First session face to face

[Cosworth]

Hi there,

We played our first session using maptool yesterday. It was featuring new rules (pathfinder) and maptool. The session was face to face.

Setup:
2 instances of Maptool running on one machine dual-screen. Player instance on projector.
5 mice were connected and the neat program Teamplayer from wunderworks.com was just perfect for this. (each has his own cursor color but only one is controlling the mouse at any one time)
I went with full lighting/VBL/fog of war and it went very smoothly. Players were in awe and commented that this was far better than miniatures on the table. All their rolls were manual and all mine were maptool based. I really liked how the metagaming was reduced because they didn't see all of the map and monsters at all times.

A new campaign will be starting based on this setup, so it was a great success.

Things that didn't work 100% was:
- On one map the players couldn't autoreveal and I couldn't figure out why on the fly.
- the Vision blocking lines are for some reason visible to players. This is not good for daylight ambushes as the players can anticipate something is hidden behind those lines.
- Setting initiative for all players was a bit slow and could be faster if a they could be entered in a list for selected tokens or similar. (in a face to face game not all players have access to keyboards, so the initiative entering becomes an issue.
- There were a few macro issues too but nothing major.

[Azhrei]

Hi there,

Hey, Cos.

Things that didn't work 100% was:
- On one map the players couldn't autoreveal and I couldn't figure out why on the fly.

Strange that it was only a single map...

- the Vision blocking lines are for some reason visible to players. This is not good for daylight ambushes as the players can anticipate something is hidden behind those lines.

Do you really mean that the light being blocked by the VBL is noticeable? Because the VBL lines themselves are NEVER visible to players, although their effects can be.

Easy solution is to drop extra VBL around. Of course, that's the kind of misdirection that GMs do all the time in a regular battlemat game. (Or at least, I do. )

- Setting initiative for all players was a bit slow and could be faster if a they could be entered in a list for selected tokens or similar. (in a face to face game not all players have access to keyboards, so the initiative entering becomes an issue.

I just use Shift-drag to select a bunch of tokens at once, then click my Init macro that calls Wiki: setInitiative() on each of them. (This is from lmarkus' campaign framework.)

[Cosworth]

The VBL is always visible as white lines when you mouse over a token with sight enabled. I'll post a screenshot tomorrow.

I know the Init macro, but in face to face games the issue is getting physical die rolls into maptool to track initiative. Players wan't to roll their own die. I suppose I could just tweak your macro a bit.

[Amaril]

Technically, you don't have to set initiative values. Just drag and drop them in the order they need to be.

[Jector]

The VBL is always visible as white lines when you mouse over a token with sight enabled. I'll post a screenshot tomorrow.

That is how it's supposed to work. Mousing over characters with vision shows what they can see as an outline, so VBL will be part of that outline. If they have conical vision you'll see the outline of the wedge they can view when you mouse over them.

[Cosworth]

Technically, you don't have to set initiative values. Just drag and drop them in the order they need to be.

good point!