Trying to get back into roleplaying through MapTool

[evilC]

A number of my friends decided they wanted to try RPG games again - we are all in our 30s/40s and played in our youth.
However, picking up the rules (Plus learning them!), miniatures etc to do it properly seemed like a large leap for something we may not stick with, so I did a bit of research and came up with MapTool.

Ideally what we would want would be a laptop for the GM, plus a player's display on the TV (Which it seems MT can do) and for character sheets, movement rules, combat etc to be handled as much as possible by the software - leaving the humans mostly free for role-playing.

Ideally I suppose, we would need a starting scenario and ruleset, and suggestions as to a good framework and campaign to start with?
If it is a case of buying a ruleset and a real copy of a campaign, then using maptool to automate it, that would be acceptable, but something with all the resources I need online would be great.

We used to play 2nd ed D&D back in the day, but anything considered.

[Jagged]

This is me a year or two ago, except I never played much D&D

My advice is not to jump in at the deep end. There are some very clever frameworks out there, but even the best takes some learning and its all the harder if you are not up to speed with Maptool.

Can I suggest that for your first games you just use Maptool as you would a wipe-board? Get tokens for everyone (and the monsters of course), draw stuff on the fly and roll dice on the fly. Maybe even roll real dice if you are face-to-face.

As you get familiar with maptool you (or one of your players) will soon start creating Macros and health bars and status flags etc etc. Thats the point to start looking at other people's frameworks. If you jump straight into a Do-Everything Framework it can be rather difficult to get everything working.

Good luck and let us know how it goes. Session write-ups in the Session Feedback section are always welcome

[evilC]

Thanks for the advice - I think you are maybe right, do a combat-heavy scenario, try to use maptool to at least whiteboard, and take it from there.

Rules-wise, I was looking at the "Keep of the Shadowfell" scenario as that seems to be designed for new players, plus it was designed to go with the quick start rules, and both of these are freely available on the Wizards of the Coast website.

I noticed one MapTool implementation of KotS in the downloads section (However it seemed vague as to whether it worked or not) and I saw a post about a KotS campaign file by Jagged, but that was apparently unfinished.

It strikes me that surely this is a match made in heaven - if someone could make a MapTool implementation of KotS with macros of an appropriate complexity, then it would be much easier to do in-depth tutorials as there would be a definite scope to cover - enough to give a half decent game using free tools (MapTool, KotS PDF, Starter Guide PDF) but not too much as to bog things down.

Anyway, thanks for the help so far, I will let you know how we get on.

[Cherno]

Hello,

I wrote a little report on my Maptools experience a while back, maybe you find something useful in there.

http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23057

[Jagged]

Regarding KotS, I have recently run my group through the campaign See the Session Report section. I would be happy to provide you with my campaign files, although as per my previous advice, that may not necessarily produce the best experience for you and your group.

Let me know.

[evilC]

Thanks once again Jagged. I would most likely be interested.

I have done some more fiddling with MT, and love what some of the frameworks out there are doing, but there is one aspect of the D&D ruleset which I cannot seem to solve to my liking - movement and line of sight.

Whilst the vision blocking implementation is impressive, the way it seems to work in games is not, or maybe I am missing something.

In combat, there seems to be no easy way to reliably track movement and action points. If I have another PC connected in as a player, then that player can drag their token around without any record being kept of where it was, if that is the player's final decision, etc, etc. As it stands, there is nothing stopping a player who has control of his token from dropping it anywhere on the map to reveal anything that may be there.

What I would love to see is:
1. Player gets initiative, and is credited with 6 Move Points
2. Player can drag token anywhere he likes, and vision cones are shown, but not what may be in those cones.
Player drags token to a point 3 squares away where he could see around a corner and clicks "Commit".
3. MT steps the player token through each square of movement, showing vision cones for each square as it goes.
4. Player gets to move again, available squares down to 3 from 6 - Player reacts to new LOS info and finishes his move.

Is there anything like this available? If not, would it be possible to code a framework to operate like that?

[Jagged]

My implementation uses Rumble's Slim framework, which is light on automation. Players have to apply their own damage for example, and I am fine with that.

There may be frameworks out there that manage players movements and restrict them, but I don't use them and, to be honest, I think too much automation is a bad thing. Just causes headaches when the framework hasn't coded some obscure rule or other and you have to fudge things. Plus if you are playing face to face there is far less need for strict rule management.

PS: 4e doesn't use vision cones. 4e uses vision squares and all players can effectively "see" anything any other player can see. Only targeting is based upon their individual position.

[evilC]

I defo understand where you are coming from, but what is the workaround?
As it stands, it seems that if a player has control of a token, it seems impossible to know where it currently should be. ie if they drag it around twice, you lose a record of where it was, and "revert last" will not help you.

If not what I described, surely you need some system of keeping tabs on where a player was at the start of his turn, how many squares they have moved this turn etc?

[evilC]

PS: 4e doesn't use vision cones. 4e uses vision squares and all players can effectively "see" anything any other player can see. Only targeting is based upon their individual position.

I think I know what you mean, I was just saying that it should draw the white lines to show your field of view.

[CoveredInFish]

@movement:

Right now its just like at the table if the player keeps moving his mini around ignoring the rules.

There are ways to handle that by macro, but that is some advanced stuff. I second the recommendation to go easy with the advanced maptool features. But there is the Bag Of Tricks by Wolph42 in the user creations forum that has, among a lot of other features, a movement tracking. Its not usable out of the box, so you have to do some (easy) macro writing too (since the BoT is system agnostic).

@vision:
maybe the next release of MT will have a line of sight tool, i think the Devs planned to do so.

[evilC]

@movement:
Right now its just like at the table if the player keeps moving his mini around ignoring the rules.

Not really, if you are trying to have a game where the player moving their token reveals parts of the game world using the lighting system etc, then there needs to be some mechanism whereby the player can move a token around to get a feel for what angles they could see, maybe even show whether they could hit monsters they know about, whilst still allowing the GM to use MT to give the characters control over where they move and the resultant consequences.
That for me years ago was where D&D didn't quite gel. When, even if you were using miniatures, you have to ask "Are you walking on the left or the right of the passageway?" it gives off clues to the players. Do you just ignore it and say they stepped on the trap? Maybe it is not as bad as I remember or the modern rules have solved it, but I always wished there was some way to at least automate that part so there were no arguments and it was fair.

There are ways to handle that by macro, but that is some advanced stuff. I second the recommendation to go easy with the advanced maptool features. But there is the Bag Of Tricks by Wolph42 in the user creations forum that has, among a lot of other features, a movement tracking. Its not usable out of the box, so you have to do some (easy) macro writing too (since the BoT is system agnostic).

I guess this conversation has already digressed from the original subject - I think I quite possibly will take your advice, but longer term I am looking forward towards a vision for a computer / RPG hybrid that I have had for about 20 years. I dunno, maybe I should make another thread - at least it is my own thread to hijack I suppose. I have and always been a tinkerer. I have coded loads of different languages, so despite being daunted by a steep learning curve, I am also spurred on by the possibility of achieving a childhood dream.

For now, I would just be happy with a very basic system that let players explore their movement options, whilst keeping a track of where the player currently is.
So something like:
FOW system - Terrain FOW and Monster FOW are two separate things. Once you uncover terrain, it forms part of your map and is always visible. Light and Sight may dim it but you always know what background is there.
With monsters, only those within party LOS are shown.
Isn't this much possible already? I know the terrain part is from the demo video, but I thought the issue was stopping the player dropping their token into a room they couldn't get to? Obviously having the GM approve the move solves this issue, and also if you do not update the map or either FOW until the GM approves, it solves the other problem.

Any thoughts on whether that poses a major technical hurdle? If it is possible but may involve a bunch of work, I may give it a crack. Not really concerned about other rules to start off with, if I could just handle movement to start with, that is my main aim.

[CoveredInFish]

Ah ... good points, I guess its too long since I played such tactic-heavy games.

Maybe you should just dive in the complex stuff - I did so too even when I recommend doing it otherwise. Having some coding experience should enable you to learn macro script easily, its a bit quirky language, but we should be able to help you with those quirks. Having a proper understanding of the MapTool foundation does help - but playing is not the only way to get that

I think you can do most of it right now with the proper settings. The lighting/fow-settings are complicated.

You can turn off "player can reveal", so you reveal sight only when you approved their position. Its a step more the GM has to do, but you keep all the control.

Terrain/monster fow should be what we call soft/hard fow around here. If you have seen terrain, you'll can see it dimmed when you cannot currently see it. If there happens to be monsters in that dimmed terrain you do not see those. You see tokens only when you have currently LOS and light. I'm not the best to explain this

EDIT:
As for movement ... as I said there are ways to keep track of movement distance/cost, not moving through soft fog, we have macros that drop down a path were a token has been moved, we have done terrain modifiers. Its all possible. Its not in the base set of mapTool features, but possible using the macro language - and that is where maptool really shines. Possible. Hard to set up - yes, but possible.

[evilC]

Thanks for your comments.
It's not just tactics heavy games per-se, I think it is the logical interface for the computer games generation. I am interested in the kind of games people could play who wouldn't normally play a PnP RPG. If all they want is combat, sure... But the roleplaying always ends up creeping in, or at least skulduggery
Make it light on the GM - he just needs to orchestrate and play the parts - leave the players to move themselves about and make choices.

I have started on the proof of concept code already - I have onTokenMove based restriction understood - modifying the sample code to not restrict GM movement.

Next up: Working out how to allow players to plan a move before they execute.
I am thinking a similar mechanism to that which I saw in a video - like a grenade throwing routine - a temporary token gets created that you move around.

[aliasmask]

This sounds right up wolph42's alley. His Bag of Tricks does have movement count and terrain modifiers. I also believe he has grenade throwing macros as well.

[evilC]

Yeah, by the sound of it he probably knows the best way to solve most of this.
I may see if I can direct his attention towards this thread to help shed some light on matters.