Wow.. That was easy...

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Aydee
Kobold
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:03 am

Wow.. That was easy...

Post by Aydee »

So... I did the hopefully smart thing and watched all the tutorials first and the like.

I got a good idea of how things worked.. Took about 2 hours of watching tutorials and just 'bashing around'..

I'm learning to use the 3.5 framework, but that 'learning' wouldn't be ready for tonights game....

Tonights game is going to be 90% story telling, and then it will be 'hunting in the forest time'.. (Doing a hunter or hunted type mission in a forest)

Took me 20 minutes to get a pretty map up.. Add another 10 minutes to get the final works in of placing tokens. BAM..

An AWESOME map ready to go.. SO EASY!!!!!

I did a quick test with a smaller scale map with one of my players making sure I got it right first. (This guy lives about 1000km from me so was an excellent test. :P )

He was able to 'see' enough slivers of light from the enemy campfire to start working his way through the forest and move up to the enemy. Was very interesting watching him move. He had a great time with JUST A TEST!!!

So.. We'll still be using Pen and Paper character sheets tonight. That's fine.. But this is the best online battlemap I've used... Bar none. (I've tried quite a few too) You know it says a lot about online battle maps when you come to the conclusion that the best online battle map is a shared excel spreadsheet.. :shock: That opinion is now thoroughly revised.

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Xaelvaen
Dragon
Posts: 498
Joined: Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:49 pm
Location: Somewhere between Heaven and Hell

Re: Wow.. That was easy...

Post by Xaelvaen »

Heh; glad its panning out for you. You'll find at least a handful of people here who use it for their in-person games as well, as more of a projected battle-map. I personally use it in that format, so the only real coding I need is to simulate enemy attacks, apply damage (to record hit points), initiative, and pretty clickable information so I don't have to read aloud as much haha.

Very glad you're enjoying it, and may it serve all your purposes well.
"An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person." - Leo Tolstoy

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Azhrei
Site Admin
Posts: 12086
Joined: Mon Jun 12, 2006 1:20 pm
Location: Tampa, FL

Re: Wow.. That was easy...

Post by Azhrei »

Welcome to RPTools, Aydee.

When you're ready, you can head over here and introduce yourself, if you wish. :)
Aydee wrote:So... I did the hopefully smart thing and watched all the tutorials first and the like.
Yep. MapTool is a very complex program with a lot of functionality. So much that it can be a bit daunting at first. It's a good approach to watch the tutorials once to get an idea of what it can do, then a second time as you pause the screencast and try out what you're seeing.

We have some volunteers putting together some documentation, but that's a long hard road. :|

Anyway, welcome to the family. :)

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jfrazierjr
Deity
Posts: 5176
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2007 7:31 pm

Re: Wow.. That was easy...

Post by jfrazierjr »

Aydee wrote:So... I did the hopefully smart thing and watched all the tutorials first and the like.

I got a good idea of how things worked.. Took about 2 hours of watching tutorials and just 'bashing around'..

I'm learning to use the 3.5 framework, but that 'learning' wouldn't be ready for tonights game....

Tonights game is going to be 90% story telling, and then it will be 'hunting in the forest time'.. (Doing a hunter or hunted type mission in a forest)

Took me 20 minutes to get a pretty map up.. Add another 10 minutes to get the final works in of placing tokens. BAM..

An AWESOME map ready to go.. SO EASY!!!!!

I did a quick test with a smaller scale map with one of my players making sure I got it right first. (This guy lives about 1000km from me so was an excellent test. :P )

He was able to 'see' enough slivers of light from the enemy campfire to start working his way through the forest and move up to the enemy. Was very interesting watching him move. He had a great time with JUST A TEST!!!

So.. We'll still be using Pen and Paper character sheets tonight. That's fine.. But this is the best online battlemap I've used... Bar none. (I've tried quite a few too) You know it says a lot about online battle maps when you come to the conclusion that the best online battle map is a shared excel spreadsheet.. :shock: That opinion is now thoroughly revised.

AD
My suggestion... depending on how well you know your players(and their maturity level), set aside some time in the first session to just play around. They will almost likely do it any way(or at least some will) and quite frankly, it's better to do this when you are expecting it than to be like all in the story and go "WTF!!!" when someone draws something because they want to see what the tool can do. Having them watch the player tutorial is quite helpful and it only takes around 10 minutes (or less).
I save all my Campaign Files to DropBox. Not only can I access a campaign file from pretty much any OS that will run Maptool(Win,OSX, linux), but each file is versioned, so if something goes crazy wild, I can always roll back to a previous version of the same file.

Get your Dropbox 2GB via my referral link, and as a bonus, I get an extra 250 MB of space. Even if you don't don't use my link, I still enthusiastically recommend Dropbox..

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