RPTools.net

Earning a free or discounted GM account would be nice, but I'd like to point out it means little to you or the GMs if the GMs have a hard time recruiting players. Any tools you provide for that will benefit both you and the GMs.

As a GM, I'd rather pay my $27 (or $36) a year and be able to get 6-10 reliable players than I would to get a free account and only get 2-4 players. Of course, I'd obviously be even happier to have 6-10 players and a free account, but I want to make sure you know that from this GMs perspective I'm not worried about the cost for me nearly as much as I am about how to convince my players to play and pay.

Some ideas:

- short term gift accounts - 1-6 month gift subscriptions that can be given by GMs.

- session passes - 2-6 hour session passes that can be given by GMs to allow someone to test their game. A few available for free, additional ones at a small cost

- visitor accounts/status - where people can watch, but not participate

- "guest" characters - allow GMs to set up special NPCs that would go into a sitewide common guest character pool. Someone interested in the site could be randomly assigned one of these guest NPCs/campaigns, and allowed to play it for a session/week/etc.

- group package discounts - a GM coordinated buy that sets up all the player accounts at once for a group (with a minimum size, of course), possibly at a discount, maybe with a shorter time frame - IE, $60 gets me 6 accounts for 4 months - after the initial four months, each player has to renew their own account at the regular rate.

And I've run out of immediate ideas...maybe more later.

Another simple idea is to use the TippingBucket.com strategy: allow players to sign up for an account conditionally, with the clause that they won't get charged anything unless X other players (from a list of their friends) also subscribe.

This is exactly what I'm talking about... Yes lots of web sites designs have trouble with IE... and people get payed lots of money mostly to fix those issues... A free page that has IE issues is no biggy... but a pay site better have dealt with these issues or done some beta time...

And this is the one reason I haven't completely written it off myself...

Really? I wasn't aware that unattended operation was such a huge feature...

Being able to run MapTool in headless mode (without a display) has been discussed before. At a minimum it would require being able to load a campaign file when MapTool is started (avoiding the issues where remote GMs can't load a campaign) and the ability to start a server from the command line (meaning filling in all of the dialog boxes with proper values).

The first one shouldn't be too tough: just add a command line parameter that identifies the location of the campaign.

The second one had some work done by someone here on the forum. They had the basics setup as I recall, but there would still be more required. My preference would be to add a feature to the Start a Server dialog where the settings could be exported as XML. Then a single command line parameter that identifies the XML file would be enough. This would work similar to how all MapTool data is written to external files as XML...

It was the first thing that grabbed me about SG too. Although it is a bit more than just unattended operation. It's also the ability for the user to plot out movement but have the GM approve it, and/or the notification feature where the others are notified when an action has been made. But those two things aren't necessary, they can optionally be handled in other ways outside of the application, but unattended operation is kind of either there or its not.

I've been trying to leave a MapTools session up and running on a spare computer in my house, but it does have issues. To do anything significant (load/save campaigns, etc.) I need to remote desktop to it, rather than just using the MapTools client and connecting as GM. And if my network connection goes down (which it does, briefly, a few times per day) it disconnects people and they can't reconnect until their old session times out and they are auto-booted. And if there is a Windows update it reboots the server, and the MapTools session is down until I notice it.

I'd much rather be able to run it off of a web server in the cloud, and load/save to my desktop PC via the client. I'm not sure if that scenario would be possible with the solution you described, or if it would take more work to make it run on a server that doesn't even have a monitor or GUI interface, like most shared web hosts. Even just being able to put the server startup in a bat file and running it on the machine's startup would solve one of my three issues.

But as I said, that was the feature that made me take a look at SG.

It's not something I just go "THIS IS WONDERFUL" about... especially if a) a headless version of MT hits, and b)it handles GM logins for maintenance better... more of a "there are ways that could be handy"

I'll admit I am very ready for a headless MT that GM's can load/save campaigns to that doesn't break. After this mess with moving from Lubbock to Abilene, I'll be in a situation to leave my servers up somewhere long term... which'll be neat for a micro "living-realm" setup I'm wanting to try with some people.

Headless MT which can be served from a web server you have space on but dont own, plus the addition of linkable maps (where clicking on a 'link' on a map automatically loads another map) combined means online MapTools atlases and something I've been wanting to do forever.

"I'd buy that for a dollar" - although I'd rather get it free.

I'm off to check out this new software and see what the fuss is all about...

It's not just the unattended operation - the notifications portion of it caught my attention, too. Yes, I could leave MT running most/all of the time if I wanted to, but the mention of the feature in Scenegrinder immediately made me think of the advantages of a PBeM game, only on a VTT. The fact that it's browser based and running on a server out there in the cloud is appealing from a system maintenance point of view as well.

Not as a replacement for MT, but as a visually appealing way to play something similar to a PBeM or PBP game.

Good discussion, everyone.


Well, you'll need more than that. You'll need a host that allows you to leave a server running all the time, so it wouldn't be a typical web hosting service.

You'll need a host that allows opening of arbitrary ports for incoming traffic.

Those two things will limit your choice of host and likely raise the cost of hosting. But Trevor had mentioned previously about having a hosted server for remote execution of MapTool (that was a long time ago).

In any case, I like the frank and open discussion going on about what is valuable to the community. Keep it up!

Uhmmm....can anyone advise if this service is still up and existing. Can anybody here help me contact Mr. Jerry, as i am very much interested with their work?

Many thanks, people.

the site is active i started a trial account to check it out and am reading my way through their documentation be advised it is a service you pay for.