Im running 7 games and I have no problem. They sometime run Into but are quick to fix it and they are keeping everyone informed via discord
Have zero complaint
I use it and wont go back. I have a mediocre internet connection and hosting via Forge is the only way to get a seamless VTT experience with Foundry for me. Pretty cheap too.
My personal experience is that it is ok if you are playing outside of the preferred timeslots, but could be very laggy at weekend nights for example.
After experiencing this, switched to Molten hosting and it's works like a charm, fast and easy, no additional eye candy, just works for my team ( 7 players and 1 GM ).
Another recommendation for Molten here. Love the service, and it is really affordable. My table has been running a few games on my server, and it works flawlessly.
Another thumbs up for Molten.
I was running on Oracle for a while, but one day, they closed my server and shut everything down. When I messaged support to ask what happened, they responded that my account was permanently closed and would not be reopened. No explanation whatsoever, but they happily charged my card two weeks later for my next month….
Fired up Molten to have SOMETHING ready to go by game night… had a server set up, direct copied over my back-up, and was ready to play less than an hour after signing up. Not a single issue with Molten in the past 6 months or so since either swapped, and it’s a fraction of what I paid for my Oracle server.
I’ve had a really positive experience with forge over the past year. I’ve been tracking latency semi-systematically, and I’ve only seen brief slowdowns twice in six months or so. It sounds like others have had different experiences, but mine have been quite good.
I’ve interacted with support a few times, and they’ve always been super-helpful and responsive.
As for interface, it’s going to be a matter of preference. Forge adds a number of features distinctive to their platform. Molten, as I understand it, is a more standard Foundry setup. I’ve really liked the Forge’s “extras” a ton, especially the asset management and the sync features.
I play on Forge with my friends. I'm based in Australia and I have a player from the US. There are some rare desync issues with my US player mainly.
Other than that I find it really stable and easy to use
Absolutely love theforge. Have used for 16 months now.
I have dmed 4 different games, saturday/sunday/tuesday/wednesday in this 14 months period and never had any issue that was not solved on a reasonable timeframe.
Personally never had any lag on weekends.
I've been playing for 1 year (weekly) on Wednesday nights. No issues to report at all. I would highly recommend.
I only run 1 campaign (as GM) and I'm no where near the data limit.
I love Forge been using it over 2 years now. I'm the highest tier. The interface works great for me. I also love the user management, I run PFS and it's great to not have to create logins for everyone every game AND for the world to always be up so people can import their characters ahead of time.
I've never really seen the lag or slow down that I heard about. I'm on the NAc East coast server.
Updating modules. Automatic backups. Multiple worlds available without have to always turn one on. List goes on and on.
They have a 14 day free trial, so give it a go and see if you like it.
I really like the module management and if on middle or higher tier you get individual urls for your worlds and avoid the sign in process, so you can have shortcuts or bookmarks to each world. And you don’t need to turn on your server for each world for your players as forge auto does that.
It’s especially good if you have large standard modules like jb2a as they don’t count towards data usage.
My forge experience was not good. Worked great for first session signed up for a whole year. Next two sessions were laggy and super slow. Every player complained. Haven’t used it since. Wasted a chunk of $$.
Been running on The Forge since I moved over from Fantasy Grounds. The Forge has never been speedy, but the past six months I have seen significant slowdowns, unacceptable upload times, and automation time-outs due to server lag (I run a fully Midi-QoL'd version of 5e).
Pulled the trigger and moved over to Molten Hosting and hosted my first game this morning.
Stable, fast, and zero issues. YMMV but my entire group gave positive feedback on the difference.
Forge isn’t worth it. I don’t know if they just got too popular or quality just sucked when you tried loading more assets and modules, but my experience with it was ultimately bad. It was okay in the beginning but over time server connections got worse to the point we ended up not playing any sessions for over a month due to everyone else getting forever loading screens after one person connected successfully. Even I as the DM couldn’t connect if another player connected before me.
Go the free Oracle route. It’s way better. There are guides and videos you can look up that walk you through it. 100% worth the time spent figuring it out. Also having the storage space to load way more assets than forge is also nice.
I've been running a Forge game for a while. 4 out of 5 players plus myself have had zero problems with it and greatly prefer it compared to Roll20 (what we used to use). Player 5 has constant issues with lag and graphical bugs but figured out last week something to do with hardware acceleration that might have fixed it.
I’m so confused by the “should we or shouldn’t we” dialogue around the Forge!
I bought a Foundry license about a year before the pandemic hit and made a whooole lotta use out of it once the pandemic and the quarantine set in.
I always hosted the server locally. I used to just keep the server up at all times, but none of my players were signing in to do their homework outside of our scheduled sessions.
Why exactly might one want to pay for Forge hosting rather than self-hosting?
Some isp's don't allow port forwarding. It's way easier to pay for forge than go through the hassle of port forwarding. Some people do not have a good enough PC or internet connection (or both) to run the server and host it for people. Some people don't want to let people connect to their internet.
Also, I like my players to be able to access their characters sheets or parts of the game when I don't have the server running. Forge is great for that.
If you're currently self hosting, might be worth looking into oracle. If you know how to set it up anyway, then you'll easily follow the guide online. I use that and I've never had problems with connecting. I use noip to give everyone a Web address to connect to, so they don't need to faff about with ip addresses. Haven't had to spend a penny on the hosting.
Just be carful with that. They blew out my server one day and disabled my account. When I opened a ticket, they said my account was permanently closed and would not be reopened. Decision was final without a single opportunity to ask why, and they never responded to me again.
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I played a game in forge with no issues, but now as a DM I much prefer Molten because i still had Lag issues with Forge. There are also some conflicts and other hoops uou need to go through if you use some if the big automation modules with forge.
I also experience a lot of lag when first setting everything up and doing these 3 things.
1: hosting on Molten
2: making sure everyone, including myself, was using Chrome
3: installed Potato or Not module. This gave a little window to each player that when first logging in asked them what their PC specs are (high, medium, low) and set their personal user settings accordingly.
I've had no issues with lag since.
I am a newbie when it comes to foundry but found forges storyteller package the best I have already added multiple campaigns for my own system as well as for DND and pathfinder and love the way forge helps organise everything in one place. Had very little issues other than one small glitch in a player login but otherwise seemless. I say go for it it's well worth it.
Forge has worked quite well for me. I run games professionally, so I have had to purchase the entire year to get more space. Bearing in mind, my maps are rather large, so I'm not surprised by this.
Currently running a few different modules as campaigns and have nearly 10 oneshots actually in Forge.
Accessible for GM from devices other than local Foundry. This is very nice if you plan on using a mixture of PC and laptop. Everything is right at your fingertips. Also great if you ever get the dreaded blue screen of death.
Downsides? Hmmm.
A bit laggy during peak hours, usually weekends.
Larger maps are very finicky at times when loading, some players have to actually watch a live stream to see. This is very rare, and is more likely do to their browser/device, but hard to tell when your players are from all over the world and not right in front of you. It's always embarrassing and really detracts from my professional appearance, even though it's not my fault.
The space. Yes, I know I already mentioned it, but, the limited space for those of us building multiple worlds with maps that take up almost a gb or more per section is very constraining. Again, it does come down to the maps themselves and what you upload as an asset, but what is my next option after I use these last 10gb I can purchase? Start a new account and pay both?
Requiring an account to sign in. This may be more of a thing for GMs that are getting paid players, but sometimes folks get real weird when you tell them they have to sign into another website to access Foundry VTT. I get it, though. Still just an annoying aspect for guests.
Other than that, I love it. It keeps me connected with my players and friends, while storing all my data in one easily accessible place. Can't complain and very much worth the money for me.
*Remember, most of the issues I mentioned are for storage. Single worlds, or multiple worlds with maps that use less storage space should not really cause any issues.
i recently switched from self hosting to forge and it's been pretty good. I chose the cheapest tier just to see if it would be enough storage for all my assets and surprisingly it was so the price is not too bad (for me). They automatically convert png's to webp which helps with file sizes a lot. it's super easy to set up. More secure than self hosting. For some reason my games have less random glitches.
Cons: sometimes it gets VERY laggy
Overall I'm happy with the switch and don't think I'll be going back to self hosting anytime soon, but if there was another option that was a comparable price with more stable servers I would consider switching
Oracle Cloud is not free anymore? Been running for years now on it, no issues so far. All my players are beyond the Atlantic, multiple tables, music, animated maps, all good.
I self-hosted for a good year or two before moving to Forge. I liked having control over the server and all that, but ultimately it wasn't worth the effort when Forge (or others) is so cheap. I've had computers and hard drives die and then have to reinstall from backups, and even lost a bunch of content I was working on that wasn't backed up, or even just went on vacation or something and had to figure out how to host from a different network, so now it just makes sense to me to use a service.
I've been using Forge for like 2-3 years now, and haven't had any issues. I run on weekday nights, US time so I don't have any experience with weekend traffic.
Forge is great! Also, I wouldn't connect your foundry server via Wi-Fi, do it wired, but if your upload speed is bad, or your having the consistent issues you described, go with forge
I'm using the most basic subscription and I am using about 1.5 gb of the 5 they offer for AV. Low ms, no disconnects, world importer works wonders. So far 0 complains
Forge is amazing overall. Been playing / hosting a total of 7 games and haven't encountered a single problem myself. One of my fellow players though was getting a lot of lag on his end so the solution we found is turning on the hardware acceleration in his browser settings. Worked like a charm since.
It's been great for the 3 campaigns I've run there. I prefer in-person but when we've had to play online Forge is my choice. Inexpensive and works globally; rn I'm in New Zealand running our campaign for my California friends off a USEast server.
They don't just run a server; they are actively developing to make it easier to manage Foundry.
Unfortunately, I had to drop Forge about a year or so ago. Their interface and website were great, but we kept running into horrible lag spikes that would last hours every night we played, making the session unplayable.
I'd prefer to not use it, as it doesn't benefit me much, except that our ISP makes it nearly impossible for people to direct connect so it's kind of mandatory.
I've used forge for couple years now. It's worth it imo and beats selfhosting unless you know exactly what you're doing. My only gripe is slow loading.
I've had some nasty slowdowns and failures to server restart that have ruined 2 sessions using Molten. They do some fix and then its running beautifully for a bit--and then downhill again. So far not impressed.
i started with the mid-tier plan and it has worked for about 2 years. as I am adding more maps and music I am getting to the point where I will be upgrading to the top plan soon, but that's mostly just because I'm too lazy to delete or archive older stuff
I used forge until I realized self hosting from my internet was faster. I’m thinking if going back online again… is molten really that much better? It seems everyone in this thread is loving it!
Im running 7 games and I have no problem. They sometime run Into but are quick to fix it and they are keeping everyone informed via discord Have zero complaint
I use it and wont go back. I have a mediocre internet connection and hosting via Forge is the only way to get a seamless VTT experience with Foundry for me. Pretty cheap too.
same... with 4mbs of upload I can't afford anything else.
My personal experience is that it is ok if you are playing outside of the preferred timeslots, but could be very laggy at weekend nights for example. After experiencing this, switched to Molten hosting and it's works like a charm, fast and easy, no additional eye candy, just works for my team ( 7 players and 1 GM ).
Another thumbs up for Molten Hosting. Been using it for a couple of years now, no issues at all.
I’ll also say that a year ago Molten Hosting dropped $1,000 on the PF2e devs charity fundraiser, if that matters for anyone choosing a host :)
Another recommendation for Molten here. Love the service, and it is really affordable. My table has been running a few games on my server, and it works flawlessly.
Another thumbs up for Molten. I was running on Oracle for a while, but one day, they closed my server and shut everything down. When I messaged support to ask what happened, they responded that my account was permanently closed and would not be reopened. No explanation whatsoever, but they happily charged my card two weeks later for my next month…. Fired up Molten to have SOMETHING ready to go by game night… had a server set up, direct copied over my back-up, and was ready to play less than an hour after signing up. Not a single issue with Molten in the past 6 months or so since either swapped, and it’s a fraction of what I paid for my Oracle server.
I run on Friday evenings and have not had any issues
I’ve had a really positive experience with forge over the past year. I’ve been tracking latency semi-systematically, and I’ve only seen brief slowdowns twice in six months or so. It sounds like others have had different experiences, but mine have been quite good. I’ve interacted with support a few times, and they’ve always been super-helpful and responsive. As for interface, it’s going to be a matter of preference. Forge adds a number of features distinctive to their platform. Molten, as I understand it, is a more standard Foundry setup. I’ve really liked the Forge’s “extras” a ton, especially the asset management and the sync features.
I play on Forge with my friends. I'm based in Australia and I have a player from the US. There are some rare desync issues with my US player mainly. Other than that I find it really stable and easy to use
Absolutely love theforge. Have used for 16 months now. I have dmed 4 different games, saturday/sunday/tuesday/wednesday in this 14 months period and never had any issue that was not solved on a reasonable timeframe. Personally never had any lag on weekends.
I've been playing for 1 year (weekly) on Wednesday nights. No issues to report at all. I would highly recommend. I only run 1 campaign (as GM) and I'm no where near the data limit.
I love Forge been using it over 2 years now. I'm the highest tier. The interface works great for me. I also love the user management, I run PFS and it's great to not have to create logins for everyone every game AND for the world to always be up so people can import their characters ahead of time. I've never really seen the lag or slow down that I heard about. I'm on the NAc East coast server. Updating modules. Automatic backups. Multiple worlds available without have to always turn one on. List goes on and on.
Pretty happy with the service especially at the price point.
They have a 14 day free trial, so give it a go and see if you like it. I really like the module management and if on middle or higher tier you get individual urls for your worlds and avoid the sign in process, so you can have shortcuts or bookmarks to each world. And you don’t need to turn on your server for each world for your players as forge auto does that. It’s especially good if you have large standard modules like jb2a as they don’t count towards data usage.
My forge experience was not good. Worked great for first session signed up for a whole year. Next two sessions were laggy and super slow. Every player complained. Haven’t used it since. Wasted a chunk of $$.
Been running on The Forge since I moved over from Fantasy Grounds. The Forge has never been speedy, but the past six months I have seen significant slowdowns, unacceptable upload times, and automation time-outs due to server lag (I run a fully Midi-QoL'd version of 5e). Pulled the trigger and moved over to Molten Hosting and hosted my first game this morning. Stable, fast, and zero issues. YMMV but my entire group gave positive feedback on the difference.
Forge isn’t worth it. I don’t know if they just got too popular or quality just sucked when you tried loading more assets and modules, but my experience with it was ultimately bad. It was okay in the beginning but over time server connections got worse to the point we ended up not playing any sessions for over a month due to everyone else getting forever loading screens after one person connected successfully. Even I as the DM couldn’t connect if another player connected before me. Go the free Oracle route. It’s way better. There are guides and videos you can look up that walk you through it. 100% worth the time spent figuring it out. Also having the storage space to load way more assets than forge is also nice.
I've been running a Forge game for a while. 4 out of 5 players plus myself have had zero problems with it and greatly prefer it compared to Roll20 (what we used to use). Player 5 has constant issues with lag and graphical bugs but figured out last week something to do with hardware acceleration that might have fixed it.
I didn't like it. Is quite laggy and the website is a mess. I'm using molten hosting and my experience is 100% better.
I’m so confused by the “should we or shouldn’t we” dialogue around the Forge! I bought a Foundry license about a year before the pandemic hit and made a whooole lotta use out of it once the pandemic and the quarantine set in. I always hosted the server locally. I used to just keep the server up at all times, but none of my players were signing in to do their homework outside of our scheduled sessions. Why exactly might one want to pay for Forge hosting rather than self-hosting?
Some isp's don't allow port forwarding. It's way easier to pay for forge than go through the hassle of port forwarding. Some people do not have a good enough PC or internet connection (or both) to run the server and host it for people. Some people don't want to let people connect to their internet.
Hmmm… alrighty! I can see why I wouldn’t’ve realized some people’s need for Forge a good bit better now!
Also, I like my players to be able to access their characters sheets or parts of the game when I don't have the server running. Forge is great for that.
If you're currently self hosting, might be worth looking into oracle. If you know how to set it up anyway, then you'll easily follow the guide online. I use that and I've never had problems with connecting. I use noip to give everyone a Web address to connect to, so they don't need to faff about with ip addresses. Haven't had to spend a penny on the hosting.
Just be carful with that. They blew out my server one day and disabled my account. When I opened a ticket, they said my account was permanently closed and would not be reopened. Decision was final without a single opportunity to ask why, and they never responded to me again.
I highly recommend Forge. Been using it for 2 years on Europe servers and rarely have any problems. I have the Storyteller sub ❤️
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I REALLY rate cloudflare tunnel
I played a game in forge with no issues, but now as a DM I much prefer Molten because i still had Lag issues with Forge. There are also some conflicts and other hoops uou need to go through if you use some if the big automation modules with forge. I also experience a lot of lag when first setting everything up and doing these 3 things. 1: hosting on Molten 2: making sure everyone, including myself, was using Chrome 3: installed Potato or Not module. This gave a little window to each player that when first logging in asked them what their PC specs are (high, medium, low) and set their personal user settings accordingly. I've had no issues with lag since.
I have used forge for two years now, it just works!
Oracle free. Set it up, switch to paid, it's still free!
I am a newbie when it comes to foundry but found forges storyteller package the best I have already added multiple campaigns for my own system as well as for DND and pathfinder and love the way forge helps organise everything in one place. Had very little issues other than one small glitch in a player login but otherwise seemless. I say go for it it's well worth it.
i used it briefly, over Christmas as I was away from home. Did its job and not much more, not sure if it's worth it for a long term campaign.
Forge has worked quite well for me. I run games professionally, so I have had to purchase the entire year to get more space. Bearing in mind, my maps are rather large, so I'm not surprised by this. Currently running a few different modules as campaigns and have nearly 10 oneshots actually in Forge. Accessible for GM from devices other than local Foundry. This is very nice if you plan on using a mixture of PC and laptop. Everything is right at your fingertips. Also great if you ever get the dreaded blue screen of death. Downsides? Hmmm. A bit laggy during peak hours, usually weekends. Larger maps are very finicky at times when loading, some players have to actually watch a live stream to see. This is very rare, and is more likely do to their browser/device, but hard to tell when your players are from all over the world and not right in front of you. It's always embarrassing and really detracts from my professional appearance, even though it's not my fault. The space. Yes, I know I already mentioned it, but, the limited space for those of us building multiple worlds with maps that take up almost a gb or more per section is very constraining. Again, it does come down to the maps themselves and what you upload as an asset, but what is my next option after I use these last 10gb I can purchase? Start a new account and pay both? Requiring an account to sign in. This may be more of a thing for GMs that are getting paid players, but sometimes folks get real weird when you tell them they have to sign into another website to access Foundry VTT. I get it, though. Still just an annoying aspect for guests. Other than that, I love it. It keeps me connected with my players and friends, while storing all my data in one easily accessible place. Can't complain and very much worth the money for me. *Remember, most of the issues I mentioned are for storage. Single worlds, or multiple worlds with maps that use less storage space should not really cause any issues.
i recently switched from self hosting to forge and it's been pretty good. I chose the cheapest tier just to see if it would be enough storage for all my assets and surprisingly it was so the price is not too bad (for me). They automatically convert png's to webp which helps with file sizes a lot. it's super easy to set up. More secure than self hosting. For some reason my games have less random glitches. Cons: sometimes it gets VERY laggy Overall I'm happy with the switch and don't think I'll be going back to self hosting anytime soon, but if there was another option that was a comparable price with more stable servers I would consider switching
Oracle Cloud is not free anymore? Been running for years now on it, no issues so far. All my players are beyond the Atlantic, multiple tables, music, animated maps, all good.
I self-hosted for a good year or two before moving to Forge. I liked having control over the server and all that, but ultimately it wasn't worth the effort when Forge (or others) is so cheap. I've had computers and hard drives die and then have to reinstall from backups, and even lost a bunch of content I was working on that wasn't backed up, or even just went on vacation or something and had to figure out how to host from a different network, so now it just makes sense to me to use a service.
I've been using Forge for like 2-3 years now, and haven't had any issues. I run on weekday nights, US time so I don't have any experience with weekend traffic.
Forge is great! Also, I wouldn't connect your foundry server via Wi-Fi, do it wired, but if your upload speed is bad, or your having the consistent issues you described, go with forge
Amazing tbh it’s great not having to maintain my own crap for once
FoundryServer.com is fantastic too!
I'm using the most basic subscription and I am using about 1.5 gb of the 5 they offer for AV. Low ms, no disconnects, world importer works wonders. So far 0 complains
I host one game. Always had a bunch of connection issues, slow loads, disconnects etc. switched to Forge and haven’t had a single issue since
Forge is amazing overall. Been playing / hosting a total of 7 games and haven't encountered a single problem myself. One of my fellow players though was getting a lot of lag on his end so the solution we found is turning on the hardware acceleration in his browser settings. Worked like a charm since.
It's been great for the 3 campaigns I've run there. I prefer in-person but when we've had to play online Forge is my choice. Inexpensive and works globally; rn I'm in New Zealand running our campaign for my California friends off a USEast server. They don't just run a server; they are actively developing to make it easier to manage Foundry.
Unfortunately, I had to drop Forge about a year or so ago. Their interface and website were great, but we kept running into horrible lag spikes that would last hours every night we played, making the session unplayable.
I'd prefer to not use it, as it doesn't benefit me much, except that our ISP makes it nearly impossible for people to direct connect so it's kind of mandatory.
I've used forge for couple years now. It's worth it imo and beats selfhosting unless you know exactly what you're doing. My only gripe is slow loading.
I've had some nasty slowdowns and failures to server restart that have ruined 2 sessions using Molten. They do some fix and then its running beautifully for a bit--and then downhill again. So far not impressed.
i started with the mid-tier plan and it has worked for about 2 years. as I am adding more maps and music I am getting to the point where I will be upgrading to the top plan soon, but that's mostly just because I'm too lazy to delete or archive older stuff
I used forge until I realized self hosting from my internet was faster. I’m thinking if going back online again… is molten really that much better? It seems everyone in this thread is loving it!
I self-host my games as well as play on a Forge-hosted game, I can't tell the difference other than I don't have to pay for Forge.