Improvisation is important

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

Barbara and I are now in Boston for a business trip of mine, so what do we do on our first day in town? Play D&D online with our friends in Florida, of course! Hey, we’re all on the same time zone now, so we might as well.

At 11:00 AM, we all met online to play. I called Zach and Lane via Skype, which worked great. My maps in Gametable were ready to go, so I loaded up a map and hit Host. I checked my IP address and told it to Zach… and realized that we can’t use Gametable when the host doesn’t own the internet router that they’re connecting to. As you may recall from my earlier article about connecting to your players via Gametable, I had to go into my router settings and forward internet traffic that came to my IP address to my computer in particular, rather than to Barbara’s computer or some other device on our network. Since I didn’t own the hotel router that I was connecting to, I couldn’t go into its settings to forward internet traffic to my computer. Zach and Lane could host on their computer, but that wouldn’t work since they’re not the DM. I could send them the complete map with all of the monsters revealed and everything, but that’s a less fun experience for them.

So, I improvised. Back in the earliest days of my blog, I thought we were going to be using OpenRPG rather than Gametable for running our online games. Gametable is far easier to build maps in, but OpenRPG is easier on the networking side. As long as everyone can connect to the same server, OpenRPG is good to go. So, we could play via OpenRPG – but all of my maps were in Gametable. What to do?

I started by asking Lane and Zach to give me 20 minutes to get everything set up.

I then opened up Gametable, set the view to show the first area of the Keep on the Shadowfell (the entry chamber guarded by goblins) and took a screenshot.
I pasted the screenshot into Photoshop Elements.
I trimmed the canvas so that the top left corner was on the top left corner of a grid square, and the same for the top right.
I resized the map image so that the grid squares were 64 pixels wide (that’s where they started, but I had to zoom out in order for enough of the map to show up on my screen shot). In order to do this, I counted the number of squares across in the image, multiplied that number by 64, and resized the image (keeping the proportions constant) so that the width equaled the number of squares times 64 pixels.
I erased the areas of the map that weren’t part of this first encounter.
I saved this image file on my Dropbox public directory (more on Dropbox in a later post).
I opened OpenRPG.
I set the General property of the map so that the map was plenty large enough for my new image.
I set the background color of the map to gray (not necessary, but nice).
I set the grid size to 64 pixels and made the grid lines invisible (since my image file had the grid lines from Gametable).
I loaded my new map image as the background, using the public URL from the Dropbox directory.
I also copied all of my Gametable character and monster pogs to my Dropbox public directory so that I could load them into OpenRPG. (I suppose I could actually do the same with environmental pogs… hmm…)

Once I had this set up, I opened a new room on an OpenRPG server, called Lane and Zach back and told them how to connect to my room in OpenRPG. I assigned them the role of Player, and they could then move their minis around the map. Huzzah!

The map image I created is below. It’s messy, because I had to manually erase the parts of the map that I didn’t want the players to see, but that’s okay.

We played through the entry chamber and the torture chamber (which I created in the same manner and had to load as a separate background image when they went into that area), and I have to say that it all went pretty well. I had to manually add each monster as they encountered them rather than revealing them from the private map as I would have done in Gametable, but that was easy enough to do.

It’s worth mentioning that the party ripped through the bad guys like a knife through butter! Zach’s rogue successfully stealthed down the stairs and got a sneak attack with a sling on the first goblin warrior, then rolled the highest initiative and finished the warrior off with more sneak attack damage before he had a chance to warn his friends. I had already removed the pit trap and the swarm of rats from the encounter in order to level it down for a party of three PCs, and I was planning to remove one of the goblin sharpshooters as well. But since the party was handling everything so skillfully, I left the second sharpshooter in the battle, and the PCs had no trouble at all. The torture chamber was a little more challenging, but it was awesome when Barbara’s swordmage shoved a goblin into the iron maiden and slammed it shut on him to start the battle. I removed just one goblin from the battle, and that was all I did to level it down (well, I also forgot about the daily power of the hobgoblin’s magic armor, but oh well). After the two battles, we had played for two and a half hours (including technical difficulty time) and decided to call it a day. The party did decide to release Splug, cautiously, which should be interesting! Best of all, they were still excited about the game and want to get together tomorrow evening to continue! I’d call that a success. They were within a few XP of leveling up, so I awarded them a few extra points for good roleplaying and general cool moves so that they could begin tomorrow with level 2 characters.

Since I’ve now had a little more time to prepare to run the game in OpenRPG, I’ve figured out the fog of war function and decided to use it for tomorrow’s battle. I created an image of the entire first level of the Keep on the Shadowfell (even though there’s no way the party will get to all of it tomorrow), loaded it into OpenRPG, and used the fog function to hide everything that the players haven’t discovered yet. This is a little imperfect, as Barbara can see my screen (we only have the one laptop here in the hotel room), but that’s okay – she’s good at playing based on what her character knows rather than what she as a player knows. Tomorrow should be even smoother!

My artistic skills are developing!

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

I’ve mentioned before that I am not artistic by nature. Okay, singing and acting, sure, but not the visual arts. However, being an online dungeon master (hey, that’s the name of the blog!) has forced me into the visual arts on a small scale, and I have to admit that I’m having a lot of fun with it. Gametable comes with a lot of pre-made artwork to use – dungeon walls, trees, character and monster minis, etc. – which helps a lot. But if I want my game to look right, I have to do some artwork.

Sometimes this involves drawing large, freehand features like rivers, roads and mountains. These don’t need to be too detailed, so a rough outline of what they should look like is all I really need. Witness the maps from my first online session:

However, we’ll soon be getting into the Keep on the Shadowfell itself, which deserves higher-quality artwork, in my humble opinion. Having the dungeon walls pre-made helps. I was able to add some simple features like doors. I shared in an earlier post (and on my downloads page) some basic game elements like tables, prison bars and stairs. For the next part of the dungeon, though, I needed some artwork. Specifically, I needed a rune that appears several times on the floor of one section of the dungeon. The runes are background elements, but they’re important. I really wanted to get them right. There’s an illustration in the adventure manual of what they should look like, roughly, but not the type of illustration that I could cut and paste to use in the game. No, this time I had to actually draw the runes in Photoshop:Okay, I know I’m not a pro, but come on – that’s a badass-looking rune! And I really did have to draw it more or less freehand. I first drew the top triangle-thingy, then copied and rotated it so that I had three of them, then drew the other symbols in part using the line tools in Photoshop and in part just freehanding it. I learned a lesson about combining layers in Photoshop, too. By default, every time you draw a new shape, Photoshop Elements puts it on a whole new layer. This is convenient much of the time, when you want to enlarge or rotate just one piece of the drawing (you don’t have to worry about selecting it perfectly – it’s on its own layer). It got annoying, though, when I wanted to shift and resize the hand that I drew and I found that each finger was on its own layer, as was the palm. Eventually I just merged all of the visible layers and selected the hand independently, which worked just fine. And now I have a rune!

I also have some new environmental elements, most of which started with photos online that I resized or modified in some way.

This shelf, for instance, started from a schematic of a bookshelf that I found online. It’s surprisingly hard to find overhead views of lots of the items I’m looking for in the game, so the schematic below was where I started:

Bookshelf schematic

From there, I used the eyedropper in Photoshop to pick up some of the brown color, then used the line tools to make the top solid, then got a little creative with making the 35″ measurement on the front of the middle shelf disappear. Sure, my dungeon shelf has particle board, but that’s okay!

I also needed some suits of armor. There are tons of great pictures of suits of armor online, but again, it’s hard to find one from overhead. Fortunately, I was able to experiment with the tools in Photoshop to distort the image of a straight-on picture of armor so that it more or less looks like it’s coming from overhead. I started with the picture on the left and ultimately turned it into the image on the right. It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing (and it looks fine at its usual 64 by 64 pixel size).

Suit of armor - original

Finally, I created a few other miscellaneous minis that I’ve shown below without full write-ups. These are things I’ve created from images I found online. From left to right, my improved fire pit, a coffin, a tent, a blue slime (I love Dragon Warrior!), an ochre jelly and two kruthiks (yeah, I had no idea what I kruthik was, either). Also, an awesome giant rat.

I’m pretty happy with myself, I have to say! I hope we get to play this dungeon soon. Lane, Zach and Barbara have said that they want to play sooner rather than later, even if we can’t get our full group of five players together. We may run some more side quests – perhaps even some that I’ll try to build myself – or we may delve into the main keep and pick up other players for future adventures. Frankly, I’m getting a little too excited about what I’ve created in the keep NOT to run it! But we’ll see how things play out. Barbara and I will be traveling next week, and we realized that there’s nothing keeping us from playing our online game while we’re on the road. We’ll have the laptop, and that’s all we really need. Plus, we’ll be in Boston, so we’ll be in the same time zone as our friends in Florida (as opposed to Mountain Time here in Colorado), so that might even be easier. Our next session will likely be played from our hotel room!

Private maps in Gametable

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

Today I’d like to focus on an important tool within Gametable – the ability to set up your map with some items hidden and then reveal them to your players as they explore and discover new things. This isn’t very hard to do, but it’s important to do it right.

As my example today, I’ll use the Irontooth encounter map that my party went through last weekend. Here is the completed, fully revealed encounter map (and the map file is at this link):

This is a pretty straightforward battle map. I started by setting the map background to gray. I then created a few underlay images of dark gray walls to serve as the cavern walls. You’ll note that these are actually square images, not rectangles. If you make them rectangles, Gametable will want to center them within their squares, which is really not what you’re looking for. When creating images that you want to appear off-center in the game (such as a 2 by 1 square wall that you want to show up in the bottom two squares of a four-square box, rather than across the middle of the four-square box), make the image a transparent square and then color in only part of the square, as I’ve done below.

After using these thick walls for the cavern layout, I brought in several copies of my homebrew kobold pogs along with the pre-packaged goblin pog (for Irontooth). I labeled the kobolds who weren’t minions by left clicking on each and and choosing “Set Name.” (I also do this in-game to denote a creature who is bloodied, prone, marked, etc.) I brought in my homebrew minis for Irontooth’s bed and treasure chest. I also drew the waterfall entrance on the left side of the map by hand (I’m not much of an artist, but I can spice things up with a little color). This gave me a complete map – well, except for my PCs’ minis.

Now, when the party comes through the waterfall, I don’t want them to see the entire map all at once. I certainly don’t want them to know where Irontooth and his treasure are, for instance. I don’t even want them to know how big the cavern is at the start. Here is what I want them to see when they first walk in:

This just shows what the players could see when they first walk through the waterfall. There are four kobold minions and a kobold skirmisher in front of them, and they can see the cavern walls that are immediately around them. So, what happened to the rest of the cavern? It’s on the private map.

To get to the private map, either go to Map – Edit Private Map, or simply hit Ctrl+F. You’ll note that the public map now appears in a shaded-out form, while the parts that are hidden from the players are in full color. You can now edit this map as you would the main map (add or remove items, move them around, draw on the map, etc.). To reveal something to the players, you simply need to publish it. To publish an individual item, such as a monster or a treasure chest or a single section of wall, you can left click on the item you want to reveal and click Publish.

Alternatively, you can use the mass publisher tool. This tool can be found on the toolbar at the top of the screen (and can be turned on by pressing Ctrl+9):

The publish tool will let you drag a box around areas of the map that you want to publish, and they will all appear at once. This is also the way to go when you are getting your map set up for your players – you can start with your complete, revealed map and then selectively use the publish tool to move some items to the private map. So, when you’re on the private map the publish tools moves items to the public map, and when you’re on the public map it moves things to the private map. It toggles their public/private status.

There’s one other important point to understand about the public and private maps – they are separate map files in Gametable. I learned this lesson the hard way, before I really understood the private map. In my earlier post about my map of the first section of the Keep on the Shadowfell, I showed an image of the complete keep (so far):

I was so proud of myself for setting up this detailed map. I then moved most of it to the private map (so that it would be ready to go for my players) and saved the map file. I then cleared off the map and started drawing my map for the outdoor kobold ambush. When working on that map, I started moving things to the private map and realized that all of the private items from the map of the keep were there, which I obviously didn’t want outdoors, so I cleared it all off the private map.

Imagine my chagrin when I later opened what I thought was the complete map of the keep that I had drawn, only to discover that it only contained the small section that I wanted to be revealed to the players when they first entered:

Crap! The private map was completely empty. It turns out that I had to save it as a totally separate file and then load that file when I had toggled my view to the private map view. So, here is how I set up map files now:

Start by saving a new map file as “NameOfMap_Complete.grm”
Go to Map – Clear Map
Build the new map, with everything revealed
Save the map
Go to the private map (Ctrl+F)
Save this map as “NameOfMap_Private.grm”
If there’s some private stuff on here from a previous map, go to Map – Clear Map
Toggle back to the public map and start unpublishing whatever you want to hide using either the Publish tool or by left clicking on each item and choosing Unpublish (for finer control)
Toggle back to the private map, and you’ll see your unpublished items
Once you have everything set the way you want it, save the private map as “NameOfMap_Private.grm” (you’ve already set it up under this name) and save the public map as “NameOfMap_Public.grm”
When you’re ready to use this map, you’ll need to toggle to the public map view and load “NameOfMap_Public.grm,” then toggle to the private map view and load “NameOfMap_Private.grm”

So, remember that you’re actually editing two different maps, one public and one private, and you’ll be all right. Once you understand how this tool works, it’s fantastically useful. I love being able to set up my entire map in advance and then reveal little bits at a time. If you set up a whole dungeon level this way, you can simply save the public map and private map as they exist at the end of your session (with the player characters saved wherever they happen to be standing and everything) and pick up right where you left off at the last session. This is one area where the online game has some advantages over the in-person game!

Also, I’ve saved the public, private and complete versions of my maps on the Downloads page, so you can see this in action with maps that are ready to use. I’d love to hear any comments you have regarding ways to improve this process, experiences you’ve had with this type of map online or in real life, etc.

Second gaming session – the Irontooth battle

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

As we planned on Friday, I got together Saturday afternoon online with Barbara, Lane and Zach to finish up the side quest of ridding Winterhaven of the kobold menace. There was only one encounter to run: the infamous Irontooth battle. From reading about the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure online, I knew that other DMs said that the Irontooth battle could be a total party kill (TPK), especially if the players were unlucky or if they were still new to the game and not understanding what they could do. The battle is set up as a sixth-level encounter for a party of first-level players. Encounters that are a level or two above the players are totally reasonable but challenging, and three or four levels above them should be highly threatening. Five levels above? Now you’re just trying to kill your friends, and that’s not fun.

So, in addition to scaling the battle down to work for three players, I wanted to scale it down a little farther still in order to be more like a fifth level encounter. This is a good time to talk about scaling encounters for smaller parties.

Wizards of the Coast tries to help out DMs when it comes to scaling battles up or down for party size or character level (on pages 56-57 of the DMG1). Every monster has an experience point value, and an encounter of a given level for a given party is made up of monsters whose XP total equals the XP for a monster of that level times the number of PCs in the party. If you want a first-level encounter for three players, you see that a first-level monster has XP of 100, so you want monsters that total 300 XP (100 XP times three players). If it were a third-level battle for a party of six characters, you’d see that a third-level monster has XP of 150, so you want 900 total XP in the encounter (150 XP times six players), and so on. That could be made up of a whole bunch of tiny little minions or just a couple of higher-level baddies.

The Irontooth battle as written is worth 1,250 XP – a sixth-level encounter for a party of five players. I wanted it to be more like a fifth-level encounter for a party of three players, which meant I was aiming for more like 600 XP. That meant I had a lot of slashing to do.

The encounter calls for 10 Kobold Minions at 25 XP each. I cut this down to 4 minions (100 XP)
3 Kobold Skirmishers at 100 XP each became just one (100 XP)
2 Kobold Denwardens at 125 XP each became one (125 XP)
1 Kobold Wyrmpriest at 150 XP was eliminated, which I hated to do but I had to do something (0 XP)
Irontooth himself is built to be worth 300 XP. I cut his hit points from 106 down to 80 and removed his hit point regeneration ability (getting back 5 HP per turn once he’s bloodied seems too strong), but left his damage and other abilities alone. I figured this made him worth about 250 XP (250 XP).
In addition, a Kobold Slink escaped the previous battle to go into the cave to warn the other kobolds, so he was going to show up here. However, he was beaten up from the earlier battle and doesn’t have any healing surges, so I started him at his bloodied hit point value and shaved his XP from 100 to 75 (75 XP).

All together, this adds up to 650 XP, which is slightly above a fifth-level encounter for this party. Hoo boy! This could be tough. The map is below (and the Gametable .grm file is at this link, as well as on the Downloads page with my other maps).

The Irontooth battle, scaled for three players

Fortunately, the party’s tactics were sound. The battle is set up in two waves, with a second group of enemies (including Irontooth) coming into the fray three rounds after the first wave. The party finished off the first wave (four minions and a skirmisher) during round three, just in time for the second wave (Irontooth, the denwarden and the bloodied slink) to show up. Had they still had parts of the first wave running around while they were trying to deal with the second, it could have gotten ugly. As it stood, they did a good job of saving their daily powers and action points for the second wave, where things got challenging. The Healing Word power that I had given to Lane’s druid, Kana, was used up early on, and everyone’s second winds were used, too, but they ultimately finished off Irontooth with single-digit hit point totals remaining.

My favorite part of this day’s session was the excitement when the treasure chest came into view. Zach’s character seriously considered ignoring her allies in battle (all three characters are female, even though Zach is male) so that she could sneak over to the chest and try to pop it open during battle. Cooler heads prevailed, and she decided to keep fighting and pick the lock on the chest later (no one thought to try using the key from Irontooth’s pouch, but the lockpicking went off without a hitch).

We’re going to try to get together on Friday nights, starting this coming week, with the whole group of five adventurers. This time, they’re ready to take on Shadowfell Keep itself.

First actual online gaming session – it rocks!

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

We have a success! Tonight my friends and I tried playing D&D online together for the first time, and it worked. Not only did it work, but we had so much fun that everyone wants to get together again tomorrow to finish the adventure. Huzzah!

The day started off with bad news for gaming. The group is supposed to be six of us. I (Michael) am the DM and my wife Barbara is playing our defender, a dragonborn swordmage. We’re in Colorado, a bit south of Denver. Lane and Zach, who live in Tallahassee, Florida, are a deva druid and an eladrin rogue, respectively – a controller and a striker. Jen and Eric, who live in Bradenton, Florida, are a gnome wizard and a half-elf cleric – another controller and a leader. However, a few hours before we were supposed to start, Jen called to say that Eric had to work late and they weren’t going to be able to play tonight. Should we cancel? Should we just do a technology check?

Screw that – we’re playing! This was actually Barbara’s suggestion, which made me very happy. Also, since we were planning on waiting until 9:00 PM Eastern time to get started in order to give Eric time to get home from work, with Eric not playing we were able to start closer to 8:30 Eastern.

In preparing for today’s session, I had to get myself a webcam so I could talk to everyone on Skype. Well, I could have just gotten a microphone, but the webcam only cost $30 and it works just fine as a microphone, so that’s what I got. I also had to get my maps ready. You may recall my last post, where I put up the detailed map of the first few areas of the Keep on the Shadowfell itself, all finished and ready to go. Well, since we were going to start with a smaller group, I decided that we should try a side quest first. When we first played in person in Florida the night of Jen and Eric’s wedding, the group charged right through the first kobold ambush and a quick stop in Winterhaven before making a beeline for the keep, which is where we stopped, halfway through the first battle. I missed the fact that I was supposed to send a second kobold ambush at them when they left town, and I didn’t roleplay anyone in the tavern to give them a chance to explore (I was a bit rushed as far as prep time went – that is, I had none!). So this time, I rolled back the clock and gave them the second kobold ambush, then sent them back to town. In town, I railroaded them a bit into a side quest to seek out the source of the kobolds.

First thing first: the kobold ambush. Here is the map I used, with enemies displayed.

Gametable map for a kobold ambush encounter

Okay, so this one isn’t as fancy or detailed as the Keep on the Shadowfell map I shared yesterday. This is partly because I wasn’t using the nice, pre-created dungeon walls that come with Gametable this time and partly because I was in a hurry. I drew this last night (after realizing that the party might want to try a side quest), but I didn’t have much time to do it. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard. I took the same kobold image that I used for my OpenRPG mini in an earlier post, added a green background, and used TokenTool to make a pog. I’m still torn on the “little statue” mini versus “round pog” mini debate, but I have to admit that the round pogs look pretty good and are easy to distinguish from one another at a glance, especially if I give them different background colors. These guys are all kobolds, so I used the same minis, but I set their names differently to distinguish them.

Combat was surprisingly interesting. The party didn’t have much success with their Perception checks, so the kobolds got a surprise round on most of them. Two out of the three PCs were bloodied, one getting down as low as 4 HP, but they prevailed. My favorite moment of the night was when Lane’s character wanted to claim the holy symbol from around the Kobold Wyrmpriest’s neck. She was into it!

After heading back to town (on rails), the party found their way to Lord Padraig to get hired to clear out the kobold home base. Barbara’s character was savvy enough to do some negotiating, getting a little extra gold for their fee (if they succeed, of course). They decided to sleep in the inn for the night and then headed toward the kobold lair (Paddy drew them a map). This brought them to the next encounter:

The exterior of the kobold lair in the waterfall valley

This is, obviously, another map that I drew in a hurry last night. I used pre-packaged trees and rocks, drew a stream and some foam at the bottom of the waterfall, and pasted in the image of the waterfall valley from the Keep on the Shadowfell PDF, just so the players could see what it looked like. I also used a circle of stones from Dungeon Tiles (available for Masterplan via the Dungeon Tiles Yahoo group). Quick and easy, and it worked just fine. This time, the party tried to be stealthy and had some good success with it. Kana, the fragile druid, managed to get herself surrounded by minions (the kobolds with no labels) but wisely used some area of effect spells to get out of trouble. The slink got low on hit points and managed to escape into the waterfall to warn his buddies.

After this encounter, even though it was 11:30 PM Eastern time, Zach and Lane were really tempted to keep playing. I suggested pausing until tomorrow, since we all have some free time tomorrow. This would also give me time to put the next map together! Very important. So, we’re getting together online again tomorrow afternoon.

A good time was had by all tonight, and I’m excited! I’d like to share a few things that I learned this evening.

First, a little prep time goes a long way with Gametable. It doesn’t take too long to put together a totally serviceable map that’s way fun for play. I wouldn’t have a problem with drawing on the fly if I had to.

Second, scaling encounters meant for five players down to three players isn’t that hard. I simply brought the total XP of the baddies down by 40%, eliminating enemies as needed. It worked like a charm – a good challenge, but one that the party can handle. We’ll see how that goes with the big boss battle tomorrow – one that I’ve heard should be adjusted even with five players (it’s a level 6 encounter for level 1 characters – I plan to tone it down).

Third, if you’re missing an important role in your party (in our case, a leader to heal characters), you can get creative. We gave our druid the cleric’s Healing Word power and changed her Wild Shape power to a free action. Having Healing Word mattered a LOT, and I’m glad we did it. If we continue much longer with a three-character party, we’ll have to establish a more permanent way of getting a healing feature, but this patch worked great for tonight.

Fourth, I’ve learned how to use the private map effectively – but that’s for another post.

Fifth, keeping track of initiative and hit points in an Excel spreadsheet is awesome. I love it. If I were DMing a game in real life, I would still want to use it. Again, that’s a post for another day.

Sixth, the dice rolling macros in Gametable are fantastic. That’s another topic for a post of its own. But I’ve decided that I want to set up macros for each day’s encounters in advance – every bad guy’s attack and damage rolls – and it will make combat super-easy.

I’ll also start a Downloads page on this blog for posting my Gametable map files, dice macros, images, etc. If there’s something you’ve seen me mention on the blog that you don’t see on that page, please let me know. I want that page to be a good source for other DMs who want to run adventures in Gametable. I’m loving it!

First map in Gametable – game on!

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

I haven’t posted in a couple of days, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my online D&D game! Our group is tentatively scheduled to meet online tomorrow (as I post this) for the first time. We plan to try connecting to one another with Gametable and Skype and maybe, if the technology works out okay, try to get some gaming in.

I don’t have much of an audience for this blog (yet), but I could see my players checking it out from time to time. This is interesting because I really want to share the work I’ve done so far, but I don’t want to spoil any surprises for the players. Since it’s unlikely that my friends will be checking this before we play – and because I’m just anxious to share what I’ve learned – some lessons are below.

First of all, I should point out that I’m using a published D&D adventure (The Keep on the Shadowfell) for this first game. I’m an inexperienced Dungeon Master, and my more knowledgeable brethren have told me to stick with pre-published adventures, at least at first. This means that I can build maps in advance using Gametable. I’ll jump to the punch line and show you the finished product (at least, finished so far):

My first detailed map in Gametable, ready for adventure!

So, what’s all this? It’s the first five areas of the Keep on the Shadowfell, fully revealed. I used a few pre-packaged items and a whole bunch of items that I’ve created myself, so let me share with you a little bit about what I’ve done.

The basic building block of the dungeon is the dungeon wall. Gametable comes with four walls – short (2 square) and long (4 square) horizontal and vertical walls. These are easy to use for the basic dungeon layout. It also comes with a bunch of pogs – that is, minis to use for characters and monsters. I’ve used their Goblin mini (quite liberally) and one of their character minis (for one of my player characters).

Above are the four dungeon wall graphics that come with Gametable; below are the monster and player pogs I’m using that came with the program:

Goblin

Skeleton

Skeleton Lord

Female character

Male character

Now, if you look at my map graphic, you’ll notice a whole lot of other things on there. Everything aside from the stuff I just listed is something I made – usually using images I found online, but occasionally using my own skills of an artist. My wife Barbara is the one who usually uses Photoshop Elements, but for this project I’ve had to get at least a little bit familiar with the program. (By the way, if you own any of the images I’ve used and would like me to take them down, just let me know).

If you’re going to make graphics using Photoshop Elements for something like Gametable, you’re probably going to want them on a transparent background. That way, if your new item (such as a treasure chest, a table, a stairway, etc.) doesn’t take up every pixel of its square, the pixels around it will match the dungeon background or the other elements you’ve put it on top of. That’s a good thing. The best way I’ve found to get a transparent background is to start with a new file, specifying that you want it to be transparent.

Note that the Transparent box at the bottom is checked

This will give you a file with a gray and white checkerboard background – that’s Photoshop’s indication that the background is transparent. I don’t know of a way to do this in regular old MS Paint, so I’ve migrated to Photoshop Elements.

To turn an image online into a useful Gametable element, start by copying the image into Photoshop Elements. You can do this by simply clicking on the image, dragging it down to Photoshop in your taskbar, waiting for the Photoshop window to open, and then releasing the image inside of Photoshop. For instance, I need to get an image of a zombie (a monster my players will be encountering soon), so I’ll begin by searching for promising images using Google. Here’s one that I like, from a blog called Great White Snark (this is actually a picture of a cake!):

I copied this to my clipboard, then went into Photoshop Elements and selected File – New – Image from clipboard. Now I have the image open in Photoshop exactly as you see it above. I don’t want the whole thing for my zombie mini – specifically, I don’t want the white walls in the background, nor do I want to see the edge of the table that the cake is sitting on. So, I use the Magnetic Lasso tool to highlight just the parts of the image that I want (yes, this can be very painstaking) and then go to Edit – Copy. Now that just the zombie itself is on my clipboard, I create a new blank file with a transparent background as described above and paste my zombie image into that.

Finally, I need to get my zombie image to the size that I want. I described in an earlier post a program called TokenTool that helps you generate pogs like those that come with Gametable – round, with some kind of border encircling them. Those are fine, but I’ve discovered that I actually prefer my minis to be like little statues with transparent backgrounds rather than filled-in circles. This way, if they ever end up on top of each other, you can still see some of the mini that’s hidden behind the other. Also, I try to make them square so that I can anticipate how they’ll look. Finally, I’m starting to feel like I want my minis to be a little bit smaller than the full size of the square, just so that they don’t overlap with the edge of a wall or anything like that.

I’ll start by making the image a square. To do that, I want to pad the canvas size in the horizontal direction so that it matches the vertical direction. I go to Image – Resize – Canvas Size, and I see that my image is currently 333 pixels by 489 pixels. I want some extra space around the mini, so I’ll resize to 525 pixels by 525 pixels (the canvas, remember, not the image), and I’m left with this:

Now all that’s left to do is to shrink this down to the size of a mini for Gametable – 64 by 64 pixels (if it were a large creature, it would be 128 by 128 pixels, and so on for bigger sizes). I go to Image – Resize – Image Size (as opposed to my earlier Canvas Size) and choose 64 by 64 pixels. With that, I have my finished zombie mini (note that Gametable uses PNG files for its images, not JPGs):

To make the other items you see on the map, I used pretty much the same procedure. This includes crates, chests, three different tables, plank bridges and a torture rack, all of which are below:

Crate

Chest

Small table

Tall table

Long table

Plank bridge

Torture Rack

There were a few items that I drew myself in Photoshop. The biggest pain in the butt was actually the stairs, because I wanted them to be open rectangles that showed the dungeon background through them, rather than filled-in rectangles (which Photoshop draws by default). In Paint this is an easy change to make, but in Photoshop it’s a huge pain. I ended up using this article from About.com in order to make the stairs work, but boy, what a hassle! They did turn out looking great, but SO MANY LAYERS! I used a more freehand approach to draw the curtain, which I end up changing within Gametable so that it has a face size of 2 squares (with just 1 square, it sits in the middle of the square – I wanted it to go across the border of the squares). The pillar was easy (just a gray circle), and the prison bars were also simple (a few gray squares copied over a few times – also changed within Gametable to have a 2 square face size). The bed was a little bit trickier – I used the wood from the plank bridge as the headboard and then some rounded rectangles for the bed itself and the pillow. The bedspread needed texture – a flat color looked awful – so I picked one from within Photoshop. I freely admit that my fire pit looks like a pizza – I guess I should have searched for a good image of that online, but oh well! And the iron maiden’s fancy artwork is all me, baby. Yes, I am a crappy artist, but it kind of looks like an overhead view of an iron maiden, doesn’t it? Kind of? A little?

Stairs

Curtain

Pillar

Prison bars

Bed

Fire pit

Iron Maiden

I also created a couple of custom monster and character minis – I’ll probably need to make a few more characters before tomorrow night’s session, for the rest of my players.

With that, I’ll call it a day. I’ve discovered several more features of Gametable, such as how to hide areas and monsters from your players until the players encounter them, but I’ll save those lessons for another day. If you’re running your own games in Gametable or similar software and you’d like to use any of the graphics I’ve created, please feel free – I hope I can save you some trouble!

Success with networking

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

As I mentioned in my last post, I first thought that OpenRPG would be the tool that I would use to run my online D&D game, but then discovered Gametable, which I absolutely loved. The only problem with Gametable is that I couldn’t connect my wife Barbara’s computer to mine with it, which I could easily do with OpenRPG.

Fortunately, one of the players in the game, Zach, is a computer pro and was able to help me set things up so that I could host a game that both Zach and Barbara could connect to. (We can presumably connect more people, too, though we haven’t tried yet.) Let me share my new knowledge with you.

First, I’ll say a few words about connecting to your players via OpenRPG (since I never addressed this in my earlier posts). In this program, you start by connecting to one of the servers out there for OpenRPG (you could also run your own server, but that’s beyond my needs).

To start networking, go to Game Server - Browse Servers

One you’re browsing the servers, you’ll want to pick one and join its Lobby. I’ve tried creating a room before joining a lobby, but for some reason it didn’t seem to work properly.

Double click a server on the left, then click on the Lobby on the right

Once you’re in a server’s lobby, you can create the room for your game at the bottom right corner of this window. Give it a name, and then a password if you wish (this keeps other people from taking over the room, though I’m not sure I’d be too worried about that) and an admin password – then click Create Room.

After that, you need to tell your players what server you’re on and what room you’re in (and the room password, if you’ve assigned one). They’ll need to go to the Lobby, then click on your room and “Join Room.” They’ll show up on the Player List in your room, and you can right click on their names to assign them the role of Player, which will let them interact with their minis. By default they will be Lurkers, who can’t affect the game. Only the GM (the person who started the room, or anyone who is assigned the GM role) can do things like changing the background to bring up the next map.

So, connecting to other players via OpenRPG is easy. With Gametable, it could be a little bit harder. I’ll lay out my experience, though yours may vary depending on your setup. I’m using a Dell laptop running Windows XP. Barbara has a Dell desktop, also running XP. We have cable internet service, which comes out of the wall and into our cable modem, then into a Netgear wireless router. From there, an Ethernet cable connects to Barbara’s computer, while my laptop connects to our secured network wirelessly.

The reason I go into all of this detail is that I had to mess with some settings to make everything work properly. First, let me explain the steps within Gametable to start an online game. If you’re hosting, start by going to the Network menu and selecting Host.

To host a game, go to Network, then Host.

From here, you’ll be prompted to enter your name, your character’s name, a password (entirely optional – I don’t think I’ll bother) and a port (I use the default of 6812).

Easy enough. For your players to connect to your game once you’re hosting it, they’ll go to the Network menu and choose Join, where they’ll be prompted with this screen:

Yes, it’s the same as the Host screen, except it’s asking for the host address. As the host, you’ll have to tell your players what your IP address is. The simplest way to find this is by going to http://whatismyipaddress.com/ (pretty obvious, I know). It’s entirely possible that this is all that you’ll need – your players will enter the IP address you tell them, they’ll join your game, and you’re off and running.

I had two issues to deal with. First, and I’m not absolutely certain that I had to do this but I thought I should mention it, I opened port 6812 in the Windows Firewall. This involved going to the Control Panel, opening Windows Firewall, clicking the Exceptions tab, then the Add Port button. I named the new port Gametable and had it open port 6812. Maybe that port was already open, maybe not, but it definitely is now.

Next, I had to mess with some settings on my router. This may not apply to most of you, but in my case I had two router issues to deal with. First, since there are multiple devices on this IP address (including my computer and Barbara’s computer), I had to make sure that anyone connecting to this IP address would be routed to my computer. Second, I needed to figure out how to have Barbara’s computer connect to mine, since they have the same external IP address.

I’ll take the second issue first, since it helped me address the first one. It turns out that my computer has both an external IP address and an internal IP address. The external IP address is the one other computers on the internet would use to connect to me, while the internal IP address is what the router assigns to my particular computer among the devices in the house. To get the internal IP address, I went to the Run menu in Windows and typed cmd to bring up a command prompt (ah, the good old days of DOS – such memories). From that prompt, I typed ipconfig. This brought up information showing me, among other things, my internal IP address.

The steps I used to get to my internal IP address - click to enlarge

Now that I know my internal IP address (192.168.1.5), I could enter this into Barbara’s Gametable program to connect to my computer – success!

In order to get computers on the internet to connect to my computer, I needed to set things up so that anyone connecting to my external IP address would be forwarded to my computer and not Barbara’s, which meant that I needed to change some router settings. To get to the router settings, I went to 192.168.1.1 in my browser and entered my login and password information for the router (I’m very glad that I remembered to write this down when I set up the router!). From the main router settings menu, I clicked on “Port Forwarding / Port Triggering.” On the next screen, I clicked Add Custom Service, then set things up for Gametable with the appropriate port (6812) and internal IP address to forward that port to (192.168.1.5). Voila!

This might sound like a lot of effort, but honestly, once I knew what I needed to do it hardly took any time at all. And the upshot is that now I can use Gametable to host games!

Since it looks like I’ll be abandoning OpenRPG before I even got a chance to really use it (which, I’ll admit, makes me feel a little bit sad somehow), I’ll shift to talking more about Gametable in future posts. It’s extremely user friendly, so I doubt if I’ll need as much detail on the basics as I provided for OpenRPG. My friend Zach, who helped me with the networking issues, got a chance to try out Gametable and seemed impressed. I think this is going to be a winner!

Program promiscuity

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Michael the OnlineDM

No sooner did I finish my first detailed post about OpenRPG than I discovered some more awesome, free tools for playing D&D online. I’m still not sure which tools I plan to use yet, but I thought I would share some information about what I’ve found. I should point out that I discovered these tools by browsing some blogs at the amazing RPG Bloggers site. If I end up making this blog a long-term project, I’d definitely like to be a member of that group!

The first new program I discovered is Gametable. This program basically has the map and dice roller tools of OpenRPG, except better. With OpenRPG, as far as I’ve been able to tell, you have to do all of your map prep work before you play – you have to have the background images properly formatted with all of your grid lines in place, with the file loaded onto a public web site, etc.

Gametable goes in another, much more flexible direction. When you open up Gametable, the map takes up most of the screen, and by default it looks like the tan-colored battle maps that those of us who play D&D with pen and paper are used to (though you can change the color). The coolest part is that you can easily draw maps on the fly, just as you would around a real table. The program has basic tools for drawing lines and bringing in walls, plus pre-made areas that you can just drag onto the board and run with. It has pre-made battle features like rocks and trees and pits that you can just drag onto the screen, and they look great. It also comes pre-loaded with a bunch of “pogs” or minis of various sizes. Super-simple, with no setup required. You could have your players log in and start with a blank board, and then you could draw the battle map on the fly, just as you would on a real battle mat. Outstanding!

An example Gametable session, which took maybe 5 minutes to assemble

I’ve discovered only one quibble with Gametable so far – connecting to other players has been harder for me than it was with OpenRPG. With OpenRPG, you browse for available servers (of which there are plenty), create a room for your game, and then have your players go to that same room from their computers. With Gametable, you’re hosting the game directly on your computer, which means that other players have to enter your IP address to connect. This might be easy in most cases, but my only test computer is also here in the house, running off the same router – which means it has the same IP address. I haven’t been able to connect two computers yet – but I won’t give up! This program just looks so good and seems so easy to use, I can’t give up on it without giving it a good chance.

The second amazing program I discovered is not actually a program to PLAY D&D online, but it’s a fantastic program for a DM to build their game and run it in the background. It’s called Masterplan. While OpenRPG and Gametable are flexible map programs for playing any RPG, Masterplan is a Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition tool, period. First off, the game is fully integrated with other official Wizards of the Coast D&D tools. When you open it up for the first time, it asks you if you have a D&D Insider (D&DI) subscription (I’m glad that I do!), and if you log in to D&DI it will then download all of the monsters and items that are in the D&D Compendium. For me, that was a little over 9,600 items, which took about 20 minutes to download. Unlike OpenRPG or Gametable, Masterplan comes with a fantastic, detailed user manual with tons of screenshots and examples. It also has some pre-made adventures, which are great for seeing the program in action.

Basically, Masterplan lets you plan adventures. It centers around a flowchart view of plot points for your campaign. For instance, you might start with a simple “you all meet in a tavern” plot point, which could lead to either of two different paths depending on what the characters decide to do. The next step on each path might be a combat encounter. Masterplan lets you build the map for that encounter using slick Dungeon Tiles that look very cool. It lets you add whatever enemies you think make sense – or it can help you autobuild a set of enemies to provide whatever level of challenge you want, given the party that will be playing it. You can import your players’ character files straight out of Character Builder so that Masterplan will know what level the party is, what powers they have, their defenses, their hit points, etc. Every monster in any published D&D 4e book is here, with easy additions of your custom monsters from Adventure Tools. You can run the battle within the program, rolling initiative, keeping track of hit points, even tracking ongoing conditions with prompts for end of turn saves. I’m absolutely blown away.

A Masterplan screen shot, with a battle running in the foreground and the rest of the features in the background

So, what will I be using? Well, I haven’t decided yet. I’m almost certain that I’ll be using Masterplan at some point, certainly whenever I start making my own adventures. Since I’m running pre-published adventures for now, though, I don’t know that I want to go to the trouble of recreating them within Masterplan. However, I do think it’s possible that I might make some maps in Masterplan (which, as I said, look awesome) and resize them to a 60-pixel grid to serve as a background within OpenRPG. If my games end up more free-form, though, I think I’ll have to go with Gametable (assuming I can solve the connectivity issues) just so I can draw maps on the fly.

What do you think? Do you have any experience with any of these programs? I’d love to get advice from someone who has used them!

Online Dungeon Master

Running D&D games with technology; Designing board and card games

Tag Archives: Gametable

Improvisation is important

My artistic skills are developing!

Private maps in Gametable

Second gaming session – the Irontooth battle

First actual online gaming session – it rocks!

First map in Gametable – game on!

Success with networking

Program promiscuity

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: