I’m at the stage in life where I’ve got kids and my friends have started moving away. This leaves me wanting to play D&D 4e with my friends but getting people together is becoming tougher and tougher and time is extremely limited. So what did I do? Two things:
1) Maptool
http://rptools.net/doku.php?id=maptool:intro
2) Skype
http://skype.com/
Here’s our situation:
I, my wife and one of my good friends are located in Montreal, Canada. Another of my friends is in Toronto and another couple live in Victoria, BC. This situation spans three timezones so we play once the kids are in bed on a Friday or Saturday @10pm Eastern (which is 7pm Pacific) for roughly 3 hours. We’re fortunate because just about everyone involved has their own computer (mostly laptops). I use one to run the session, another for the players in Montreal (at the same table as me), one more in Toronto and the couple in Victoria each have their own computer.
We had tried using video chat via iChat but two things prevented this from being a great solution:
- It ate up bandwidth/computing resources like crazy and made everything else slow down.
- Not everyone was using a Mac so we needed a solution that could work across both platforms.
As a minor additional reason, we spent so much time looking at the map that looking at each other simply wasn’t happening very often. In the end, Skype allows all of us, regardless of platform and without overly taxing anyone’s computer, to talk together. Skype has a great Conference Call mode that allows us to speak together for free over the Internet and it works great. Occasionally, someone will get dropped but it’s simply a matter of adding them back which take seconds.
The principal reason our whole “play over the net” plan works is because of reason #1: Maptool.
What is it? Instead of everyone sitting around a table looking at tiles or dry-erase markings, you’re all looking at a screen with a map, that has a grid on top. You can drag player and monster tokens on to the map and it, essentially, looks like what you’d see on the table. Except now you can pretty much be anywhere in the world and you’re all seeing the same thing.
How does it work? The DM (in this case, me) starts Maptool and begins a Server session as DM. Everyone else fires it up and joins the Server as players. This likely requires a brief lesson in port-forwarding but the Maptool forums have a ton of support and the people there will help you out if you get stuck. Once everyone is logged in, the DM controls what map is used, the monsters, etc. The Players can move around. I trust my players to roll dice locally but if they want, Maptool also has a robust dice roller where if you type {3d6+5} (or something like that), boom, you get your answer in the public chat window. You can even pre-program these with Macros so they’re one click away.
What can it do? There are a couple of builds available on the Maptool site. I’d strongly advise against getting the Release Candidate and go for the Development build (which is 1.3.b45 as of this writing). It has all of the latest features, many of which are must-have. As you drag your tokens around a map, Maptool will display your movement so no need to count squares. It supports both 3.X and 4e movement (diagonals) and the grid can be customized to be hexes or squares. Just about every major system is usable under Maptool.
Maps can be imported as images and if there’s a grid on the image, simply adjust your grid size in Maptool until they line up and you’re good to go. If you want to get really fancy, though, Maptool handles line of sight. Each token can be given a light radius (torch 5, lantern 10,etc) and the fog of war will not be revealed until the character moves into an area. This is awesome but it requires a good bit of extra work for the DM who has to draw in where all the walls and doors are. The tools provided are great but for a super detailed dungeon, it can get a little hairy.
Other things: Players don’t need to get confused when attacking one of the 20 goblins ("which one?” “that one” “which one?” “THAT one” “I don’t know which THAT one you’re talking about!!"). A simple press of the spacebar pops up an arrow on everyone’s screen. There’s a great initiative tracker that lists everyone’s turn in the latest build. You can add light sources to areas, reveal hidden monsters and draw notes on the map. It has a crazy ton of features that I’m only beginning to use after a few months with it.
The Maptool Forums are essential for learning and asking questions:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewforum.php?f=3
Plus there are some awesome users that post insane works like the full campaign file for Keep on the Shadowfell (this blew my mind and shows the full power of what Maptool can do).
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?t=4714
But the biggest help for me were the screencast tutorials:
http://www.rptoolstutorials.net/maptool.htm
These are mandatory viewing if you plan on using Maptool.
The interface is pretty unwieldy and it will devour your resources if you try to do too much. But the plan is to improve the interface in 1.4 and, unless you drop 100MB images every five seconds into the app, you can do quite a bit without taxing your CPU and mem (the KOTS campaign really is jaw-dropping).
Anyways, I hope people find this useful because I am nothing short of a happy customer with these two FREE bits of software. I’m sure I’ll be skipping the official tools even though they might look pretty. Maptool and Skype have been rock, rock solid. Just beware the steep learning curve and intimidating interface.
If you have any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them.
Cheers,
vinny9
