I wish I had time to put up as in-depth a post as I would like, but I spent far longer than I planned to last night getting everything ready for this evening’s session of my online D&D game.  I’ll at least summarize what was involved.

• Creating the encounter maps in MapTool (I ended up re-doing them all on one map so that the players wouldn’t have to flip between multiple maps in the campaign)
• Updating the properties for the campaign per the suggestion of one of my more MapTool-experienced players (pretty minor changes)
• Creating tokens for all of the bad guys, including their stats and macros for their powers
• Creating tokens for all of the players (well, except the two who will be bringing their own), including THEIR stats and power macros
• And of course making sure that I’ll know what I’m doing when I actually run the adventure

Top row: Alayne, Thorfin, Faebs. Bottom row: Landon, Fudrick, Jaks

All of this ended up taking somewhere close to 10 hours over the past few days – and that was for an adventure that was already pre-written and for which I had previously created encounter maps and enemy token images!  I shudder to think how much time I’ll have to put in once I start creating my own adventures.

On the bright side, I’ll no longer have to change properties or create PC tokens (or at least not very often), and the more I create monster tokens the more efficient I get at it (using templates for them, for instance).  I’m guessing that the prep work for a typical future session within MapTool (once I’ve already decided what the encounters will look like, what bad guys to use, etc.) will probably take about three hours instead of ten.  Just a guess, though.

Now all that’s left to do is get the group together and run the game!  It sounds so easy when I write it like that…