weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

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claud9999
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weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by claud9999 »

I've been running a weekly lunchtime (11:30-1) D&D session for somewhere around 9 months now. We started with a battlemat and paper tokens, then moved to Game Table. Once we finished the adventure (DCC #2 in 3.5) I decided to move everyone to 4E and MapTool. So far, everything has worked out well, we've had 3 sessions so far using MapTool and 4E has been good (I've run 4E a couple times, and played a couple times, so we're all learning.)

In order to acclimate everybody with 4E and MapTool, we are playing the Kobold Keep adventure out of the DMG. I killed everyone in the first room to teach them how death works (and that kobolds are 1-for-1 with 1st level characters, prettymuch, so 3 PC's versus the 5 kobolds was a serious mis-match.)

I thought about adopting other folks' macros and campaign files and whatnot, but I didn't find anything "definitive" and I'm a coder by trade so I am happy to write macros on my own. I've mostly written macros for the monsters, I want the players to learn their powers and manage their characters old-school at first to get a feel for how that works before they automate everything.

As for macros, I've written "macros" for all of the powers and whatnot that take actions on the part of the monsters. This is mostly for my own memory, as it's hard to remember what all of the capabilities of the monsters are when you go from your office to the meeting room and set up as quickly as possible. All of them are "/self" macros so I relay what they say, but they're fairly complex (including state changes, die rolling, conditional damage, etc.)

We're struggling with character management; we used to use PC-Gen for 3.5 chars but I've never been all that happy with it and their 4E support is alpha (?) I've let the players figure out amongst themselves what they'd like to use. I'd very much like to use CharTool but the 4E work seems to have stalled? For now I think most of the players will use one of the Excel spreadsheets and I'll either hand-copy their stats into their tokens, or I'll ask them to manage their tokens. We have a SVN repository we've used for sharing character sheets and whatnot, so we'll use that for tokens as well.

One strong suggestion: wiki pages -- much of what is in the forums (such as the macro tutorial) would be better managed as wiki pages so they could be constantly kept up-to-date and folks can quickly find such things as "4E macros" or "a large collection of D&D tokens" or whatnot. Conversation is good for the "now" but bad when it gets stale. I'm happy to write text.

claud9999
Kobold
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Joined: Fri Nov 14, 2008 6:00 pm
Location: Santa Clara, CA
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some comments on MapTool

Post by claud9999 »

For our adventure, I cropped the Kobold Hall map from the PDF (gee, where'd I get that?) and loaded it into MapTool.

Aligning the grid wasn't hard, took 5 minutes of tweaking around.

I quickly figured out how LoS worked and drew in all of the LoS within an hour or so (helps that it's a small map with no "caverns.")

For tokens, I use a set of public domain graphics from the Angband game that I used ImageMagick to cut up into individual tokens. I really like the old-school low-res nature of the images, and so far we've been able to find tokens to represent most of what we need. http://www.molotov.nu/?page=graphics (I can provide split images for those who are interested. I did this to create my iPhone Hack-like RPG http://www.hotcat.org/rpg/ . Hint, try /rpg/img ...)

Biggest complaint: I'm not terribly fond of the roll-over display of stats, the font is big and the lines of text have a lot of dead space between. I would really like to see the "Selection" window replace the functionality of the roll-overs as well as the "edit" modal dialog. At a minimum, scale these down or make them configurable.

Supporting hierarchical/arbitrary properties would be very helpful in 4E.

I had to hack the .xml to change the "units per cell" and to have more than 2 token types.

I run a server on my machine at home and folks connect in remotely, and I connect in remotely as the GM. This generally works, except campaign macros don't transfer to the GM client. No biggie.

It would be more convenient to not have to manage everything in zip's, particularly as I like to version-control files. Maybe have an option whether campaign/token/whatever files are zips or directories would be nice.

I wanted to try out the HEAD of the trunk to see if there was much difference, unluckily I found out the hard way that campaign files are upgraded and can't be downgraded. No biggie, but perhaps a warning would be appropriate.

Generally the code is very well organized, congrats to the coding team. I'd be happy to help, although I'm more a C/C# programmer I have done some Java and lots of XML. Client-server, OS, database, whatnot, and a little UI. I need to spend a bit more time to understand how Rhino is used. I almost flunked out of College due to spending far too much time coding multi-processing in a MUD virtual machine engine (DaemonMUCK).

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trevor
Codeum Arcanum (RPTools Founder)
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Re: some comments on MapTool

Post by trevor »

claud9999 wrote: Generally the code is very well organized, congrats to the coding team.
Heh, glad you think so. I look at it and see a big cluttered mess :) There's lots of places I'd like to overhaul.
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

claud9999
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Re: weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by claud9999 »

Sadly a couple canceled sessions recently.

But I wanted to point out something I think might be of interest to other 4E players. Instead of making powers as properties, I make them as macros. For powers that aren't attacks, I just use a "/self <this power does X>" message and replace variables as appropriate.

I've seen many folks storing powers as properties, and not only is it easy to forget what powers you have, the fixed nature of the number of properties means that if you have more than N powers you have to do something kludgy to fit in the rest.

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PyroMancer2k
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Re: weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by PyroMancer2k »

claud9999 wrote:Sadly a couple canceled sessions recently.

But I wanted to point out something I think might be of interest to other 4E players. Instead of making powers as properties, I make them as macros. For powers that aren't attacks, I just use a "/self <this power does X>" message and replace variables as appropriate.

I've seen many folks storing powers as properties, and not only is it easy to forget what powers you have, the fixed nature of the number of properties means that if you have more than N powers you have to do something kludgy to fit in the rest.
Actually I've been storing my powers in individual macros and not on the token props since day one ;). As for the properties limit you are right it can be a bit of a hassle if you go over. I original did something similar for equipment which I know a lot of people still do and what I found more annoying was all the extra slots on the list. I can only imagine what it must of been like for a power setup with tons of empty slots.

I came up with a creative solution with strProp to where you can add/remove as many items as you need so no extra slots wasting your space. The setup is so versatile I use it for Equipment, Consumables, Feats, and Notes. The Notes is for the Monster Token so you can put as many little reminders as you want. And with the new Dialog boxes it's a lot easier to display them for viewing.

I know you said you like to code your own stuff but I recently posted a new update where you can actual click on the items in the dialog box and edit them as well as add/remove items all without the need to mess with token props. So it might give you some ideas on how to deal with things. Including possibly using a frame() to replace that rollover stat sheet you said you didn't like.

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Rumble
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Re: weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by Rumble »

claud9999 wrote:Sadly a couple canceled sessions recently.

But I wanted to point out something I think might be of interest to other 4E players. Instead of making powers as properties, I make them as macros. For powers that aren't attacks, I just use a "/self <this power does X>" message and replace variables as appropriate.

I've seen many folks storing powers as properties, and not only is it easy to forget what powers you have, the fixed nature of the number of properties means that if you have more than N powers you have to do something kludgy to fit in the rest.
Depends on how you handle it. There is an upper limit (well, I suppose there isn't, but a reasonable upper limit) to the number of powers a character is going to have that aren't going to be /self "power does x" type powers. At 30th level, you're looking at 10 attack powers, plus paragon and epic powers (or maybe it's not "plus" - I have no idea how paragon or epic destinies work), and then racials, channel divinities, and a fairly limited number of item powers. My setup stores powers in string properties, each one residing in a token property called Power0, Power1, Power2, etc. These are only for attack powers - something you'd run against another token.

In most cases, I would guess that the number of attack powers that are stored are easily less than 20. As far as utility and other miscellany - stuff that doesn't necessarily run against an enemy token - I use custom/unique macros.

As for the player "interface" part - when they add a power to their power list, a button is automatically created (with the appropriate color and a "grayout" function) that runs the proper sequence to use that power. So they just see their powers as buttons. If they need to edit them, they call up the power editor and can mess with the powers they possess.

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PyroMancer2k
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Re: weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by PyroMancer2k »

Rumble wrote:At 30th level, you're looking at 10 attack powers, plus paragon and epic powers (or maybe it's not "plus" - I have no idea how paragon or epic destinies work)
The Paragon and Epic powers are include in that advancement table in the PHB. When it comes to Paragon and Epic choose wisely because you can't swap out their powers. Besides the fact that you don't really have another power to choose from you can't replace the powers given by your Paragon or Epic.

In the DM on page 143, the section on Starting at higher levels, there is a chart of what powers you should have at each level. And you can see once you get the Paragon ones they are never replaced, same with epic.

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Rumble
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Re: weekly lunchtime 4E sessions

Post by Rumble »

PyroMancer2k wrote:
Rumble wrote:At 30th level, you're looking at 10 attack powers, plus paragon and epic powers (or maybe it's not "plus" - I have no idea how paragon or epic destinies work)
The Paragon and Epic powers are include in that advancement table in the PHB. When it comes to Paragon and Epic choose wisely because you can't swap out their powers. Besides the fact that you don't really have another power to choose from you can't replace the powers given by your Paragon or Epic.

In the DM on page 143, the section on Starting at higher levels, there is a chart of what powers you should have at each level. And you can see once you get the Paragon ones they are never replaced, same with epic.
Yeah, that's where it was. Anyway, my point was that at least with D&D 4th, there is a reasonable upper limit to powers that might need to be stored on a property. I'm not arguing it's the best way - a string property is probably better (especially the way you handled it) since it's infinitely expandable, more or less. However, if there is a fixed number, and you can access and manipulate them, then token properties are a fairly decent solution as well.

On the other hand, in a game where there's some feature a character has that has no predictable limit (say, Exalted, where you can have charms out the yang, and then combos of charms, and so forth) you either have to say "it supports up to 10 Awesome Abilities" or you do a string property and let it expand as necessary.

It's game-based, really.

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