Iron Children - report-back

Tell us how you are using our gaming tools and how your sessions are going.

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heyes
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Iron Children - report-back

Post by heyes »

First night of a new group with a new system.
Found that there was a bit of lag between the computers, but not enough to make using it a problem. I am definitely switching to a square grid for combat though, as it was a real hassle having tokens disappear in hexes that straddled the vlb lines.

For the most part maptools didn't dominate the game, and that was the most important part It felt like a tool, and not the game itself.

More as it develops.

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nolgroth
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Re: Iron Children - report-back

Post by nolgroth »

Have you considered turning snap off completely? I find that, hexes or squares, snap is a pain in the area-not-to-be-named. The only difference is that you can't really track number of grid units moved. I believe with snap turned off, it simply shows the number of pixels moved instead. Some conversion between pixels and grid scale needs to be made at that point, but I notice that it tends to make movement more organic. Just a suggestion.

As to MapTool itself, like you I find that MapTool integrates wonderfully into the whole role-playing experience. I want to integrate some sort of voice chat (Ventrillo, Teamspeak, or something) just to see how that would work out. Good luck in your future games.

Phergus
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Re: Iron Children - report-back

Post by Phergus »

nolgroth wrote:The only difference is that you can't really track number of grid units moved. I believe with snap turned off, it simply shows the number of pixels moved instead. Some conversion between pixels and grid scale needs to be made at that point, but I notice that it tends to make movement more organic. Just a suggestion.
Actually it still works in units just like with snap to grid on. If, when you create your gridless map, you set units per cell to 1 and cell size to 50 then for very 50 map pixels you move you will see the movement indicator show 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. If your game system uses meters and your maps are 50 pixels = 2 meters then enter 2 for units and 50 for cell size and your good to go with gridless.

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heyes
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Re: Iron Children - report-back

Post by heyes »

Session 2:

This time we had a sweet projector. We still used two computers, and this worked out very well.

I did have a strange bug happen though. A few turns into the game all of my PCs reverted back to having "normal" sight, instead of the sight I had assigned them. Caused a bit of a crisis as I tried to solve this, but in the end it all worked out great.

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trevor
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Re: Iron Children - report-back

Post by trevor »

Odd. Were the tokens being moved around a lot ?
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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heyes
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Re: Iron Children - report-back

Post by heyes »

trevor wrote:Odd. Were the tokens being moved around a lot ?

At the time there was a little bit of lag between what I was doing on my maptools occurrence and what was happening on the players' occurrence. At the moment that I noticed it the players were suffering from invisible token issues, resulting from suddenly no longer having the effect of personal light and not being in the range of any other light source.

When I recall what was going on just prior, it was something like this:

One group of the pcs had finished their actions on one part of the map, and we were moving the visible area up to the next group of pcs. I clicked on a pc token, and one of the players clicked on a different pc token at roughly (but not exactly) the same time. I don't know what exactly happened, or what caused it, but that even didn't happen again after I manually reset the players' tokens sight type back to what I desired it to be.

Something else I didn't mention that the players liked:

I have an overworld style map of the city they are playing in. Each time the go to a new area in the city I drop a little "area" token and give that token some information. Next to the city map is what I like to call the Corrals. There is one for the important NPCs, unusual monsters, and for the PCs. I put the tokens in the object layer, and put stuff in the notes. I have told the players that they are welcome to go back and look at that map (I call it the district map, some people call it a sling-blade, a-hem) when we are not in combat.

Alas handouts did not work they way I thought they did, and choosing "show handout" did not put the handout up on their screen. I know there is a macro out there for doing that, but I have decided that for this game (only a summer game) I won't be using macros (since we are all face to face anyway).

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