re free to do whatever works best.)

We now get a chat window that shows us all the relevant information about the attack (Bill went over this, so I won’t go too in depth). This includes reminding us about our options when the Trimaldis hit a target with a ranged attack: we can do damage as normal, or we can use Warning Shot to do some debuffs (two because of Perfect Aim).

We decide we’re going to do damage. At this point, you would just announce that. Clicking on the Apply Damage button would just apply it to who we have selected: The Trimaldis. (Yes, selecting and targetting are two different things in Foundry. If anything is going to be a stumbling block for us, it’s probably going to be that.) Instead, I as the GM will apply the damage.

And that’s it, right? Almost. Remember, the Trimaldis still have the bonus from High Speed. We need to clear that. There are two options: one is to right click on the icon in the combat HUD at the bottom of the screen, or we can go up to Effects in the Action Bar. Regardless of which we chose, we want to hover over the icon and right click.

This will give us a notification on whether we’d like to remove the bonus.

Select Yes and the effect is removed.

Now we can continue on with Combat.

Now time for one last tip: if you right click on the enemy’s portrait in the combat HUD at the bottom of the screen it will bring up everything you know about the baddie. Since we haven’t studied them yet, we just know their level and any Affinities we’ve interacted with. (I’ve been using this enemy as a test run for most everything, which is why their Affinities for Physical, Wind, and Light damage are also revealed.)

If someone studies them, we’ll then get a more complete picture from that screen. Looks like he’s about as basic as they come.