The other is, well, hack'n'slash at its best. Welcome to Zangband, D&D style. I call the campaign Uber-Dungeon. It has a loose in-game justification for this magical dungeon discovered underneath a city. The dungeon is constantly changing, which means if you leave and come back you may be faced with new rooms, puzzles, and monsters. Essentially, it's a chance for me to have fun with my many random generation tables (random dungeons, random monsters, traps, etc.). I had intended this to be a one-time session while my other campaign had a 4-week hiatus, but the players (including two people completely new to D&D) loved it and wanted more. And today I integrated MapTool into the mix.
It was awesome.
So, with all that exposition done with, here is what I've done to make my sessions more sexy. Please let me know if there are any areas where I could make improvements.
1) Start mapping with Dundjinni
Dundjinni seems to be rather handy for quickly making maps. I'm not a very artistic person, and have very limited time these days, so it seemed to provide me with what I needed.
I took my hand-drawn map and converted it into a very basic Dundjinni map. I actually needed 4 Dundjinni maps because of its size, but I just used Gimp to stitch them all together.
2) Super-Charge the Map with MapTool
I set out to create everything through Dundjinni that couldn't be interacted with. That's why my initial map lacked doors (my hope was to make the doors actually open when the PCs opened them). However, with all the overtime I've been working lately, I had to be content with just setting up topography lines through the middle of all the walls. I also added some treasure items that the players could take, secret doors that would be revealed once found, and trap graphics that would appear if triggered. Oh, and, of course, monster tokens.
3) Play!
I had ordered a projector to arrive on Friday, but it didn't show. Today I had an extra laptop on a swivel tray for the players to use. It worked well, but I'm eagerly anticipating the projection of our session onto the wall.
Between my computer acting up, and PCGen having a hissy fit because it now wasn't the only Java app used for my game sessions, there was a considerable delay to our start time. However, once I got things going and guided the players through the dungeon to where we left off, they were immediately hooked. The light ranges and vision enhancements alone are enough to make MapTool invaluable.
Comments and issues:
a) As mentioned, PCGen crapped out on me. I normally use this app as my combat tracker but also for its automatic awarding of XP and the easy levelling up (as you can imagine, fairly important for a hack'n'slash game such as this). PCGen is normally pretty slow for me, but today it maxed out my CPU usage and even crashed my computer. Any ideas on how to make it behave with its new sibling?
b) The party's SOP for opening doors typically involves putting down lanterns (pointed at the door) so that they can charge in unhindered. I simulated this by taking the light source away from their token, and then adding a temp token as a 'PC' that would have the same light source. I suppose dropping an object with the light source would be just as good.
Would there be a better way to do this? I think the main slow-down here was re-creating the temp token each time. Could I save an object with a light source and throw it in when needed? Hmm, I guess I could just put the object out in the middle of solid earth until it is needed again...
(by the way, thanks to the light feature of MapTool, my players now see how imperfect their SOP is, since it leaves considerable darkness in the adjacent room. They had to run out, grab a light source, and run back in to expose those dark visioning nasties that were pelting them with missiles)
c) Manoeuvring the PCs down various halls was a bit tedious. The main reason why was their marching order would have to be re-adjusted for each turn. However, I just thought now that I didn't try the shift-scroll technique. Does that work for a selection of tokens? It would certainly make dungeon crawls easier.
d) I used patterns a couple of times (Burning Hands). It's a great tool. However, I couldn't manage to erase the pattern afterwards. I tried using shift and I tried clicking the erase button. What am I missing?
e) The labels on the tokens caught me off guard a couple of times. I realize now that that there is a DM version and a public version, so I can leave the public part ambiguous for those monsters the PCs haven't yet encountered. However, I also had the label poking through doors to give away the presence of a monster... Can these be turned off, in general, or do I need to remember to set every monster to not visible?
f) There are a bunch of features I've discovered today that are quite awesome. For one, the spacebar arrow came in handy on a frequent basis (most importantly when the Paladin was detecting evil through doors and I'd point at the approximate positions of the evil sources). I'm really looking forward to learning more about the macros. And the token stats. And- and-...
Well, enough gushing for now. Thanks for the awesome product. Just one last question before I sign off:
I'm thinking of ditching the grid and going completely free-moving. Does anyone have experience with this and can give me some pointers? My main concern at the moment is determining attacks of opportunity (threatened spaces). A "threatened area" overlay (like light) would be nice to have.
Now to prep that fortress I need for my other campaign for next week. Who needs sleep?
- Niilo
