sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on Sept 2, 2013 6:53:24 GMT -8
I thought maybe we could use a thread for discussing the nuts and bolts of running online games a la Jackercon. Tips? Tricks? Etc. I've been poking around in it a bit, and it looks to me like for a non-battlemat'ed game, all you really need is the diceroller, really... maybe the art library. Or am I missing other useful things?
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Post by HourEleven on Sept 2, 2013 7:33:11 GMT -8
When I run non-battlemat games on roll20 I tend to use broad location maps (like the entire city) and put a counter at the players current location, in a general sense. For instance, I use this map for one of the WoD games I run: www.dropbox.com/s/eo3m2d0qx53821a/5aHudsonHeightsMap%20V1.png (linking on my phone isn't working.) And I have a token for the entire group, and individual tokens incase they get split up and I want to show that Steve is still over there while everyone else is over here. I find having something to ground the game in geography can help a lot, especially in mood based games.
I also use a "time of day" tracker with "morning, noon, evening, midnight" labeled on it and a token shaped like an arrow that I rotate as the players lose time. In games with a "ticking time bomb" type of count down, I put up a calendar and add X shaped tokens so they can watch the days run out.
Typically I'll also set up a series of boards with inspirational photos - I tend to paint the primary locations and a picture...blah blah blah...1k words...blah blah blah. I can quickly hop over to an evocative image just by dragging the players tag there and then back.
In a campaign where the players had to eliminate a group of people, I had one board with "mug shots" of the targets. As each target is picked off, I placed a big red X over that face. It worked like a score board. Oh yeah, one time in a particularly intense chase scene in GURPS, I used 2 cars to illustrate the abstract distance (like the meter at the top of Mario Kart) as the players tried desperately to catch up.
In my opinion, roll20 may be designed as a battle board but its really only limited by your imaginati
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Post by rickno7 on Sept 2, 2013 19:26:29 GMT -8
+1 on that, I"ve been a huge advocate on using the "battlemap" for more than just that. I use NPC portraits and selected backgrounds to do a sort of "JRPG" conversation scene with it. This leads in to my #1 tip for GM'ing Roll20 as a multimedia experience: Use the Fog of War for hiding extra set pieces. I have a color coded token system; Red = Hostile, Yellow = undetermined and Green = Friendly. Sometimes I'm not sure which way an NPC will be received by the players or how they will treat them, so I load several versions of the token and hide it in the fog of war till I know which to use. With my conversations I have borderless location scenes as the "map" and I find NPC's with solid background that I can easily cut out. Make it a PNG file so the background is invisible. Then I can keep the NPC's off to the side in the fog of war and slide them over as the players interact. They flag down a waitress at a bar, I slide the waitress over. She doesn't know the answer to the question, so she calls the bar-keep over, I slide him into the scene. Really helps with the "feel" of the scene. Using the Fog of War like that, you can have your entire adventure set up before the players ever log in. No more waiting on a new image to load, or looking on google for something appropriate while the players twiddle their thumbs. Saves immensely on downtime. PS. Also protip... don't make a 20,000x20,000 pixel campaign map then blame Roll20 when it can't handle it PPS: Also battlemaps and placement maps are not the same thing, don't be afraid to use simple placement maps to help people visualize, and you can easily do it without measuring distances and counting squares and turning it into a tactical game.
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Post by HourEleven on Sept 2, 2013 22:18:02 GMT -8
Good call on fog of war, btw. I find roll20 so useful that I use it for offline gaming as well. Laptop at my table signed in as GM, PC hooked to the TV signed in as player. Easier than printing things and sliding them around the table. Great for just displaying initiative order to the whole table at once.
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Post by Houndin on Sept 3, 2013 11:00:16 GMT -8
I mentioned this in another thread, but a tutorial has been made for Roll20 from a GMs perspective www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWUU8hZvVJI I've only watched a few minutes of it but it seems to cover the basics at least.
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D.T. Pints
Instigator
JACKERCON 2018: WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY June 22-July 1st
Posts: 2,857
Currently Playing: D&D 5e, Pathfinder, DUNGEONWORLD, Star Wars Edge of the Empire
Currently Running: DUNGEONWORLD, PATHFINDER
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Post by D.T. Pints on Sept 3, 2013 11:17:42 GMT -8
The jukebox is a fun thing to play with...adding spooky music or pre recorded computerized voice announcements "the ship will self destruct in :10 minutes..."
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snoman314
Journeyman Douchebag
Posts: 225
Preferred Game Systems: GURPS
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Post by snoman314 on Sept 3, 2013 21:01:19 GMT -8
This leads in to my #1 tip for GM'ing Roll20 as a multimedia experience: Use the Fog of War for hiding extra set pieces. I have a color coded token system; Red = Hostile, Yellow = undetermined and Green = Friendly. Sometimes I'm not sure which way an NPC will be received by the players or how they will treat them, so I load several versions of the token and hide it in the fog of war till I know which to use. With my conversations I have borderless location scenes as the "map" and I find NPC's with solid background that I can easily cut out. Make it a PNG file so the background is invisible. Then I can keep the NPC's off to the side in the fog of war and slide them over as the players interact. They flag down a waitress at a bar, I slide the waitress over. She doesn't know the answer to the question, so she calls the bar-keep over, I slide him into the scene. Really helps with the "feel" of the scene. Using the Fog of War like that, you can have your entire adventure set up before the players ever log in. No more waiting on a new image to load, or looking on google for something appropriate while the players twiddle their thumbs. Saves immensely on downtime. You realise that this is what the character sheet system is for right? Once you set them up, you can drag characters out of the 'Characters' section of the sidebar, straight onto the map, with their tokens, stats etc already loaded.
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Post by rickno7 on Sept 4, 2013 10:40:43 GMT -8
For character sheets yes, but what I was talking about encompasses a whole lot more than that, like general set pieces and theatrical stuff.
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snoman314
Journeyman Douchebag
Posts: 225
Preferred Game Systems: GURPS
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Post by snoman314 on Sept 5, 2013 0:38:33 GMT -8
For character sheets yes, but what I was talking about encompasses a whole lot more than that, like general set pieces and theatrical stuff. I'd be interested to talk to you about this, because I'm still not sure what you mean exactly. In my experience there's nothing that putting tokens in the GM layer or in a strip of fog of war that you can't do better with the characters section of the journal.
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Post by rickno7 on Sept 5, 2013 8:22:16 GMT -8
Less annoying as piss link to imageNow, sure, if I WANTED to, I could make NPC character sheets in Roll20 and have that image of the barmaid as a token, but this is a rather old pic, in my newer games I have not only conversation portraits(as I call them) of characters, I also have the usual token that you would move on a map. Again, I could just make 2 character sheets, one with the map token and one with the conversation token, but to me it just seems a hell of a lot easier to keep them off in the fog of war. Also as I said earlier, I make my own borders on tokens because they are obvious and easier to see at a glance instead of the effects you can put on them in roll20. Red = hostile green = ally yellow = undetermined. I'm not going to make a separate character page for each of those colors, i'm just going to have the tokens loaded up on my GM/FOW layer so I can slide them in whenever.
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