Tracking Movement in Play-By-Post

[RusanCrosha]

This has always been my one failing in PBP games: how do you track movement and distance for purposes of moving in combat, range increments, spell ranges, etc.? Is it generally ad-libbed at GM discretion or is there a program out there that'll let me make simple yet manipulatable maps that I'd be able to post?

[BigNorseWolf]

Break out a battle mat

x axis is a b c d e f g h i j k
Y axis is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

[wraithstrike]

RusanCrosha wrote:

This has always been my one failing in PBP games: how do you track movement and distance for purposes of moving in combat, range increments, spell ranges, etc.? Is it generally ad-libbed at GM discretion or is there a program out there that'll let me make simple yet manipulatable maps that I'd be able to post?

You can use google doc to make excel type spreadsheets. Each cell can be a 5 ft square, and you can import images into it also.

[Wrath]

I use map tools from rptools.

Create the map, print screen, paste in photoshop and upload to photobucket. Takes about 5 minutes.

Maptools stores everything and allows for easy tracking as you go. Takes some time to get used to it though.

You get maps like this.

Map

rptools website

hope that's helpful

Cheers

[RusanCrosha]

Awesome, thanks to all who have responded, your ideas have been helpful. :) Thinking the RPtools is where I'll end up going, if I can get the program to work properly and such.

[Laithoron]

I'll echo Wrath's suggestion, MapTool will definitely be what you want to use. I've had great success with it in my own PbP and it's also what the other GMs I've played under have used. While it has a TON of features such as servers, chat, etc, you really don't need to let all of that intimidate you since you'll really only need a subset of its features for running a PbP.

Start by learning how to import maps and character/monster tokens, then move on to learning about the vision-blocking layer (VBL) and sight/lighting. Those are the basics you'll be interested in to get started. After that, experiment with painting, and spell effect templates (burst, radius, line) would be next IMO.

The site I learned from is here. They have excellent documentation and lots of simple, handy tutorials. If you check my profile, I have a couple links to some handy macros I posted on the boards here last year that simplify the tracking of healing and damage.

As far as drawing new maps by hand, the best advice that I can give you for making decent looking maps in MapTool itself (as opposed to Campaign Cartographer, Fractal Mapper or Dundjinni) is to build up a good library of seamless textures (check 3D design sites), and then paint using about 20 to 60% transparency and just go over areas multiple times layering textures. Once you get used to it, you'll be able to paint new maps in mere minutes.

Examples: Beach, Cliffs

If you really get into it, you might want to pick up a graphics tablet, otherwise, hit up the site Wrath posted and you should find some good links to maps that other people have made that you can borrow. Lastly, if you subscribe to Paizo's map line, they now include the PDFs of the maps for subscribers. They are VERY nice quality and high resolution. You can easily export them to JPG using Some PDF Image Extract and then add them as the background image for your map.

Oh, and the forum avatars here make great character tokens. :)

Have fun with your game!