Comments on: A couple of more neat finds…

By: bigbadmikey

bigbadmikey — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:43:02 +0000

Thanks for the info!

By: OnlineDM

OnlineDM — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:16:00 +0000

@IsmaelDM – Sorry about that! Somehow I thought my contact info was on the blog. My email address is OnlineDungeonMaster, and it’s a Gmail address. Thanks for pointing me toward the tutorials and for your direct help, too!

By: Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Sunday Seven: 2010-06-13

Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Sunday Seven: 2010-06-13 — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 03:22:30 +0000

[...] A couple of more neat finds… Here’s some link salad from Newbie DM that tastes great and is good for your RPG waistline. Go check them out! [...]

By: Ismael_DM

Ismael_DM — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:52:02 +0000

@OnlineDM: For the doors, I just place a door object in the object layer. This allows hiding the door from the player’s view. Another good object is tables/chairs/etc. I don’t know about you, but my players have, on more than one occasion, barricaded themselves in a room or modified furniture in some way.

I’m not that experienced, the MapTool tutorials are a great source of information. I did a quick scan through your blog but didn’t see any contact information.

By: OnlineDM

OnlineDM — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:25:29 +0000

@Ismael_DM: Thanks for the tips! I don’t have a lot of textures to use – I wish I had the ones from the videos that you shared. But even with basic colors, I can probably use them to make nice-looking backgrounds. I certainly don’t want my games to grind to a halt because there are too many objects on the map.

When you say you use the objects outline for doors and so on, do you use the object layer and then draw textures on it, or do you use the object layer and drag door objects onto it as objects? I don’t know the subtleties of how one approach would be better or worse than another.

By the way, I’d love to be able to pick your brain directly (not that I don’t love exchanging comments on NewbieDM’s blog!), so please either leave some contact info here or come by my blog where you can get my contact info. It sounds like I have much to learn from a more experienced MapTool DM!

By: Ismael_DM

Ismael_DM — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:20:40 +0000

Glad I was able to help!

Ever since I was able to build a tavern and simply remove/hide the roof once the PCs actually go inside, I’ve been sold on MapTools.

I was a bit too terse in my last comment so I feel like I should expand:
I tend to build my walls via textures, they load faster in Maptools when you’re distributing the map. This also lets me keep ~ 6-8 maps in a campaign file without issue. (More than that has given me issues.) I’ve made a few maps with objects, like you described, but they never seemed as good as the texture maps. I tend to use the background layer for building terrain and building outlines. I use the object outline for doors, building furnishings, basically anything the PCs are going to move/interact with.

By: OnlineDM

OnlineDM — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:58:45 +0000

@Ismael_DM: Hmm, not a bad idea! I just took a few minutes to play around with it, and this has potential. For instance, I like the “Wall” and “LongWall” graphics that come with Gametable (OSU-gt) since I can drag and drop them onto the grid. After your suggestion, I decided to do the same thing in MapTool. I added my Gametable directory as a resource for MapTool, went to the Object layer and started dragging and dropping. Everything is still snapped to the grid, but resized to one square by default.

If I’m using a wall that’s supposed to be 2 squares long, it shows up running down the middle of one square when I drag it onto the map. However, I can then resize it to Large size, et voila! If it’s a four-square in length wall, I resize to Gargantuan. If I had to do this for each and every wall segment manually it would be a huge pain in the butt. Fortunately, I can do it once and then copy and paste that resized wall chunk from there.

If I were building a full map, I would probably put a few of the properly-sized walls at the top of my map and then copy and paste them from there as needed rather than dragging and dropping from the sidebar.

Thank you for the suggestion. I think this is going to let me do in MapTool what I loved about Gametable!

By: Ismael_DM

Ismael_DM — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:44:06 +0000

@OnlineDM I’ve been able to use the object layer to drag-and-drop walls to make a quick & dirty map. I just have to resize the grid to the correct size, if needed, afterward. I find it easier to use terrain and the brush function.

By: OnlineDM

OnlineDM — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:06:22 +0000

@LooneyDM: My two cents is that Gametable (OSU-gt) and MapTool are pretty darn similar in a lot of ways. There are a few things that are “simpler” about Gametable, though. Gametable’s dice macros are simpler, I would say – they’re not really programmable beyond the number of dice you roll, the number of sides on each die and the number you add to the total. Gametable also saves maps only single maps (well, you can have a private map tied to a public map) while MapTool allows you to have multiple maps in one campaign. Gametable doesn’t have token properties as MapTool does. It also doesn’t have a fog of war function, just the private map that you can put things on until you want to publish them.

Personally, I like all of the things MapTool has that Gametable lacks, but it’s true that Gametable is simpler without them. The one thing that I wish MapTool had is Gametable’s ease of creating maps using drag-and-drop objects like walls.

By: LooneyDM

LooneyDM — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:56:41 +0000

Personally I’m a fan of maptools. One of the big selling points was the documentation and the helpful forums. I’d be interested to hear which complex things gametable doesn’t have and how you feel their lack benefits casual gamers. I recommend that you write a tutorial for setting up a server and connecting clients if you’re going to write tutorials. That is usually the most complex thing of using any online mapping program for RPGing.