Blog Comments

As I was reading your post, I found it particularly interesting that you designed or implemented maps keeping character abilities in mind. Furthermore, specific characters, those of "the old Band". In one respect, that's convenient, some worldbuilders might not have that information to work with when designing their maps, unless they exclusively use pre-gen characters.

Thanks again for the post.

I really enjoy your blogs, they're well written, concise and informative. I typically come away from them with ideas for improving my DM skills and the experiences of my players.

Your explanation today of upload speeds was wonderful. I'd never considered that I was the bottleneck in how long it takes my players to receive an image or map. I host "canned" campaigns so I have little control over file size (I think?).

I usually ask one of my players to "host" the VOIP (make the call to everyone). It seems to help a little. I usually have my VOIP connection over my iPhone instead of the PC, it allows me dettachment from my PC but still remain in-game, to get another drink or whatever. But I force internet data instead of cellular data, so I'm not saving on upload there!

I too have run into the 10,000 character blog post size limit, a bit annoying to say the least. I find the new "I am not a bot" scanner particularly troublesome.

Keep the blogs coming.

Thanks for your kind words, Minty! There are a lot of images that can make good tokens, depending on what you need. I have used pictures of cosplayers that I took at Gen Con, webcomics, scanned art of various types, and a ton of images I found with search engines. A while back we needed Old West images for a tabletop game, and we found tons of cowboy pictures that were good. More recently I needed a token for an animated heap of bones. I found the perfect drawing with a Google image search. All I had to do was paint in some red dots in the skulls' eye sockets, do a little cropping and resizing and I was in business.

What an inspiring blog post! I don't have any of my own tokens. They're an expense I have so far avoided. I typically run canned campaigns, so most of the tokens are supplied. But every once in a while... And now, thanks to your post, I'll be rolling in the tokens. I have tons of old paper material that's dying to be scanned and cropped. Thanks Phystus.

No, I didn't, I just went directly to drawing my dungeons with the vector drawing tools. But you raise a good point, eliminating the graph paper grid would probably have worked too. I'd probably go with the color replacer tool rather than the flood fill, though, as it's less fiddly. I have found that the slightest break in a line will allow the flood fill to "leak" into places it isn't wanted. But if you were to sample the color of the grid and replace it with the color of the paper you might eliminate the grid pretty quickly. Good idea!

As I read your post, I wondered, did you try to eliminate the scanned grid, the graph paper with say either the scanning software, kind of like tune it out as noise? Or use the little area fill tool, I think it looks like a slightly tipped paint can, with paint running out of it. it seems like it might fill to the walls of the dungeon, possibly drowning out the graph? Mostly curious as to whether you'd tried either of these and how it went. Personally I've never been to impressed with the area fill tool, too quirky!

Thanks for your comment!

I looked at CC, but I haven't bought it. In part that was due to the price, and in part the learning curve. My wife has done some CAD stuff, but I haven't, and I couldn't very well have her make the maps since she's also one of my players.

I also looked at Dundjinni, but that was around the time the developer announced they weren't doing further work on it, so I felt like there was no point in buying it. I'm not sure if they are developing it anymore or not.

I do use Pyromancer's site to build dungeon maps. I'll talk about that in my next post...

~P

Nice, I have used Campaign Cartographer to great use in the past. And while it's quite a bit of a learning curve (larger than FG I would think), it's based upon a CAD program so if you have any familiarity with most 2d CAD prog's it should make plenty of sense.

Yes I agree, I'm also interested to here how your game experiences have changed between the early versions and now.

Hello Phystus, thanks for sharing your experience.

The best method i have found is to have all the players make a Google Calendar on when they know they can't game. Then the Gm picks a date enters it and invites everyong and the players double check to make sure they were really free or weren't "volunteered" by spouses for something.

Yes, exactly. The days of "same time next week" are long gone, and we have to devote about 10 minutes at the end of each game to figure out when we can get back together.

I assume you mean "joy" :-)

Aw, shucks!

Seriously though, I've gotten to chat with my old buddies a LOT more since we started the online game, and that's really been the best part. Gaming with people who have careers and families is certainly a challenge, but it's totally worth it. Plus, it will make great material for future blog posts!

And I'd totally vote for your cleric. If he broke his campaign promises I could hit him with lightning!

As a character in the aforementioned campaign, I'd say that it's been a great way to maintain contact with old friends like Phystus here. I was one of the first ones he approached about it, and I've been on board with it ever since. Being adults though, with careers, kids (and/or pets), completely different time zones, it's been a challenge at times, but it's always been great fun. Phystus is a great DM.

And remember kids: Always, always, suck up to the DM...

I still had my character sheets (are all old-time DnD'ers packrats?) as well. I retired my F/MU/T rather than convert him, but kept my Cleric. He'll be old enough to be POTUS in 2024, too. Time to start the write-in campaign!

Your public awaits, Phystus! Start writin'...

For the characters in the old campaigns? We had some of the character sheets. Luckily, I had made mini-sheets for all the characters on 3x5 index cards that I had kept clipped to the DM screen, so I had their stats, important magic items, and so forth. The wizard still had her character sheet and spell list, so we were pretty well set.

We converted from 1st Edition AD&D to D&D 3.5 when we restarted since there wasn't a ruleset for AD&D at the time. So the characters changed quite a bit, particularly the multiclassed characters and the ranger.

I also still had all the maps, old adventures, and notes, along with a database I had built of all the important NPC's (which I hope to blog about at some point). So I was in a pretty good position to reboot the campaign and carry on with the original storylines. I guess there are advantages to being a packrat after all!

Out of interest did you still have the original character sheets?

Yeah, time really flies. I think back then Smiteworks was still owned by the fellows from Finland. It's amazing how far the product has come since then.

It's hard to believe that was almost 8 years ago. Wow, the time has really flown by. My first Gen Con experience was in 2010 when I ran the SmiteWorks booth for the first time.