RttToEE

Tell us how you are using our gaming tools and how your sessions are going.

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Azhrei
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Re: RttToEE

Post by Azhrei »

Paradox wrote:During the training session and first few games I should make it a point to encourage them to do a few things for themselves
By all means, do so. You might even need to be a little heavy-handed and remind them that it's your job to keep the game moving along quickly, so if they can't click a button in a timely fashion, you'll take care of it for them.

In general I've found that to be quite effective: some players will relinquish rolling because they don't want to learn, and others will spend the time to learn because for them it means being more involved. After a couple of sessions, you'll know which way each of your players is leaning.

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lmarkus001
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Re: RttToEE

Post by lmarkus001 »

I had a couple of good sessions. For the past two sessions, I have had a random lurker pop in to poke about (a different person both times, one from Australia, the other from Italy). I leave my server un-passworded so folks can wander in in case they are curious of what MapTools is all about. On both occasions the lurkers were totally polite and genuinely interested and inquisitive. We use Skype for our audio and they even joined in so they could listen too. As GM, I copy a player token and rename it and assign rights to the lurker so they can bop about and see and stuff.

I noticed I was getting a tad low on space on my C: drive and poking about, I had about 4gb of copies of my campaign files (manual backups). Moving those off to a different store has helped... I was just suprised at the volume (my current campaign file breaks 50MB and I generate 2-3 new copies a week, so it adds up fast.

After the session I was futzing with UStream and noticed that a quicky recording of us setup around the table was taken 378 days ago... it was a shocker that I have been an avid MapTools user for over a year and a half!

Some of my remote players have gotten lazy and have been going without headsets. Last night our sound quality totally sucked because of it. I am going to have to be the tough guy and force headsets. I can not stress it enough that headsets are critical for remote players. Especially in our setup where we have a high end conference phone for the group in the basement, and everyone remote are individuals. When the remote folks feedback it hammers all of us badly.

I am excited about one of the new features mentioned in the developer notes: locking player movement unless that player has initiative. This will be great for the high action strategic battle phases

We have been working on speeding gameplay. One of the things we are doing is having the players put their tokens into a marching order, then having the lead player move just his/her token, and the GM (me) moves the rest of the party as a group. This has made a noticeable improvement.

This week I unlocked a lot of my "effect" macros (Bull's Strength, Prayer, Enlarge, etc.) Previously I (the GM) would run those but would require my players to not be touching their tokens so the edits would not undo. This often caused hiccups, plus my players were more confused about what was happening. Now they can not effect each other, but if an effect is on themself, they are in charge of applying the mods and the macro helps them with that. This seems to be better after one night but I will have to keep an eye out.

One night I had one player alone playing around for a while as others were gathering etc. When I came back I found giant crayon marks all over one of the maps... seems she had not really played with the drawing tools before and while she was figuring them out she had been smudging all over the hidden areas (fog of war) so had no clue she did it. It was easily undone and we had a chuckle, but 1.4 desperately needs a total rework of the drawing tools.

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Paradox
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Re: RttToEE

Post by Paradox »

Sounds a lot like my last session that I was about to write up. We had just figured out the situation with 'no head set' = 'feedback from those not using them'.

The sound was just absolutely horrible from two players living in the same apartment. One of them claimed he got a headset. I guess he might have, because the symptoms were a little different. We use "push to talk" settings on Ventrilo.. and I'd hear the first part of their sentence and then the last part of their sentence.

We muddle through the game, but I felt so frustrated that I took a week off and haven't messed with MapTools much for that week. We're playing next Monday (not tomorrrow), so I'm getting back to work now.
I no longer believe that MapTools is usuable or intended just for programmers. MapTools is for everyone.

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trevor
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Re: RttToEE

Post by trevor »

lmarkus001 wrote: it was a shocker that I have been an avid MapTools user for over a year and a half!
And the entire community has been better for it !
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

Mortuis
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Re: RttToEE

Post by Mortuis »

Were all of these maps posted somewhere? When I check the gallery site I only see CRM maps up to H, and half the Outer Fane.

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