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Somewhat related: I have a group I introduced to D&D a couple years ago. We were all bored husbands of overly-busy medical students, so it was a good way to chill out, get drunk, and have some fun. Anyhow, school finished, and we all went our separate ways. Except now we're jonesin' to get the game going again. With that in mind, we're going to start experimenting with remote D&D. RPTools' MapTool is the first on our list to try, and we're going to just use it for the mapping/character-movement/etc stuff and leave all the actual game mechanics to players on their own (including honor-system dice rolling.) So the question: does anyone have any recommendations for a system which isn't too burdensome in its rules (while still providing a solid framework: we like the numbers side of the game) and has a good community of support for this sort of thing and good software for what we're after? It sounds like 4e and 3.5/Pathfinder both have the best support of any system in MapTool, but if anyone has any more other recommendations, I'm all ears. For now, since we're just using MapTool in its absolute most basic form, we're using 3e just because that's what they learned on, because that's what I had a ton of books for at the time we started playing. I know the system pretty drat well so it's not a huge burden, but I also know there are waaaay better options. tl;dr: I'm just looking for some advice on finding a more suitable replacement system (both game system and software system) for what we're actually doing here, e.g. remote D&D.
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Jun 11, 2013 18:27
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Kevsop posted:honorable mention goes to roll20 Thanks for this. I signed up and am watching the tutorial, and so far I'm really liking what I see. It's like MapTool Web Lite, this might be just the ticket. I think I'll take the same little test adventure I made up and put it into Roll20, and then we can do the pepsi challenge. Thanks!  e: The only thing I feel like it's really missing is the automatic line of sight/lighting stuff that MapTool does, that one feature really turns my crank. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Jun 11, 2013 |
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Jun 11, 2013 21:34
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DarkHorse posted:Oh man, that's neat! Yeah, rolling is always the easiest part.  Of course, there's still so much value in physically rolling dice that I think for most things, I'll just trust my people to roll them irl and report the results. If I get the impression they're cheating, I'll just cheat back. Which, imho, is a critical aspect of a real, in-person game, as well.  I'd love to hop in on a game run by someone who knows the tool (either of them!) I don't care what game system as long as you don't mind if I'm clueless. I like what I'm seeing in Roll20 because it takes the stuff I like about MapTool and just trims it down to a simple, clean iRPG experience. On the other hand, I see these campaign frameworks for MapTool which look like it's basically converting the entire system into a massive set of macros and poo poo, and while that's awesome and I love it, it gets waaaaay too complicated waaaaay too fast. That turns me off from those extra features, at which point I have MapTool Basic vs. Roll20. Since Roll20 is apparently designed to operate at that level (although there is support for some more advanced features like macros) it's starting to look like it might be a winner. If they got that line of sight stuff in, it'd be a shoe-in, at last for now. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jun 12, 2013 |
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Jun 12, 2013 01:13
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It doesn't help that MapTool shows on its download page EVERY VERSION EVER COMPILED INCLUDING V1.3.b88_BROKEN_DO_NOT_USE.ZIP (seriously). It would be nice if they just had a "download latest version" link and the rest were hidden behind a "download old releases" link. Half the time of getting a friend up and running is the extended conversation of which version they should be using, do I need to update, will this module support version X, etc. Someone mentioned that the line of sight thing (not just lighting) was coming for Roll20, is there a thread on their forum about that or something? If they had that, or if it was coming in the near future, I'd gladly pay for their upgraded services. If it's one of those "yes, we'll add that some day, in the mysterious future, hopefully before the robots attack" type situations, though, that's less enticing.
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Jun 12, 2013 21:21
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I used to, but it didn't work so well, it kept re-asking if I wanted to authorize the app (for running as a server), etc. Downloading it fixed that problem. Web launch is great in some cases, less so in others.
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Jun 12, 2013 21:53
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Rocket Ace posted:Does D&D allow EXP rewards for defeating an encounter by other means than killing? I mean, if you knock a foe unconscious, or made it run away for various reasons, wouldn't that be considered a victory? I've always gone by the rule that if an enemy escapes, it's a victory, but since he could come back if he chose, it's some percentage of full exp (ranging from 50% if the enemy is basically guaranteed to return, up to 100% if the enemy is really never coming back. I also give 100% if, of course, the enemy was supposed to escape as, say, part of the story.) Taking an enemy prisoner is full victory, so full exp. In any event, DM can award exp for whatever the heck he wants. We played on or around Halloween once, and I gave bonus exp for people that brought props relevant to their character. It was a blast, and some of those props kept appearing at every game after that. Give exp for whatever you like.
Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 16:40
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Razorwired posted:To expand on this, one of my favorite issues of the Darkness is when The Sovereign is introduced. Now the Sovereign himself is another villain altogether but the first mission he sends Jackie on is a hit on a demon that has possessed a Mother Theresa stand-in and has kept her body going after Theresa's soul had passed on. The demon actually kept the hospitals and shelters going and from all outward appearances was being very Catholic, humble and righteous. To keep the body going he would take the life of one of the comatose patients in the infirmary once a month. Beyond this everyone he took into the shelter had a better quality of life. That's such a wonderful situation, thanks.
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Jun 16, 2013 15:43
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Lallander posted:So what interesting thing are you going to be putting inside their new hollow toy? Kal-El, last son of Krypton, duh.  I like elemental themes. If it gets subjected to some extreme sources of various energy types (and you can go beyond the typical Captain Planet energy types and add in things like positive/negative energy, etc) then let it take on some characteristic of that energy that the players can notice (and assumedly benefits them in some way, like they can get a resistance to a particular energy type charged up from it once a day, which will encourage them to expose it to other energies), and once they catch on, they can strive to expose it to other energies, making the rock itself a sort of ad hoc opportunistic quest. Once it's been exposed to everything on your list, hatch it. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jun 16, 2013 |
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Jun 16, 2013 17:15
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JAssassin posted:I'm starting a 4th edition campaign with some of my friends online next week, and I'm trying to find a program that will let me design maps and such so we can play. The 4e thread recommends Maptool, but the big torrent of stuff is down. What would be a good alternative to Maptool, or is Maptool still good enough to use without all the extra bits? I've got a copy of the archive, I can put it somewhere if you want to download it the old fashioned way.
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Jun 27, 2013 17:32
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Ashcans posted:I will also mention that whichever you are using, you can also use a website like Pyromancers to actually construct the underlying map you want to use and import it into the tabletop program. This is particularly useful for something like Roll20, because it cuts down the number of objects vs. building the map inside the engine. Oh, awesome, thanks for that. I was on the verge of doing that in illustrator. Which would work, but isn't really what I was after.
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Jun 27, 2013 17:54
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JAssassin posted:Oh that'd be awesome if you could do that.
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Jun 27, 2013 18:10
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Mendrian posted:"I attack the Goblin." "Okay, but what are you wearing?" Right but you see you forget the motivation for attacking the goblin in the first place: his clothes are hideous and those shoes simply do not match that overcoat.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:42
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I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or what. Are you actually offended that people here have told you that maybe playing Make-Believe Barbie Dressup instead of D&D isn't necessarily what your players want?
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Jul 10, 2013 19:37
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krebbed flam posted:Oh jeez. A veritable font of information. Lallander posted:I don't really get what you mean here.
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Jul 10, 2013 19:53
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Regarding experience for non-present members: you'll probably hear arguments from both sides on this. I say if the character is there, s/he should get full experience. Otherwise, you're punishing the character for something the player probably has no control over. Don't punish your players for having a life outside your game, in particular by withholding experience, because that punishment will stick with them for the entirety of the life of that character, because they missed a game or two on account of not being able to get a babysitter or having to work or whatever. As for dungeons: consider the actual ecology of your dungeon. How did it come to be? What is living there now, and how do they get along? Is it a ruined temple now inhabited by a band of orcs? Great. Think about how the original tenants (the priests) made use of the temple, and would have had it designed. Likely a central chamber for worship, probably some secluded spaces for meditation, dormitories for the priests that lived there (how many were resident in its heyday?), pantries and cellars and kitchens and plots for livestock and farming. Was it near a town, or in the wilderness? And now that the original builders are gone and the orcs have moved in, what have they done with it? What is their day-to-day usage that defines where certain orcs are to be found and where their belongings are kept? Have the orcs found all the hidden chambers the priests might have stored some precious relics in? Does the orc leader like to sit proudly in what used to be the main worship chamber, or does he like to hide away in the inner cloister? Have the orcs ventured into the catacombs yet? And if so, did they find anything there, or still frequent the area? If not, why? Perhaps they found undead and have walled the catacombs off in fear. What secrets do the undead protect from the fearful orcs? And why are the undead there at all? Is there a dark force in the catacombs raising the undead, or did the priests do something themselves, perhaps using the undead to keep an even greater evil further below in check? The more thought you put into how a certain dungeon or setting would actually exist in your world, the more you can develop living, breathing, interesting settings. Layers can make for a great deal of fun, such as the aforementioned temple->orc outpost->undead catacombs->???. Each group would leave its mark on the location and influence how the next group exists, leading to interactions between the various groups even if they've never met (priests & orcs) or if they avoid each other at all costs (orcs & undead.) Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Jul 22, 2013 |
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Jul 22, 2013 18:35
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That's basically what I do, But I still give the players a number so they don't realize. It keeps the ones that want to see that number grow happy, while letting us get on with the fun stuff at minimal time cost. I usually just pick a number that will put most of the party around 1/4-3/4 through their next level. Every once in a while, that means someone might not quite level some time, which has the weird effect of, instead of disappointing them, making them more amped up for the next time, because they know they'll be SO CLOSE to two levels in one session, or might even get enough to level twice.
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Jul 22, 2013 22:46
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Do the new versions of the DMG not have those sweet treasure-generation tables that the 3.0 DMG had? It was a bit involved and thus not at all something to be done during the game itself, but I really liked those tables for generating random loot as part of a session's planning phase.
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Jul 25, 2013 20:22
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Have they gotten line of sight in yet? I was doing a big pepsi challenge between that and MapTool, but we were so happy with MapTool and roll20 didn't have line of sight that we never got to the other half of the bake-off.
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Aug 11, 2013 02:58
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Last I heard it wasn't...like, you could use it that way, if you wanted to give up actual lighting, but it was kludgey and not really intended to work that way. Someone around here claimed they were working on proper line of sight support, but I never found anything about it on their forum or elsewhere.
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Aug 11, 2013 03:01
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I've got a game coming up this Friday and I'm experiencing some severe writer's block. I've DM'd for a good long while, but with this game, this is only like the third session, so nothing long-term is going on yet. It's an online game, currently via RPTools, everyone is remote. Three players, and me. The setup: a human fighter, he'd been lost in the woods for a while, and was brought back to civilization by a dwarven cleric who's camp he happened upon one night. They did a little dungeon dive and are now officially buddies. They've travelled back to town, and that's where we're picking up Friday. They need to acquire the third character, a sorceress of some sort, and then have some fun. I want the game to be largely based out of this town from here on out, so I'd like some town-based fun this time to kind of cement things here. The town can be big or small, but I'm leaning towards small so they can work towards building the place up from a frontier town to a more central location for the world in general. I opted to give the sorceress a small house in or about the town, probably outside the town proper and nothing special, but a place to call home. This is D&D 3.0 with a pretty strong disinterest in most of the lovely rules (we wing it like half the time.) Any suggestions for some town-centric fun that will occupy three players for a few hours and hopefully result in a greater inclination to stick around town, at least as a home base? e: Forgot to say: more dungeon crawly/action based than, say, political intrigue. The latter is still fine as a plot device, just not a main focus. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Aug 22, 2013 |
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Aug 22, 2013 00:21
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Right on, this'll be great. Thanks a ton. Usually I'm full of ideas, but sometimes, it's just not working.  As for the hookup with the caster, we'll just roll it in as part of the story. Because of the venue, a lot of stuff is hand-waved into story telling, so it'll be along the lines of, "And from what you've learned of the problem, YOU'LL NEED AN ARCANE SPELLCASTER OF SOME SORT. Oh hey, she looks like the type." With a group this small and easy going, nobody will have any problems at all with that. They'd rather be adventuring than using up time just to get someone in the party who is literally sitting right there.
Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Aug 22, 2013 |
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Aug 22, 2013 01:13
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sebmojo posted:Edit: Also, make a swag (6-8) thumbnail sketches of characters and names that you can scatter around the town, and then keep an eye on which ones the players are interested in so you can develop them further. Give each one a name, a way of talking/catchphrase and a relationship with another town member. Adventures will ensure, I promise. For town stats and the local population, I found some really good generators that name as much of the town as you want, give them professions, names for businesses, all that stuff. Hell, one I found even provides you with menus for the various taverns and told you where/when various business owners liked to hang out when not at work and such.  For a long-term town like this, it'd actually be worthwhile having all that information. And if something isn't right, you just adjust it as needed the first time you use it.
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Aug 22, 2013 01:17
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http://www.mathemagician.net/town.html The format is a bit annoying in that I can't find a way to just get a flat text dump of the whole thing, but there are numerous browser plugins that will scrape a page like that to a local archive for later perusal at your convenience. Also if you leave a window open for a while and try to load up sub-portions of the town, it loses them sometimes? I don't know, but I recommend scraping the page real quick if you have a town you intend to re-use.
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Aug 22, 2013 01:27
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If you have the the D&D 3.0 DMG, there are like fifty random treasure tables that are all d100. What an odd request, though. 
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Aug 24, 2013 13:37
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Nihnoz posted:Random tables are useful. You never know when you might need one. Oh, I see, you're just looking for a library of tables for whatever events might arise. The way I read it originally was more along the lines of "I need a giant stack of d100 tables for no reason other than to have tables. I don't care what is on them, and when using them, I still won't care." So like you were just going to look threatening by rolling lots of d100s while paging through a massive pile of tables and glaring at your players or something. 
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Aug 26, 2013 03:27
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Table crawls are the new dungeon crawl. Also I take full credit for this game and I will be launching a kickstarter soon to try to gather $50,000 to put together the book of tables. Backing at the $100 tier will get you a pdf of the tables I google up.
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Aug 27, 2013 01:05
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$50 gets your name mentioned on a website somewhere, I don't know. $1000 gets you a personal email from me thanking you for your contribution (PDF not included). e: poo poo, forgot, I'm going to need stretch goals. Okay, if we hit $75k, I will add in a second book of tables. It will contain twice as many tables as the first book, and will be called "d50".
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Aug 27, 2013 01:11
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Lallander posted:Trying to hotlink from 4chan? Really? You might want to upload whatever it was you wanted to show us somewhere else. If you copy the image url and go there directly it works. Here ya go: 
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Sep 23, 2013 04:29
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If you give him the character back, it seems like you're rewarding him for loving things up for that character in the first place? I mean, the lesson here is, "Keep doing stuff that eventually forces my hand and I kill and you'll get to comeback as a superdude."
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Sep 29, 2013 22:02
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Absolutely. In fact, PCs that become Big Bad Evil Bad Guy NPCs can be a lot of fun.
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Sep 29, 2013 22:14
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Yeah, that's a "reward" the entire party can enjoy.
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Sep 29, 2013 22:48
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Dohaeris posted:I'm running a Next campaign through Maptool with some friends over Vent and having some trouble making map encounters. I've been using pyromancers.com which is great, but has a bit of a limited selection in terms of objects/art assets. I see you can load more stuff in but I can't find anyplace I can get more stuff to load in. Any suggestions, or alternatives for map making in that regard? There's a giant (like 2GB) archive of stuff for MapTool if you don't mind making your maps directly in that. It's supposedly available on bit torrent but last I saw, nobody was seeding. I have the archive on a public server, I just don't want to hand out the URL. You don't have PMs, but if you email me at badmunki@goondorfs.net I'll send you the URL. krushgroove posted:Since it's map-chat, I figure it's worth mentioning how we have recently starting doing mapping - we used to use Maptool but it became such a pain in the rear end for the other GMs to make maps that we went to using a big whiteboard and a set of dry-erase markers from Costco. I got the white boards free from work, but I know they can be expensive. I draw everything out and we measure movement at 5 feet per inch, using a tape measure just like we do for wargaming. Super simple and because the module we're playing gives 1000gp to map each level I make the players map it out. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 22:00
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Yeah, there's an option in the toolbox, the one that looks like a rectangle with dots on each corner, that's the snap-to-grid button for drawing. Or, when you've placed an object on the map, you can right-click on it and tell it to snap to grid. I think there's a preference somewhere to make objects snap by default, but I can't remember where exactly. e: Yeah, for objects, right-click->snap to grid, or set it in the general preferences, lower left corner: Objects, Start Snap to Grid. You can also set that for tokens and background stuff.   And for drawing, the blue rectangle at middle left: 
Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 22:32
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For a good long while now, I've disallowed players from explicitly choosing an alignment. We just leave that field blank on the character sheet. It's worked exceedingly well so far. For most characters, it doesn't matter, the character gets played a certain way and if I notice a strong deviation from that character's norm, we address that as needed (usually doesn't need addressing, it's all just part of long-term development.) For the characters where alignment is an important factor (say, a paladin) it makes for a nice bit of tension as the player has to honestly think about how things should fit into that character's worldview and how the gods or what have you would interpret his/her actions. Additionally, it completely abolishes CN bullshit and the like. If a character is being an rear end in a top hat, there's no longer the excuse of "No, you don't understand, I'm ~*~ch@0t1c n3utr4l~*~," and instead the other players/characters just say, "You're being an rear end in a top hat." When the topic of a hard, defined alignment never enters the discussion, so much bullshit simply evaporates and the characters become, in my opinion, a hundredfold more expressive.
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Oct 21, 2013 16:36
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Minor cross-post: Do any of you use the dwarven forge sets? I'm just curious which pieces you find you use the most and which you wish you had more of. I've begun casting my hirst molds in earnest and I'm roughly using their sets as a guide for what I might like to have. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 03:40
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Yeah, I'm making modular pieces that I can put together to form a map, rather than large monolithic sets. e: Oh, haha, not sure how that link got mixed up. Whoops.  Here's an example set, just for reference:  You can see how you can put those together to make various rooms and chambers. For my purposes, I'm building these things as bare-bones as possible so that they're general purpose. That is, more interesting than drawing lines on a battle mat, but not forcing me to have the same rooms over and over again. Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 04:59
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homullus posted:2) steal shamelessly from other things -- the players are unlikely to recognize characters and plots if you change the names And even if they do recognize, they won't care. They'll probably think it's loving awesome. Which is how a multi-year campaign I was running ended up turning into a high-fantasy blatant stargate ripoff for over a year at the end of its life, and even when I stepped down, another guy stepped in and took over, running it for another team of characters, which I got to play in, and I was all, "HELL YEAH, FANTASY STARGATE." Once they figured out what was going on, they even named their little band of adventurers "DG-1" (Dimensional Gate 1, as they were the founders of the whole thing) and were proud of their blatant ripoff campaign. So yeah, don't be shy about stealing.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:39
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It was a lot of fun, I highly recommend it. And going planes-hopping means pretty much anything goes as far as what you throw at the players, while still neatly wrapping things up every couple of sessions and allowing for a big, over-arching campaign.
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Dec 13, 2013 23:46
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Ehh, you can always just retire him and phase out his team except for the occasional cameo, and make a new team out of the characters from another campaign you were working on but decided to shut down all of a sudden.
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Dec 14, 2013 00:11
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Antti posted:It won't be quite the same though Just don't jump the shark and decide to make a "gritty" Battlestar Galactica crossover campaign called Dimensional Gate: Universe, nothing will ever actually happen and you'll just end up canceling it while it's still in its infancy. Once your original campaign and a couple spinoffs have played out, it's better to just leave it alone so your players remember it fondly, rather than trying to bludgeon them with some ill-conceived slop.
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Dec 14, 2013 16:30
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