|
Hey all,
I find myself ramping up to run some games on here,but I haven't done any PbP in a long while.
Back in 2002-05, I ran a LOT of games over at ENWorld (Username:Uriel).
I was one of the 3 folks that got Living EnWorld going, as well...I was a big fan of PbP, obviously. I actually managed to complete some games (WooHoo!), and played in a lot as well, all with varying styles of dealing with the issues I am going to mention.
Mapping...
It was a lot more primitive then, 5-7 years is a bit like the Dark Ages with anything online. I would draw things out on graph (I ran a lot of involved battles), scan them, with numbers along the edges. Players would state which spaces they traveled through, moved too.
I can almost hear a few laughs, or at least 'Ouch, THAT sounds like a lot of work...' I was, especially given that things could change at each person's turn.
Anyways, I am looking for options for Maps, so any help would be great.
On the subject of running games (To players, as well as DMs). There seems to be a lot of APs going on. This is fine, but I usually use original material/ideas. Do folks around here seem to have a preference?
I run PF in Golarion (Kingmaker currently),but I also have a well established 3.5 World (PF now) to use, as well as 2 that I use for HARP (Fluff is Fluff, however).
I think initially, I will use Golarion, as that is familiar to people.
Me as a PbPer:
I live in California (GMT-08.00), but I am most active at night. I can change this easily to accommodate games, but I work nights (Bartender), and I tend to be up all night regardless of being on shift or not.
I can usually post at least a couple of times a night from work, much more on Monday nights (Slower Goth Night...I bring my laptop to work). Week days are usually free, Fridays and Saturdays are tougher for me, until 4am or so, my time.
Really, however, I am pretty open.
Cheers,
-Uriel
Hey there, Uriel. Always nice to see someone willing to run a game on the boards.
1. Mapping
Several members of the Paizo boards, myself included, use MapTool provided by RPTools. They offer a wide variety of free-to-use roleplaying software that makes life eminently easier for DMs. I typically use their MapTool and TokenTool for the game that I run. Other nifty things like CharacterTool, InitiativeTool, and DiceTool are handy for running live connection games, but for PbP I generally find that the first two satisfy 99% of my needs. It takes a few hours of watching tutorial videos and tinkering around with the program before you are producing anything that looks good, but I feel the results are very much worth the effort. Here are some examples from my game:
There are packets of token and background art available for free on the site, and you can always create your own with Paint or the Tokentool. I make the map, use the export function to create a jpeg in a folder, then post it on the boards using an image site like Photobucket.
2. Original material
It seems that a significant majority of games follow the 'published material with a twist' recipe. Games generally follow the Adventure Paths published by Paizo, but individuals running those games give their little touches to make it their own. Right now I am running The Red Hand of Doom and adding all sorts of little things that were not in the original. It saves me an incredible amount of work and hassle and still lets me exercise my creative spark. It also gives me tons of ready-made artwork and maps that I can import to MapTool.
3. Playing
I would love to hear more about the kind of game you would like to run. As far as playing in one, I am planning on starting up a Carrion Crown game as soon as I can get my grubby mitts on the pdf in mid-March. Did you have any thoughts as to what you would like to do?
If you have campaign cartographer or similar tools, I imagine exporting (or even screencapping) images from those could be uploaded to GoogleDocs and used that way with relative ease. The nice thing about campaign cartographer is--once you get the knack of it, mind--you can move items around easily and keep capping/exporting images as you need to.
Bear in mind I have not actually used this for pbp myself (I just use CC3 a lot so I imagine with a fairly educated guess it could be used in this manner). I have seen GMs upload some pretty cool maps and I'm curious myself what they use.
The above mentioned MapTool is much vaunted--and accessible online. I personally have never managed to make any sense of it, but I haven't put a lot of time into it either.
I use MapTool in my tabletop games. I start it two times (once as GM, once as player) and put the player instance onto a second screen. That way, we don't have to bother with drawing maps ourselves, and it's far more effective than trying to describe the dungeons' layout to the players.
It's not too hard to use, either. If you need some pointers, I'm sure someone will give you a short walkthrough.
I have CC3 and am making decent progress figuring it, I think. Once I get the maps made, I just insert battle positions with paint. It's not the prettiest solution, but it works while I figure out CC3.
|
As someone mentioned above, I generally use googledocs for my mapping. I can put up either real maps as images for people to view or I can use their spreadsheet program to make one that way and keep a running battlemat.
Its also handy because if you wish you can allow or limit editing on any document you wish and can roll back to older changes if needed. So if I wish to allow my players to edit a battlemat or have a document they can collaboratively keep notes in, I can, while if there is some other document that I need to keep as is I can make it read only.
To give an example, I'm currently running dungeon a day and here is what the players have mapped out so far of the first floor.
Edit: The various rooms are numbered because I have a separate word type document that the players can edit to make notes about what room is what and if there is anything they need to return for.