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Dungeon a day

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 11:50 am
by torstan
So Monte Cook has started a mega-dungeon here: www.dungeonaday.com. The map is huge: http://www.dungeonaday.com/categories/Level1Map Note that those are 10' squares. They don't have a map at 1" squares or in fact anything more detailed than the one shown there. They encourage people to use their sponsor's dungeon pieces to build it for their games. However I thought this might be an interesting challenge for the fledgling maptool dungeon tile pack, and it worked really well. So I posted on the forums over there. I've posted a zoomed out shot, and a few close ups of the first couple of areas. I'll be interested to hear the responses. I'll keep an eye on the thread and send people back over here if there's an interest.

It's $10 a month to subscribe and you'll need a subscription to read the forum, but if you are signed up then the maptool post is here:

http://www.dungeonaday.com/forum/22/125

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 12:23 pm
by trevor
Definitely let us know how the thread discussion progresses

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 12:55 pm
by torstan
I will do.

Clickable html links in notes would be amazing for this. The rooms each have a web page with their descriptions, and being able to pull that up from within maptool would be spectacular. I think that would sweep the board if it were possible. I don't know if that's an easy or a hard fix, but there's a lot of talk on the dungeon a day boards about getting the online map to have clickable room numbers. If it were possible to trump it with maptool it would make quite a splash.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 3:08 pm
by jfrazierjr
torstan wrote:I will do.

Clickable html links in notes would be amazing for this. The rooms each have a web page with their descriptions, and being able to pull that up from within maptool would be spectacular. I think that would sweep the board if it were possible. I don't know if that's an easy or a hard fix, but there's a lot of talk on the dungeon a day boards about getting the online map to have clickable room numbers. If it were possible to trump it with maptool it would make quite a splash.
Sooo... any though about making a frame with HTML that links to the room layout image as well as description? That would be a somewhat easy way, perhaps even combining tables for the image and another table for the text,send the macrolink to everyone to open a frame with the description of the room.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:34 pm
by torstan
So this has generated a bit of interest so far. I am still maptooling up the dungeon at the moment (it's around 400 by 500 grid squares, so it's a lot of dungeon to map) but it's getting there. I'll post it there when it's done. I'll also add room notes that have macros with links in them that allow people to link the to the room descriptions (that are all online) from within maptool. I posted about this in the maptool forums here:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7538

This has already got a few people over there to come by the maptool forum to see what's going on. My guess is that when the full level one map is done and people can play with it, we'll get a lot more.

Currently the two greatest things that people want from dungeon a day that haven't been provided by Monte Cook are:
1. A map with clickable links to take you to an area.
2. 1 square=1 inch battlemats that people can print out and play on.

Both of these could be generated by maptool and tiles. 1. I addressed with the links in notes, which can currently be achieved (though a little more cumbersome) through links in chat. 2. could be achieved really quickly with an advanced screenshot tool that can export a larger image at native resolution rather than being limited to the screensize. I posted a note about this in the feature requests forum:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7569

I'll keep you posted on any further developments.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:42 pm
by Brigand
Is he really getting $8 to $10 a month for that on name recognition alone? I could do this for a living if I could get 120 people subscribed.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:55 pm
by torstan
Yes, but then he was one of the core designers of 3e and Ptolus was a hige success. Also, the reviews have been nothing but positive.

I'm still a little unsure myself of the use of this after the novelty has worn off, but I'm certainly pleasantly surprised by the originality of the dungeon so far. I'm going to stick it out for the first couple of months at the least.

Remember that he does still have to pay his cartographer (though that's really only one map so far) and whoever is maintaining the website.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 6:04 pm
by Brigand
At $10 a month, I would require 125 subscriptions a month to pay my bills and put food on the table. That kind of traffic isn't going to make a dent on most hosting sites. The real cost is the setup of the website and the ability to handle the subscriptions. At 250 subs a month, I could pay off my car in less than a year and quit my day job.

Ah well. I don't have the name recognition to capitalize on this nor the initial fees required to set up such a site in the first place. And I didn't think of it first. *sighs*

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 10:27 pm
by Phergus
torstan wrote:1. I addressed with the links in notes, which can currently be achieved (though a little more cumbersome) through links in chat.
On largish maps, I make unshared Campaign Macros that do a "/goto x,y" for quick navigation. You could toss in a /self <a href="some link">foo</a> to get the link into chat. Still clunky but...

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 12:55 am
by torstan
That's exactly the workaround I am using. Glad to see we're all thinking in the same way.

Thanks for the goto idea. I was going to suggest the use of NPC number tokens and then the map explorer will get you around quickly.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 1:01 am
by Brigand
You could create a single macro that populates a drop down list with all the encounter token names. Then the submit button would run the goto command.

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:01 pm
by torstan
One or two new comments over there, but here's a recent post
Holy crap. I think I encountered MapTool before, but long ago, and it wasn't nearly this awesome. I'm going to go cry now. Cry, and spend countless hours playing with my new toy. Hours that I should be spending on real life, or sleep, or food, maybe.

*eg*
Just made me smile so I thought I'd share it over here :) (with apologies to Jos Willard....)

Re: Dungeon a day

Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:10 am
by trevor
awesome ! Time to go catch up