Category Archives: News

Marvel Heroic RPG – MapTool Framework – Second Draft

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The blog post about my first draft can be found here. You can download the new framework right here!

Over the weekend, I had some time to improve my MapTool framework for the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game. @MattHawke provided the key assistance: He showed me how to use custom frames to create a very, very useful character sheet.

Frames in MapTool include the Selection frame (which holds the buttons with various macros for each token), the Chat frame (which shows the output of the chat window and macros), and the Campaign frame (which holds macros common to everyone in the campaign). You can also create your own frame to hold whatever you want.

The syntax for doing this is surprisingly simple: You just use the frame roll option, followed by the name you want to give this new frame (held inside quotation marks inside parentheses). You then fill up your new frame, largely using HTML. Since I wanted to create a frame called DataFile (the Marvel RPG name for a character sheet), I used the following code:

[frame("DataFile") : {

From there, I used a bunch of HTML to fill the frame:

<html>
 <head>
 <title>[r:getProperty("Name", MyToken)] ([r: getProperty("RealName", MyToken)])</title>
 </head>
<body>

The other awesome MapTool function that @MattHawke showed me is the macroLink function. This lets you create a link to a macro within your HTML frame. The macroLink function lets you provide the linked text, the function that’s linked to, and the people to whom the output of the function should be displayed.

This allowed me to make the DataFile frame into the entire character interface. My goal is to make it so that players will never have to use the Selection window except at the very beginning of the session, to open the DataFile frame. After that, all of the stuff they can do can be done via links in the Data File itself.

I also decided it would make my life easier if I created a library token to hold all of the macros, and then simply call those macros from the Data File.

I know that other MapTool frameworks already do a lot of cool stuff with custom frames; I never really understood them until now. This is a much better way to use a character sheet, rather than looking at the pop-up window that MapTool uses by default. I’d love to re-work my D&D 4e framework to take advantage of this, but man, that would be a lot of work at this point! For now, the Marvel RPG fans are the ones who will benefit.

Please check out this updated framework. It’s light-years better than what I started with in the first draft. Feedback is invited!

– Note that you’ll need to set your stack size in MapTool to at least 4 in order for this framework to work properly. I personally set mine to 10. This is an option in the pop-up window that opens when MapTool first starts. The default stack size of 2 doesn’t cut it.

– Michael the Online Dungeon Master

Marvel Heroic RPG – MapTool framework – First draft

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Among the big, exciting news in the world of role-playing games this past month was the release of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game from Margaret Weis Productions. Cam Banks (@boymonster on Twitter) was the design lead, and by all accounts he and his team had done a fantastic job with the game.

I’m not a comic book guy myself, so I wasn’t really planning to do anything with the game. However, I was asked by a couple of folks on Twitter (@MattHawke and @SenatorChatty) if I would be willing to put together a Marvel RPG framework in MapTool so that they and others could play the game online.

Hmm, intriguing! This is the closest I’ve come so far to doing “commission work” in role playing games (although I’m not getting paid or anything like that).

One stumbling block was that I did not own the PDF for this exciting new game. Now, it was only $12.99 on Drive Through RPG at the moment (now marked down to $9.74 for DM’s Day through March 7), but still. If I wasn’t going to play the game myself, I didn’t really want to have to pay money to do commission work.

Inspiration struck, though: Why not ask the game’s creator if he’d like me to put this together as a service to the online Marvel RPG community, and in exchange he could provide me with a copy of the PDF. Brilliant! Cam, being the awesome guy that he is, agreed.

And thus, the OnlineDM framework for the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game was born. You can download it right here.

How does it work?

I’m calling this particular version 0.11. It’s not at all polished yet, but it does work. Some instructions:

– The framework was created in version 1.3.b86 of MapTool, but it should work in any later version, too.

– There are three tokens: One for a hero (which can also be used for villains), one for The Watcher, and one for the Scene.

– The Hero token has all kinds of properties that will pop-up on a mouse-over; the Watcher and Scene are more limited, naturally.

– To build a Hero token, click the Build Character macro on the token itself and enter the various characteristics

– To build a dice pool, either click the Build Dice Pool macro or click the individual add/remove dice buttons

– To roll the dice pool or clear it, click the button labeled as such

– There are buttons to add and remove plot points from tokens (or from selected tokens if the Watcher wants to award them from the campaign panel)

– There are also buttons to set Stress, Trauma, Assets and Complications

Click to enlarge to see the framework's features in action

Room for improvement

Admittedly, this is not very pretty yet, and there are things I’d definitely like to tweak.

– Following a suggestion from @MattHawke, I’d like to use a custom frame instead of the pop-up character sheet to hold all of these properties. It really needs more formatting.

– In the dice pool building macro, I’d like to have drop-downs to pick the actual Distinctions and Powers and so on, rather than just typing in a number of dice

– And I’m sure that play-testing will reveal lots of things that need improvement!

Still, this version should be functional for play. All you really need are the dice pool and doom pool macros.

So, try out the new game and try out my framework – and let me know what suggestions you have for improvements!

– Note that you’ll need to set your stack size in MapTool to at least 4 in order for this framework to work properly. I personally set mine to 10. This is an option in the pop-up window that opens when MapTool first starts. The default stack size of 2 doesn’t cut it.

– Michael the OnlineDM

WotC to reprint 1st Edition AD&D books – woo hoo!

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Check out the solicitation to retailers: http://www.wizards.com/ContentResources/Wizards/Sales/Solicitations/2012_04_17_dd_1stED_Solicitation_en_US.pdf

This is excellent! I’m pretty much just a 4th Edition player, and I plan to pre-order a set of these as soon as they’re available from my FLGS. I’d love to have my own copy of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide in particular, but also the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual. And it benefits the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund. Too cool!

I’m very encouraged by this. Maybe WotC will have some success in uniting the D&D community after all. Way to go WotC! April 17 can’t come soon enough.

New edition of D&D – OnlineDM’s first take

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So, the big news announcement on January 9 was indeed about the next iteration of Dungeons and Dragons. Lots of folks have been chiming in with their thoughts; here are mine.

Modularity

Wizards of the Coast has said that they want the game to be modular, offering groups the chance to have more complex or less complex games as they see fit. It’s a lovely notion, and if they can pull it off, I think it will help to make the game appealing to a wide audience.

I expect to see options for omitting things like opportunity attacks. I expect to see a wizard option that’s Vancian and a wizard option that has at-wills. I expect to see separate books for whatever the next iteration equivalent of tiers will be (heroic, paragon, epic), with big changes between them.

Open Playtest

The other big news in the announcement was that WotC would be engaging in an open playtest of the rules. A friends and family playtest is ongoing (and no, so far your OnlineDM does not rank highly enough in the D&D community to have been invited; pity). The first public viewing of the current version of the new rules will be at the D&D Experience convention in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a couple of weeks (under non-disclosure agreements from the players involved). A wider public playtest is supposed to start sometime this spring.

I’m very happy to see that WotC is making this move. I opined a couple of weeks ago about the importance of the company focusing on good community relations as they move forward; so far, so good. Actively soliciting feedback from everyone who offers it is a good idea. Obviously, they won’t be able to take everyone’s feedback, since some of it will conflict. But at least giving everyone a chance to be heard is a powerful step in the right direction.

Unification

This new iteration is explicitly intended to appeal to players of D&D from its entire history. WotC is trying to unify the D&D community with their new game. A lot of folks have moved to Pathfinder or OSR games, and WotC is trying to interest them in this new iteration.

It’s a tall order. I was shocked to see the level of vitriol on a bunch of OSR blogs on the day of the announcement. I understand that these folks don’t like WotC, but wow. It seems like this company is reaching out to them, and they’re just not interested at all in many cases. There are definitely folks in the OSR who are open to the idea of this new rule set, but I was shocked to see how many flat-out are not at all interested. So, not an easy task for WotC.

What I’d like to see

I’d like WotC to use a game license that lets third party publishers get their content into whatever electronic tools they develop. I find it annoying, for instance, that my players can’t add the ZEITGEIST themes to their characters in the Character Builder.

I’d like to see continued strong support for online tools like the Character Builder.

I’d like to be able to get PDFs of adventures at the very least, and preferably PDFs of everything for the game. I run games using my computer, and I’ve actually gotten to the point where I scan my hard copies of adventures like Madness at Gardmore Abbey so that I can use them more easily as PDFs.

I pray that we don’t go back to Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. And if such a class option exists, I pray that it’s an optional rule that isn’t present for organized play events.

I want magic items to be rarer and more interesting. Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium is the right paradigm. “Expected treasure by level” is not.

I’d love for WotC to make more use of the digest format for books, as they did with Essentials.

I certainly hope the new version keeps the 4e style of monster stat blocks, with everything right there rather than making the DM look up spells and so on. I like being able to run combat easily. Heck, monster creation in general in 4e is fantastic; stick with that!

I want great community outreach. As I said, I think they’re already doing a good job on this one. Keep it up!

What I expect to see

I expect a license that’s more restrictive that the OGL but less restrictive than the GSL. I also expect WotC to do more work with third party publishers to keep them in the loop farther in advance on this issue. Community outreach!

I expect to see Vancian spellcasting in certain classes and probably even Quadratic Wizards in those classes. Sigh. I hope they’re optional rather than the default.

I expect to see the traditional hardcover format books rather than digests. Not a big deal to me, but I’m guessing this will be important for bringing back players who’ve left. They probably don’t want digests (but it’s worth asking to find out).

I expect the PDF issue to be worked out, somehow. They’ve got to get past the “no electronic books” issue if they’re going to have wide appeal these days.

I expect some option for stripped-down rules that won’t require electronic tools in order to build a character, and more advanced rules that basically will.

I expect options for gridless combat to have actual support.

I expect more focus on exploration and adventure and less focus on combat in the core books. Combat will still be well-covered, but the meat of the text will try harder to evoke a sense of wonder.

I expect lots and lots of changes throughout the process. I expect things to come up in the rules that people HATE, and for those things to subsequently go away or become marginalized. I look forward to this.

What about my own games?

I realize that it’s possible that the new version of D&D will be something that appeals to me less than 4e does, in which case I’d probably keep playing 4e. But I expect that WotC will do a good job with this new game, and that I’ll migrate over in the end.

I can say that as soon as I get the chance to playtest the new rules, I will do so. Hey WotC, you want someone to see how the new rules work in an online game, right? Drop me a line at onlinedungeonmaster@gmail.com!

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

200 Posts: My favorites of the second century

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This is post number 201 on my blog, so I thought I’d continue the tradition I started with number 100 of looking back at my previous 100 posts and picking out a few of my favorites. The OnlineDM Greatest Hits, Volume Two:

1. My players are smarter than I am. This post talks about my experience of using player ideas during a session. In this particular example, one of my players mused that he thought the bad guys would try to push a wall over on the PCs. I’d never envisioned that possibility, but it sounded like a great idea, so I ran with it. If your players give you ideas about what might happen and they’re good ideas, use them!

2. Creating D&D converts. Lots of us have friends or family members who we think would enjoy gaming, but it’s tricky to get them into it. This post describes my experience of introducing my brother-in-law and his wife to D&D via Castle Ravenloft and then some Living Forgotten Realms adventures when they visited over Christmas. It obviously worked, since I’m getting ready to run yet another session for them this evening over MapTool even though they’re in Texas. Their characters are at sixth level now, by the way!

3. Bonus points. Lots of DMs have used similar ideas; this is my own take on it. Basically, when one of my players does something creative or cool or especially in-character rather than just focusing on the numbers of combat and tactics, I hand them a bonus point that they can use in the future to add 1 to a die roll they make or subtract 1 from a die roll made against them. They’re great incentives to encourage the kind of play I enjoy.

4. Out of the gaming closet. In my first 100 posts, I had talked about the fact that I’m in the closet at work about gaming; I didn’t mention it to my colleagues out of fear of… I don’t know, ridicule? Well, I’m over that now, and happier for it.

5. Running an online game for new players. I’m really excited about how this particular game went, because I’m such a sucker for introducing people to gaming. In this particular instance, I had some people coming to me online, saying that they wanted to learn D&D but weren’t sure how to go about it. So, I recruited a group and ran a game for them. It was a lot of fun, and something I’d like to do regularly (maybe every few months or so).

6. Tallinn’s Tower. I’m including this post as a representative of my free adventures posts. I’ve posted two so far; Tallinn’s Tower was the second. The third is almost ready, and I’ve just finished a major revision of the first. I’m personally excited about this, although I haven’t gotten much feedback yet. I love free adventures, and I love to share them with the D&D community.

7. My first Pathfinder game. Yes, I’m branching out beyond D&D4e! I love learning new games, and since Pathfinder is so popular I really wanted to learn it. I think that so far I prefer D&D4e, but I do get the appeal of Pathfinder, too.

8. MapTool flexible monster creation. This continues to evolve for me, but I was quite happy with my take on flexible monster creation. I’ve been using this method exclusively since I wrote it, and it’s made monster building much faster. Also, I love the goofy damage dice I can use (2d13+16 for instance).

9. D&D Encounters. I DMed for the Encounters this summer and loved doing it, mainly because of the opportunity to introduce new players to the game. This particular session was great because it was my grand finale (I missed the final week since I was at GenCon), my wife played, and I met a new friend. Encounters was a lot of fun, and I hope to run it again next summer when my Wednesday night bowling league is over.

10. GenCon – D&D New Products Seminar. I have to include this one, even though it has no original material. This is my minute-by-minute note taking from the seminar at GenCon where WotC talked about their plans for the next year. To say that it was a popular post would be an understatement! I typically get around 300 hits per day on my blog; I topped out near 1,500 during the weekend of GenCon when this post was live. You guys love GenCon news!

Thank you all for reading Online Dungeon Master. I’ve really enjoyed having this way of talking to the D&D community and hearing from you, too. Remember that you can also follow me on Twitter as OnlineDM1.

GenCon update: Mordenkainen on Amazon or not?

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I realized with my follow-up post from GenCon that I still had some confusion about what Mike Mearls was saying during the D&D New Products Seminar about the availability of Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium online. So, I went to The Tome Show’s recording of the seminar and decided to transcribe what Mike said during the relevant section. The section of the Tome Show recording starts at 1:29:10 and runs until 1:30:08 (just about a minute) based on my download of the episode from iTunes.

The added emphasis on the section about Amazon is mine.

Questioner: What about Mordenkainen’s….

Mike Mearls: Oh, so that’s something too where we are selling into hobby stores, but plenty of those stores, they have an online presence; there are stores that’ll have a presence in Amazon, so you will, if you shop online, still be able to get it. We want to make sure people just can’t get the book, but… and Amazon could order it. Like, they will have the ability to order from us, because we are just really changing how we’re handling the distribution of that book. So. But, it’s definitely something you can still buy online I’m sure, and there are plenty of game stores that have online presences that are discounting, or free shipping and such. So, but it’s really, it’s our, one of the things we really wanted to is really help game stores be a place where people are going to. ‘Cause that’s how we can ensure the game remains healthy. And the industry as a whole, it’s a pretty complex ecosystem. At the end of the day, we can’t just walk away from game stores. Without game stores, we just, probably can’t survive. And that’s a hard sale to make to the guy who’s like, “Well I can just take my graph paper, my pencils and my Player’s Handbook,” and never need US again, so we definitely are aware of that and try to balance that.

After re-listening to that passage and typing it up, I feel better about being confused; Mike Mearls presented it rather confusingly. I’m guessing that he’s saying they normally distribute books to Amazon through some other wholesaler, and Amazon gets fantastic pricing. For Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium, however, they’re changing the way they distribute the book. It will still apparently be available for Amazon to order, but not via their normal channels – and, I think most importantly, not at their regular price.

Also, I’m assuming that Mike just misspoke when he said, “We want to make sure people just can’t get the book.” I’m sure he meant that they did NOT want a situation where people just can’t get the book if they don’t live hear a hobby store, so they want there to be some form of online distribution for those people.

I’m pretty sure the goal here is to make it hard for anyone to undercut your friendly local game store on price when it comes to MME. I don’t understand exactly how WotC will be doing that, but then I’m not a book retailer or distributor.

Post Script: By the way, my count has Mike’s answer at 229 words, spoken in approximately 56 seconds. That’s a rate of 245 words per minute. According to Wikipedia, audio books tend to be recorded at around 150-160 words per minute, which is the comfortable hearing and processing range for most people. 250 words per minute is auctioneer pace. The man can speak at a rapid clip!

ZEITGEIST adventure path for 4e and Pathfinder is here!

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I spend a lot of my D&D time over on EN World, surfing the various forums. It was a great resource for me when I was first learning D&D 4e in early 2010, and it’s where I found the players for my long-running Friday night online campaign. EN World also published the adventure path that I’m using for that campaign, War of the Burning Sky (which I’m very much enjoying running).

Thus, I was excited late last year when word started coming out about their next campaign saga, called ZEITGEIST. I was lucky enough to get into a play-by-forum playtest of the first two adventures run by the author, Ryan Nock. Ryan’s a fantastic writer, and his descriptions of our combats were amazing. Since we were really just running through the adventure to help Ryan fine-tune the plot rather than the combat encounters, he just narrated the fights, and yet this was probably even more fun than rolling the dice would have been.

I’ve been pretty geeked about this campaign path for a while, so I’m excited to say that the two-page introductions to the campaign as well as the 41-page player’s guide are now available, both for D&D4e and for Pathfinder. I have no idea what if I anything I’ll ever do with this campaign, since I’m pretty much full-up as a DM right now, but I could see maybe running it for my in-person group in the future if I decide to take another turn in the DM chair for that group.

Fortune cards – Second impressions

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I played in a Living Forgotten Realms game this morning at my friendly local game store. One of the guys who works there (a person I consider a friend) had a stack of the cards for players to look at. He knew that I wasn’t all that excited about the cards, and he was eager to tell me that I was wrong – the cards were AWESOME, in his opinion.

I looked through the stack of about 50 cards (some of which were duplicates, of course). Verdict: I’m still not impressed.

The cards seem to give minor bonuses to attack or defense or have a minor effect on the board. I think that’s the appropriate power level, since they’re pure add-ons to the powers that player characters already have. If they were super-powerful, the game would be warped and the DM would have to increase the challenge level of encounters significantly in order to make things interesting.

However, with these minor bonuses, it just feels like too much extra stuff to keep track of without enough benefit. On your turn, you now have your full array of normal powers PLUS one more card in your hand to keep track of. That card changes every turn (generally speaking, as I understand the rules of Fortune Cards), so you never get to the point that you’re totally familiar with your character’s abilities. Heck, I kept forgetting that my elf hunter ranger had Elven Accuracy this morning, and that power is always there! Fortune Cards would be one more thing that I would be likely to forget about (and then kick myself later).

Overall, I don’t think the cards add anything meaningful to the game. It’s another layer of complication on a game that, in my opinion, has enough complication already, thank you very much. If you want more twists in your game and bonus powers to give out to players, then Fortune Cards might be a great fit for you. For me – not so much. And that’s even ignoring the whole cost and rarity aspects (which bum me out, too).

By the way, Wizards of the Coast has cleared things up a little bit (in my opinion) about what organized play events will require the cards. They’re starting a new series of events in September that sound similar to the competitive Dungeon Delve events that have been held at several conventions. These are really tough adventures that you’re not expected to be able to just win. It’s strongly implied that Fortune Cards will be required for these events.

Some players will probably love this. If you’re a big-time tactical gamer and want to survive the hardest possible encounters with your min-maxed character, this is right up your alley, and building a powerful deck of Fortune Cards will help. That’s not my cup of tea, but I know some players will love it.

Fortune cards – I plan to ignore them

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Since it’s the current big uproar in the D&D community, I thought I would give my two cents’ worth on the Fortune Cards news:

I plan to ignore them.

Yes, Wizards of the Coast seems to be trying to make more money by adding a collectible card game element to Dungeons and Dragons.  I understand why they’re doing it.  It doesn’t sound like much fun to me, so I plan to leave them out of my games.  Players will not be allowed to use them in games that I run.  I only DM right now so I’m not a player in a regular game at the moment, but if I were, I would vote to exclude them (and I’m pretty sure the people I play with would do the same).

I’m a little bummed about the part of the announcement that says, “For some Wizards Play Network programs aimed at experienced players, Fortune Card purchase will be a requirement to participate.”  They say that this will not apply to D&D Encounters (although this page talks extensively about Fortune Cards with Encounters, which confuses me), so I’m left to wonder what they mean.  I know that they required the purchase of Gamma World boosters for the Gamma World Game Day (which I did not participate in); is the plan to require Fortune Cards for future Game Days?  What about Living Forgotten Realms?

I’d be especially bummed if you had to use Fortune Cards to play LFR, especially since it seems that LFR is sort of run by the community now rather than by WotC.  I like LFR, and if I HAVE to buy Fortune Cards in order to play, then I’m not playing.  I’m just not interested in the cards.  Maybe someone will give me a stack of commons that I can put on the table and then not use.

Anyway, for people who don’t care about Organized Play (which is most D&D players, since most of us play home games), you can freely ignore Fortune Cards.  The two they’ve shown so far don’t seem that interesting anyway.

Is this a money-grab by WotC?  Yep.  They’re a business and are trying to maximize profits.  Is it distasteful?  Sure, but I don’t mind ignoring it.  I like D&D 4e without Fortune Cards, and no one can require me to add them to my home games if I don’t like them, so I won’t add them.

Virtual Table – first experience

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Well, it seems that Thursday, December 9, was the day that Wizards of the Coast decided to really open up the Virtual Table to lots and lots of interested players.  I got my invitation, as did a whole bunch of other people I talked to.  So, I’m not a special snowflake, but at least I get to try this out!

I spent probably about two hours playing with the Virtual Table today, and I immediately had a goal in mind: Set up the first 4e Home Encounters adventure!  I had already built this encounter in MapTool, so all I had to do was re-create it in the Virtual Table.

The login process with the beta invite is a little unusual.  I received a welcome email with links to FAQs, five “passes” that I could use to play in Virtual Table games, and a link to the beta group on the WotC home page.  From that group, I had to find a link to a forum post that had the actual link to the beta itself.  From THAT link, I got a pop-up that asked for a user name and password.  Sheesh, what a lot of work!

Once I was in, things got a little easier.  I could browse open campaigns with short descriptions and indications of how many seats were open.  But I didn’t have time to play – I wanted to try setting up my own game.  Thus, I used the New Campaign button.

When you create a new campaign in Virtual Table, you start by editing its name, campaign system (which edition of the game you’re using), campaign world (core world, Forgotten Realms, etc.) and campaign format (ongoing campaign or one-shot).  I like the nod to older editions of D&D, though I’m not particularly experienced with them myself.

After you edit the info, you click the Launch button.  At this point, a Java program loads up and you are left in the map editor window.  All I’ve done so far is draw a map and create monster tokens.

It took a little bit of fooling around with the controls, but I was ultimately able to draw a rudimentary map for the first 4e Home Encounter.  Dungeon Tiles weren’t going to be an option because the beta currently has only tiles for, well, dungeons.  This first encounter takes place in the wilderness, so all of that stone wasn’t going to be helpful.  This meant that I had to draw on the virtual battle mat – old school!

The tools available for drawing are very simple.  Think Microsoft Paint with fewer options.  You can draw freehand lines, straight lines, empty ovals, filled ovals, empty rectangles and filled rectangles.  You can adjust the thickness of your lines to narrow, medium or thick.  You have a choice of six colors for your lines and shapes – red, yellow, black, blue, brown, or green.  You also have a choice of backgrounds – Battle Mat, Sand, Dirt or Grass.

Yes, I know that this is just a beta, and I’m guessing the drawing tools will be improved later.  But in a strange way, I kind of like the limited choices right now.  It feels more like drawing on an actual battle mat, and it makes it so that I’m not focused on making the map look awesome – I’m just making it look serviceable for my players.  Drawing the map did not take long at all – maybe 10 minutes once I understood the controls.

The final step for me was creating the monsters.  You begin by picking the monster image token that you want.  The selection here is limited for now, too, but I was able to pick a wolf and an orc, and I used a drake instead of an alternate wolf picture (there are two different kinds of wolves in this encounter).  Once you have the picture, you name the token and enter its max hit points and defenses.  You can also enter in notes.  Finally, you create powers.

Now this is an area where the creation is easy but the results currently stink.  You can create a “power” and within that you can create various die rolls associated with that power.  To run the die rolls, you have to click each button separately.  So, if the wolf has a Bite power, you create the power and any notes you want to see alongside it, then a die roll button that will display “Bite versus AC” and then the result of 1d20+10 or whatever.  You can also create a separate die roll button that you can call “Bite damage” that will display “Bite damage” and then the result of the damage roll.  When you want your wolf to attack a PC, you click the “Bite versus AC” button, ask if it hits, and if so you can click the “Bite damage” button.  It’s nowhere near as flexible as MapTool, of course, but it works.

I’m going into oral surgery Friday morning (I’ve scheduled this post to go up later in the day on Friday), but I’m hoping to run this encounter a time or two, perhaps over the weekend.  I’ve also put a post on EN World to say that I’m going to run it Monday evening at 7:00 PM Mountain time for anyone who wants to play, just to give the program a test drive.  Feel free to drop me a line via email or in the comments if you’re interested in playing with me (assuming you have a beta invitation yourself, of course).  Let’s see how this runs!