GM not on the server machine

[TheIneffableCheese]

My group is going to be running MapTool as a battlemat replacement starting (hopefully) soon. We play at my friend's apartment, and I run the game from my laptop.

The last time we ran this way, I ran the server on my laptop, and we used his laptop as a single player station by passing around a wireless mouse. It worked, but there were some performance issues from time to time.

However, he has gotten rid of that (very old) laptop, and just put together a shiny new desktop. The plan is to connect the desktop to the TV, and again use the wireless mouse to allow the players to each move their own token. We also have a temporarily out of town player who might be joining us remotely depending on his work schedule.

Is it possible to set up his desktop as the server while I act as the GM from my laptop? The campaign file will be on my laptop, so my gut tells me "no", but from a performance standpoint I am thinking that it would be better if the newer, more powerful computer that is hard lined into the LAN would be the better choice for the server if there is some way to make it happen.

My laptop is older, but still pretty solid. It's a four year old MacBook Pro, but last year I upped the RAM to 8 GB and replaced the stock spinning HDD with a SSD, so it's still pretty spry. The main issue is when I'm GMing I have quite a few programs running, so any offloading of processing will be most appreciated.

Any thoughts on how best to set this up?

[JamzTheMan]

Yep, it's very easy. Just have the player start the server (being sure to start as Player and not GM in the server dialog).

Then as a GM just connect as a GM. Basically, reverse the process, keep the roles. You can also pass him the campaign file on a thumb drive and have him load/save the campaign from his PC.

I don't think you will see much improvement in speed, your laptop will still have to calculate all the Vision/VBL and run macro's locally. Each PC has to do this on it's own. Although the desktop will handle all the server stuff now and may be easier to set up to connect external players.

We do this every week as the TV we show the players "hosts" the game. We just keep the campaign file on google drive for easy replication and backup.

[TheIneffableCheese]

Cool - thanks for the explanations. If it's not really off-loading the processing too much, I think it might not be worth the hassle, but good to know that it is a relatively simple option.