Gaming with Physicists

[torstan]

So I was shoehorned into running a game for my work colleagues after they saw a few of my maps. Turns out a lot of my office mates have gamed or would have liked to game in the past. It was a pretty simple start to 4th edition - just one large encounter followed by a couple of skill challenges. It went really well and everyone seemed to pick up 4th edition pretty quickly. My pack of wolves put the fear of death into the party very effectively before they were dispatched. I have to say that there are few things more entertaining than placing a player on their back in the middle of five wolves and then telling them that if they try to crawl away all of the wolves get a free attack... The fighters took a beating, the cleric healed, the wizard laid down areas of fire and the rogue sniped from a rooftop, so everyone picked up on what they were supposed to do and played pretty well. I think they have a reasonable idea of the rules now, and it didn't drag.

The star of the show of course was maptool. I've never used maptool with a projector before but it was phenomenal (we have a projector in the department for seminars and we 'borrowed' it). Everyone was impressed and had a great time using pointers to show where they were going to move. Keeping track of states and marks was easy. My one issue was that I forgot that all creatures need to be named differently for macros to target effectively so at the start I had one wolf taking all the damage. I fixed that, but had to rejig the damage a little from memory.

It was great fun to play with a new group again. One of the guys is moving to Vancouver in a few months and as he was leaving he joked 'now all you need to do is figure out a way of allowing the projector to be accessed from Vancouver'. When I told him that maptool was designed to do exactly that he was gobsmacked. So it seems I have a new group and maptool has just acquired 6 more devoted fans. Thanks a lot to everyone who works on this. It is an amazing tool that has revolutionised the way I play.

[trevor]

The star of the show of course was maptool.

No, that would be _you_

When I told him that maptool was designed to do exactly that he was gobsmacked.

Priceless !