Category Archives: Advice/Tools

Disease – Delirium Fever

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Edit: Thanks to a suggestion from Kingreaper on EN World, I’ve edited the Intermediate State so that hit points can go up to the PC’s surge value rather than being capped at 1.

Two areas where I wish there were more official Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition content are traps and diseases. To help remedy that, I’m sharing a disease that I put together for my home game: Delirium Fever.

Delirium Fever

  • Description: The patient is afflicted with a high fever accompanied by profuse sweating and weakness. As the disease progresses, the patient may fall into unconsciousness with periodic bouts of delirious wakefulness, babbling incoherently. Left untreated, Delirium Fever can be fatal.
  • Level: 6
  • Exposure: Via the venom of giant spiders (either at range via spitting, in melee via a bite, or after a hit from a weapon with spider venom on it)
  • Progression: Saving throw to avoid infection after initial exposure. Endurance DC16 to maintain, Endurance DC 21 to improve.
  • Initial state: The patient is weakened, and their hit points cannot go above their bloodied value (temporary hit points can still be gained as normal).  Improvement from this state represents the disease being cured.
  • Intermediate state: The patient is weakened and slowed, and their hit points cannot go above their healing surge value.
  • Advanced state: The patient is unconscious, with occasional bouts of waking delirium.
  • Final state: The patient dies.

In my game, the party encountered this disease when they ran into some duergar.  The duergar use giant spiders as mounts, and the venom of these spiders exposes the target of the attack to delirium fever (based on a secondary attack against fortitude). The party came upon a mining camp where some NPC dwarves had been attacked underground by duergar. The survivors came down with delirium fever.  The PCs went underground to rescue a dwarf prisoner and to try to get some spider venom in order to craft an antidote to the disease. In the process, one of the PCs ended up contracting the disease after a number of spider bites.

I was pretty happy with the role of the disease in my game, so feel free to use it in yours!

Bonus points – reward your players for awesomeness

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I like it when players in my D&D games do awesome things. Being an economist by training, I know that incentives matter. Therefore, if I want my players to do more awesome things in our games, I should give them an incentive to do so.

Enter Bonus Points.

Whenever a player in one of my games does something that, in my opinion, is awesome, I will give them a bonus point. They can save these points over time or spend them as they get them.

The rules for bonus points are simple (and open to DM reinterpretation on the fly). A player can spend a bonus point at any time (no action required) to add one to a die they’ve just rolled or to subtract one from a die that was just rolled against them.  Common uses of bonus points include:

  • Turning a miss into a hit
  • Turning a 19 on the die into a critical hit
  • Turning a 19 on a death save into the spending of a healing surge
  • Turning a failed skill check into a success
  • Making an attack that just hit you miss instead

If a player wants to do something that would stretch the rules a little too much, I might also allow them to spend a bonus point to make it work.

For my online game, bonus points are just another property on the PC’s token.  Players have a button on their tokens to spend bonus points, and I manually add them as needed.

For my in-person games, I created tokens following NewbieDM’s method (even using his bonus point images) of gluing printed one-inch circles of photo paper onto metal fender washers.

So, what earns a player a bonus point?  Whatever I feel deserves an extra reward.  Some situations in which I’ve given out bonus points include:

  • A party of new players completing a quest (just to make them feel good about their accomplishment and to get some point tokens in their hands)
  • A PC approaching a room full of archers behind arrow slits by teleporting through the slits into their midst, all by his lonesome
  • A PC avoiding the bottleneck of climbing down the narrow stairs into the bandits’ hideout by doing a Dungeoneering check to look for loose floorboards and then hacking a new entrance to the underground lair through the floor of the room above
  • A PC deciding to play Robin Hood when confronted with an NPC who was price-gouging poor refugees, thus derailing the adventure for a while as I put together an impromptu map of the NPC’s home with guards and a treasure chamber (this escapade was worth two bonus points!)
  • A PC surrounded by bad guys telling the wizard in the party to go ahead and shoot the whole area – he’d be fine! – at which point the wizard promptly critted that PC while missing all of the enemies

Basically, whenever my players do something cool that breaks from the standard mold of, “Let’s see, my optimal tactical position is here so that I can use this particular power and try to push the bad guy into a flank…” I want to reward them.  Creative behavior, in or out of combat, makes the game more fun for everybody.

I’ve started doing this in my Living Forgotten Realms games, too, now that the Rewards Cards are gone (and the Fortune Cards aren’t out yet).  It’s a little extra something for creative thinking.  So simple, and yet it really improves the fun at the table.

Bonus points are a house rule I highly recommend.  I know I’m not the first person to use them, but I don’t care – they rock!

Creating D&D converts

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Ah, the Christmas season.  That magical time of year when friends and family gather together and give the D&D fans in their lives the chance to talk about what a fun game this is and to turn them into brand-new gamers.

My wife’s brother and his family are staying with us for two weeks over the holidays.  My wife and I talked about D&D several times in the first few days of their visit, and they were interested in hearing more.

I received the Castle Ravenloft board game for Christmas, and my brother-in-law and I played it a couple of times .  Castle Ravenloft is a pretty good introduction to the concepts of D&D 4th Edition:

  • You have a standard and move action on your turn, with the option to turn the standard into a second move
  • You roll a d20, adding a modifier and comparing it to an armor class
  • There are D&D classes with the appropriate roles and flavors
  • There are D&D monsters with reasonable approximations of their feels

My sister-in-law joined in a five-player Castle Ravenloft game on the evening of Christmas Day, and while she was a little overwhelmed, she seemed to enjoy it.

So, the day after Christmas I showed them the online Character Builder (figuring that Essentials characters would be better for beginners) and helped them roll up their very first RPG characters.  My brother-in-law went with an elf hunter ranger named Homer, while my sister-in-law created a half-elf warpriest named Stasi.  My wife rolled up the sister of her beloved swordmage (another swordmage named Sora), and everyone was anxious to try out their new toys.

Sunday evening, the day after Christmas, we all sat down at the gaming table to really introduce my family to D&D.  I gave my in-laws a choice of three different low-level Living Forgotten Realms that I had prepared on the computer (using MapTool and my projector setup to run the game), and they chose to play a Luruar adventure in which they would be helping people at a magical college shore up some problems underground (LURU 2-3 Forgotten Crypts, Hidden Dangers, which I’ll be running at my friendly local game store this evening).  While my wife finished putting her character together, I ran my in-laws through a simple encounter with some orc minions, just so they got a feel for how battle works.

And then we were off!  We ran through the entire LFR adventure, with me scaling it down for 3 PCs on the fly.  Apparently I did a lousy job with the scaling, as I managed to kill off my brother-in-law’s character in the first battle (only the second time I’ve killed a PC).  All three of the bad guys in the battle had the ability to deal ongoing damage, and all three players had a horrible time with their saving throws.

The party decided that they wanted to take the dead character out of the catacombs and get him resurrected (rather than either give up or create a new character).  I introduced a cleric at the magical college who would resurrect him in exchange for a promise that they would work off the debt for the resurrection later.  The living PCs accepted the deal, but used some good diplomacy to persuade the cleric to give them a discount because the dead PC was working for the same organization as the cleric.  Good stuff!

Back into the catacombs, and the party made it through a skill challenge to get to the lair of the big bad guy.  They realized that the room was trapped, and they killed off the monster from the first battle that had caused them so much trouble before fleeing (a Kobold Rat Master, quickly renamed Rat Bastard).  They then retreated and took a short rest before coming back for the last two bad guys.  I had those characters move to a different part of the catacombs, and I’m glad I did – the original room for the final fight is pretty boring for the PCs if the trap is in effect.

They had such a good time on Sunday, that they asked what was next for the party on Monday!  They made it clear that they were really interested in the setting and wanted to do some more adventuring there, so I took a half day off work on Monday to whip up a brand-new adventure for them, which we ran Monday night.

This new adventure was a much better balance for the three-PC party.  They fought zombies, tracked some wraiths, bypassed a skeletal dragon (though they were sorely tempted to fight it), chased some skeletons through a series of rooms, and ultimately came to the crypt of a ghost who was using some portals to channel necrotic energy and bring more wisp wraiths into the world.  I’m quite proud of this encounter – it worked out even better than I had hoped.  I’ll write about it in more detail sometime – maybe I’ll write up the whole adventure as a PDF.

Anyway, I’ve created two new D&D players!  Now the trick will be to figure out how to keep their gamer fires burning.  We’ll probably play a little Gamma World before they head home, and maybe find time for one more D&D adventure (though I won’t have time to write a whole new one from scratch).  Maybe we’ll play using MapTool after they go home – who knows?  It’s been a fun experience so far, and I hope we get to play more in the future.

My players are smarter than I am – lucky me!

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As a relatively new dungeon master, I take the approach that I still have much to learn.  This education can even come at the hands of my players.

Now, I’m not talking about rules knowledge or information about D&D canon – I might have some gaps there, but those are no big deal.  I’m talking about knowledge of what makes an adventure fun.  When I get a great idea from my players, I’m proud to say that I quash my ego and run with the idea (or I try to).

This came up most recently on Saturday, when I was running my in-person campaign through my home brew world.  The adventurers are currently exploring an underground complex that they’ve learned is populated with duergar.  I’m actually taking the Second Edition module “The Gates of Firestorm Peak” as a source of inspiration here.

The first time the party encountered the duergar, it was in a guard room.  The room had a 20-foot ceiling and was about 30 feet square.  Running right across the middle of the chamber was a 10-foot wall made of rocks held together with some kind of mortar, and liberally spiked with shards of glass, pointy sticks, etc.  It could be climbed over without cutting one’s self to ribbons, though it wouldn’t be easy.  There was also a door hidden in the wall, though the latch was trapped.

The party found the door but not the trap, and combat began when our monk tried to open the door and found his hand nearly taken off by a bear trap.  At this point, the four duergar guards on the far side of the wall Enlarged themselves to become 12 feet tall (something that I gather was much more common in 2nd Edition than 4e, but I ran with it).  Now they could swing their warhammers or toss their throwing hammers over the wall.

In the first round of combat, the PCs threw some ranged attacks at the duergar while the two melee characters positioned themselves closer to the wall, perhaps in an attempt to try a climb or jump or another shot at the door in the next round.  One of my players said something interesting at the end of this round:

“Man, I hope they don’t push the wall over on us.”

Hmm… they weren’t going to, but only because I hadn’t thought of it before!  But now that I had three gigantic dark dwarves lined up along the non-spiky side of the wall, ready to take their turn… heave!

I had the duergar make some strength checks to push on the wall, which I was glad I had described as being somewhat makeshift.  No problem – over it goes!  I had the debris make attacks against the two PCs who were near the wall, going against Reflex (they could try to dodge out of the way), and I hit both of them.  I decided that this should deal some pretty significant damage (I believe I went with 3d6+7 for these 6th-level characters) and knock the PCs prone.  It also created a zone of difficult terrain where the wall fell.

I wrestled a bit with whether to tell the players that I was doing this on the fly thanks to their suggestion but ultimately decided not to bother.  On the one hand, they might have gotten a good feeling from having come up with a creative idea that I used.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want them to hold back from sharing this kind of idea in the future!  So, I let them believe that this was all part of my grand plan.  Of course, if they read this post that illusion is gone, but I’ll live. 🙂

What do you think? Do you ever incorporate your players’ ideas for what terrible things might befall them on the fly?  If so, do you credit them for thinking of it, or act like it was all part of the plan?

MapTool – Stupidly complex multi-attack macro

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I haven’t posted any MapTool macros in a while, but I just finished writing one that ended up being so stupidly complex that I just had to share it with the world.

First a disclaimer: Yes, I am aware that there are wonderful MapTool frameworks out there that will help automate everything and make it so that I barely need to touch any macros.  I write my own macros just for the fun of it because I’m nerdy like that.  I share them here on my blog because I know there are some other nerdy people out there who might be able to use some of my learnings in their own macros.

Okay, here’s the situation.  There’s a tiefling wizard coming up in a battle for my Friday night War of the Burning Sky campaign.  It’s not a big boss or anything like that, just an ordinary bad guy.  This creature has several different attack powers, as you might expect with a wizard.  The one particular attack power that I’m about to show you is called Dancing Lightning

  • Dancing Lightning involves three attacks (separate attack rolls, separate damage rolls) against three different creatures.
  • This is a recharge power, recharging on a 6.
  • As a tiefling, the creature gets a +1 bonus to attack rolls against bloodied targets.
  • The wizard has a magic staff with a daily power that she can use whenever she uses Dancing Lightning.  If she uses the daily, she deals some bonus damage to creatures in a close blast 3 (which might be some of the same creatures targeted by the attack, or it might not).

Now, I could handle this with separate macros to track just the recharging or just the daily power, and I could decide not to worry about the +1 to attack rolls against bloodied targets.  But instead I decided to go all-in and make this one macro handle everything.

First, the recharge bit:

[h: RechargeTarget=6]
[h: RechargeRoll=d6]
[if(R1!=1), CODE:
 {[if(RechargeRoll<RechargeTarget), CODE:
 {[g: assert(1==0,add("Recharge roll = ", RechargeRoll, ". The power fails to recharge."),0)]
 };{}]
 };{[setProperty("R1",0)]}
]

This is my standard recharge code.  It sets the target number for recharging at 6.  It rolls a d6 and stores the result as RechargeRoll.  It then checks a property on the token called R1 (which is equal to 1 when the battle begins and is set to zero after the power has been used).  If R1 is not equal to 1 (that is, it’s zero because the power has already been used at least once), then the macro checks to see if the recharge roll was at least 6.  If not, it uses the ASSERT function to give an error message (no recharge) and the macro ends.  If the recharge roll is 6, then the macro moves on.  Finally, if R1 was equal to 1 (that is, if the power hadn’t been used yet this battle), the macro sets it to zero so that it won’t work next time unless it recharges.

Next, the standard attack macro setup stuff:

[h: AttackName="Dancing Lightning"]
[h: AttackBonus=14]
[h: Defense="Reflex"]
[h: NumDice=2]
[h: DamageDie=6]
[h: DamageBonus=5]
[h: DamageString="lightning damage."]
<b>[AttackName]</b><br>

Here I set up the name of the attack to be displayed, the attack bonus, the defense that is being attacked, the number of damage dice I’m going to roll, the size of the damage die, the number I’m adding to the damage dice and the text that I want to display after the damage number (in this case, “lightning damage”).  The last line displays the name of the attack in the chat window in bold type and then inserts a line break.  Simple stuff.  I only bother using these variables because for most attacks I just set these things at the top of my code and then I’m done.

Now we get into the stuff for the first actual attack and damage roll:

[h: x=input("FoeBloody|No,Yes|Is the first target bloodied?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
[h: abort(x)]
[h: AttackBonus=if(FoeBloody=="Yes",AttackBonus+1,AttackBonus)]
[h: DamageRoll=roll(NumDice,DamageDie)]
[h: d20roll=d20]
[h: AttackRoll=d20roll+AttackBonus]
[h: MaxDamage=NumDice*DamageDie+DamageBonus]
[h: RegularDamage=DamageRoll+DamageBonus]

The first line above will result in me getting a pop-up dialog box that asks if the first target is bloodied.  The second line will end the macro if I click “Cancel” in that pop-up.  The third line checks to see if I said the first target was bloodied; if so, it adds 1 to the attack bonus (the tiefling ability).After that, the macro does a damage roll (2d6 in this case). It does a d20 roll for the attack, adding the attack bonus and calling it AttackRoll.  It calculates the maximum possible damage (in case of a crit) as well as the regular damage (from the damage roll plus the bonus).  Again, pretty simple.

Next, I display the results of the first attack in the chat window:

Attack 1: [d20roll] + [AttackBonus] = <b>[AttackRoll]</b> versus [Defense]<br>
[if(d20roll==20), CODE:
 {<font color=Red>--CRITICAL HIT--</font><br>
 Hit 1: [NumDice*DamageDie] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[MaxDamage]</b> [DamageString]
 };
 {Hit 1: [DamageRoll] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[RegularDamage]</b> [DamageString]}
]

The first line shows something like: “Attack 1: 7 + 14 = 21 versus Reflex”  Then I check to see if there was a critical hit.  If so, I display the maximum damage (along with a crit message); otherwise, I show the damage that was rolled for this attack.  Again, standard stuff from my regular attack macros.

After this, I repeat those last two sections (starting with the FoeBloody piece) for the second and third attacks (changing the language to “second target,” “Attack 2,” “Hit 2,” and so on).  I put a couple of line breaks in between as well.

Finally, there’s the piece of code to deal with whether I want to use the bonus daily damage in a close blast 3 or not.  Generally I’ll just use it at the first opportunity, of course – this is a recharge 6 power, which means it’s highly unlikely that I’ll get a second chance to use it.  But hey, for the sake of completeness, I wanted the option to be built in to the macro.

[if(E2==1), CODE:
 {[h: x=input("UseDaily|Yes,No|Use the daily close blast 3 power now?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
 [h: abort(x)]
 [if(UseDaily=="Yes"),CODE:
 {[h: E2=0]
 <br><br><i>Quarterstaff of Storms</i>: Each enemy in a close blast 3 takes an additional [d8] lightning and thunder damage.
 }; {}
 ]
 };
 {}
]

This one is very messy to look at, mainly because it uses nested IF statements (an IF within an IF).  It first looks at a property of the wizard token called E2 (this is for her second encounter power – the first is Infernal Wrath).  If E2 equals one, that means that I haven’t already used this daily yet, in which case the code moves on to ask me if I want to use it this time.  It does so with another pop-up dialog box:

Now, if I do choose to use the daily power, the macro sets E2 equal to zero (to show that the power has been used up).  It then inserts two more line breaks, displays the name of the daily power in italics and then says what happens to the enemies in the blast (including the damage roll).  Note that if E2 were equal to zero (meaning that the daily item power had already been used), then the rest of the code is skipped over.

When I run the power, the output in the chat window looks like this:

And the finished macro in all its glory is as follows:

[h: RechargeTarget=6]
[h: RechargeRoll=d6]
[if(R1!=1), CODE:
 {[if(RechargeRoll<RechargeTarget), CODE:
 {[g: assert(1==0,add("Recharge roll = ", RechargeRoll, ". The power fails to recharge."),0)]
 };{}]
 };{[setProperty("R1",0)]}
]

[h: AttackName="Dancing Lightning"]
[h: AttackBonus=14]
[h: Defense="Reflex"]
[h: NumDice=2]
[h: DamageDie=6]
[h: DamageBonus=5]
[h: DamageString="lightning damage."]

<b>[AttackName]</b><br>

[h: x=input("FoeBloody|No,Yes|Is the first target bloodied?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
[h: abort(x)]
[h: AttackBonus=if(FoeBloody=="Yes",AttackBonus+1,AttackBonus)]
[h: DamageRoll=roll(NumDice,DamageDie)]
[h: d20roll=d20]
[h: AttackRoll=d20roll+AttackBonus]
[h: MaxDamage=NumDice*DamageDie+DamageBonus]
[h: RegularDamage=DamageRoll+DamageBonus]

Attack 1: [d20roll] + [AttackBonus] = <b>[AttackRoll]</b> versus [Defense]<br>
[if(d20roll==20), CODE:
 {<font color=Red>--CRITICAL HIT--</font><br>
 Hit 1: [NumDice*DamageDie] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[MaxDamage]</b> [DamageString]
 };
 {Hit 1: [DamageRoll] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[RegularDamage]</b> [DamageString]}
]

[h: "Second Attack"]
[h: x=input("FoeBloody|No,Yes|Is the second target bloodied?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
[h: abort(x)]
[h: AttackBonus=if(FoeBloody=="Yes",AttackBonus+1,AttackBonus)]
[h: DamageRoll=roll(NumDice,DamageDie)]
[h: d20roll=d20]
[h: AttackRoll=d20roll+AttackBonus]
[h: MaxDamage=NumDice*DamageDie+DamageBonus]
[h: RegularDamage=DamageRoll+DamageBonus]
<br><br>
Attack 2: [d20roll] + [AttackBonus] = <b>[AttackRoll]</b> versus [Defense]<br>
[if(d20roll==20), CODE:
 {<font color=Red>--CRITICAL HIT--</font><br>
 Hit 2: [NumDice*DamageDie] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[MaxDamage]</b> [DamageString]
 };
 {Hit 2: [DamageRoll] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[RegularDamage]</b> [DamageString]}
]


[h: "Third Attack"]
[h: x=input("FoeBloody|No,Yes|Is the third target bloodied?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
[h: abort(x)]
[h: AttackBonus=if(FoeBloody=="Yes",AttackBonus+1,AttackBonus)]
[h: DamageRoll=roll(NumDice,DamageDie)]
[h: d20roll=d20]
[h: AttackRoll=d20roll+AttackBonus]
[h: MaxDamage=NumDice*DamageDie+DamageBonus]
[h: RegularDamage=DamageRoll+DamageBonus]
<br><br>
Attack 3: [d20roll] + [AttackBonus] = <b>[AttackRoll]</b> versus [Defense]<br>
[if(d20roll==20), CODE:
 {<font color=Red>--CRITICAL HIT--</font><br>
 Hit 3: [NumDice*DamageDie] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[MaxDamage]</b> [DamageString]
 };
 {Hit 3: [DamageRoll] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[RegularDamage]</b> [DamageString]}
]

[if(E2==1), CODE:
 {[h: x=input("UseDaily|Yes,No|Use the daily close blast 3 power now?|RADIO|VALUE=STRING")]
 [h: abort(x)]
 [if(UseDaily=="Yes"),CODE:
 {[h: E2=0]
 <br><br><i>Quarterstaff of Storms</i>: Each enemy in a close blast 3 takes an additional [d8] lightning and thunder damage.
 }; {}
 ]
 };
 {}
]

Virtual Table – first actual play experience

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As planned, I was able to get a game going this evening on the beta version of the D&D Virtual Table.  I’ll start by saying that we had a fun little adventure, partly thanks to the program and partly in spite of it.

The good stuff

The best part of the evening was that I was able to get a game together almost entirely in a pick-up manner.  One of my regular Friday night MapTool game players was able to show up (thanks, Max!) but the other players were folks who were either browsing the open games or the beta message boards, looking for a game.  So, it’s clear that the Virtual Table does enable something like a pick-up game of D&D, which is pretty cool.

The built-in audio support is a good idea, too.  It’s nice to be able to talk to one another without having to deal with two different program (a la MapTool and Skype).  I’ll have more to say on this later, though.

Using the table was pretty straightforward.  As a shared battle map, the Virtual Table works.  Everyone can see their tokens and everyone else’s tokens and move their own tokens around with no trouble.  If you wanted to just have paper character sheets in front of you and roll physical dice and call out the results, you could do that very easily (though that would be a bit of a wasted opportunity).

There were even some things that I’d say Virtual Table handles a little better than MapTool.  Initiative was easy – click one button to add the party, add each monster, let everyone click the button for their own initiative roll… it all worked smoothly and just the way you would expect it to.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how well shared editing worked.  If a player was editing their token, I could see the edits as they saved them.  I could apparently also edit the token at the same time (though we didn’t experiment too much to see what would happen if we were making conflicting edits).

The not-so-good

We had connection problems in this game.  I was lucky to have one player who has apparently played in a ton of Virtual Table games already, and he was able to clarify the best way to do certain things and help with troubleshooting.  He helped another player who was lagging badly, especially on the audio side, try to figure out the the problem with his connection (he was using a Mac, which apparently is more likely to cause audio problems for some reason).  However, the problem never really got solved and the Mac player had to drop off and rejoin a whole bunch of times.  Even the experienced player started having lag issues by the end (though the other two of the four players had no problems with lag or audio at any point). I don’t know if it’s a server issue or a problem with individual players’ computers (or mine), but it was troublesome.

Setting up player character tokens is a pain in the butt, too.  Each power has to be manually programmed, and it’s not at all intuitive to use.  It’s not customizable, either.  You can program in dice expressions (like 2d6+4) but you can’t have text be displayed after them automatically (such as “fire damage, and ongoing 5 fire damage (save ends).”)  There are kludgy workarounds for this, but they’re a pain.

Manipulating hit points is fairly intuitive, but it requires a lot of mouse clicks. I like being able to click one button for damage, type a number and hit Enter.  It doesn’t work that easily in the Virtual Table.

Adding conditions was even more of a pain.  There are built-in symbols for being Bloodied and Marked, which is a good start.  You can add other conditions by typing them in manually, in which case a little exclamation point will appear over the token, and you can hover over the exclamation point to see what you’ve typed for the condition (slowed, -2 to AC, ongoing damage, whatever).  And to get to this menu, you have to go into the “Adjust hit points” menu.  Ugh.

Another thing: Bloodied is not automatic.  This baffles me, frankly, and I’m sure they’ll correct it eventually.  It’s pretty straightforward to tell if a token is bloodied or not and I think that status should pop right up.

Overall impressions

I had a good time playing tonight, technical difficulties not withstanding.  Virtual Table is in beta and must be treated as such.  I’m sure Wizards of the Coast is watching the feedback as it comes in and will make improvements over time.  Once those improvements start flowing, and especially once the automatic import of characters, monsters and maps is incorporated, Virtual Table is probably going to be a lot of fun.  Until then, though, I have to look at it as a tool under development, not anything that I would use to replace MapTool right now.

Virtual Table issues so far

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Since getting my invitation to the Dungeons and Dragons Virtual Table beta a few days ago, I’ve had a chance to dig into the program a little bit more.  I’ve put together two encounters, and I plan to run one or both of them Monday evening at 7:00 PM Mountain Time (so if anyone is interested, feel free to join the game – look for 4e Home Encounters).  Keeping in mind that I’m spoiled by all of the features of MapTool, there are the issues I’ve discovered.

The obvious limitation at the moment is on the map creation side of things.  The Virtual Table has a few Dungeon Tiles to choose from, and I think it’s pretty clear that they plan to make Dungeon Tiles the main mapping tool in the future.  I won’t be surprised if they charge DMs to get access to new Dungeon Tile sets or something like that, but that might be overly pessimistic on my part.  The current Dungeon Tiles that are available are all for underground maps, and the maps I’m making right now are wilderness maps, so the tiles are useless for me at the moment.  The drawing tools that are available are… well, think “crayon drawing” and you’re on the right track.  I’m sure this will get better eventually, but it’s pretty painful right now.

The panels cannot be resized, which is a pain.  In MapTool, you can resize all of the various windows however you wish.  In Virtual Table you can either have the panel on the right side of the screen displayed or hidden, but not stretched or condensed.  That’s a big pain when you’re trying to select from multiple monsters in that panel that have similar names (Blackwinter Wolf, Blackwinter Wolf Pack Leader… they look very similar when their names are truncated).  Yes, you can get around it by abbreviating names, but it’s still a pain.

There’s no way to manipulate multiple tokens at once.  For instance, I’d like to be able to start with a map where all of the monsters are invisible (note: you CAN make monsters invisible, which is a good feature) and then highlight all of them and make them all visible at once, rather than having to click on each individual token and navigate through its menu to make that one token visible.  If the battlefield has a bunch of minions on it, this is just a pain in the butt.

On a related note, a useful MapTool feature that the Virtual Table currently lacks is a “View as player” option for the DM to look at the map.  When I’m drawing a map and I’ve set certain features to be visible to the players and others to be invisible, it’s VERY helpful to have a way for me to see what the map will look like to the players.  My Friday night players can tell you stories about the times that I’ve talked about the window that the bad guys are jumping out of or the wall of fire that’s coming toward them, only to find out that said window and wall of fire were invisible to my players!  Oops.  Not having a way to check that will make these issues crop up more frequently in the Virtual Table.  This is especially true since making parts of the map visible or invisible doesn’t discernably change anything that I’ve been able to see in the DM view.

Selecting a token is also a little strange.  You can click on a token and move it around and adjust its hit points, but its powers don’t show up on the right side unless you right click on the token and choose “View Token Detail” or select the token name from the monster drop-down.  This is something that should be automatic on a double-click or even a single-click.  Click the token, and its details should appear in the right panel (attacks, notes, etc.).

I like the fact that editing one copy of a token edits all of them.  If I add a new power to a token of which there are already five on the map and then save that change, all five of those tokens have the new power.  However, I believe it is impossible to edit a token’s image once you’ve created it.  I’m sure they’ll change this someday, but it’s a pain for now.

Finally, given that I like to run games in-person using MapTool and my projector, I would REALLY like a full-screen mode that I can run in a second window of the Virtual Table to put onto the table for the players to see.  There’s no full-screen mode right now, and even if there were I’m pretty sure I would need a second D&D Insider subscription in order to be able to run both the DM version of the campaign and the player version at the same time.  Obviously this is not the targeted use for the Virtual Table, but it would still be nice to have.  I’d also need to be able to run it without being connected to the internet (such as at a convention), which is probably never going to happen.

Overall impressions

So far, I’m impressed that there don’t seem to be many bugs per se in the Virtual Table.  Its features are limited, but the features that are in the tool all seem to work properly.  The features are SO limited, though, that playing with this program compared to something like MapTool is just a huge pain.  I’m going to keep playing with it just so I can get to know the tool, but there’s no way that I’m going to switch any of my regular games to it any time soon.

The killer features that the Virtual Table will probably be able to offer eventually are:

  • Automated character and monster importing from DDI tools
  • Full selection of Dungeon Tiles for quick map construction
  • An integrated lobby to find a game

Until these features come about, though, there’s no reason to use Virtual Table over MapTool except for curiosity and a desire to make the program better.  For those of you who don’t have beta invites yet and worry that you’re missing out – you’re not, unless you just like playtesting.  MapTool and its ilk are far better for now.  But the Virtual Table has potential to surpass them someday if those killer features get added.

In the mean time, I will keep playing with the program and posting updates here.  Actually running a game will be enlightening, I’m sure!

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!

100 Posts: My top five favorites

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According to WordPress, this is my 100th post on Being an Online Dungeon Master.  My first post was in late April 2010, and here I am in November 2010 putting up post number 100.

I thought I would use this momentous occasion (tongue firmly in cheek here) to chronicle my own personal top 5 posts of the first 100.

#5: MapTool programming. I’ve picked this post to be emblematic of my many posts that talk about writing macros in MapTool (these are collected on my MapTool Education Central page). I list this mainly because a lot of the traffic my blog gets is from people who are searching for tutorials on writing MapTool macros, and I’m proud of my learning process and the way I’ve documented it on my blog.  If you just want a finished product to play D&D4e in MapTool, you should definitely check out the various frameworks that are out there.  But if you enjoy writing your own macros, as I do, I hope that my blog can help you with the learning process.

#4: Are you in the RPG closet? I like this post because of the discussion it engendered.  Lots of gamers hide their hobby from certain people in their lives (often co-workers), and I’ve been guilty of this myself.  Is it a bad thing?  Well, after this discussion I decided that I wanted to be more open about my hobby and specifically mentioned it to a few people at work.  Nothing horrible has ensued.  I feel better about myself now.

#3: Eat what you kill. I love this story. In this post I tell the tale of the first game of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition that I ever ran as a DM.  It was totally improvised and run at a friend’s wedding all the way across the country with no gaming supplies – and we still had a blast.  That story is what led to the creation of this blog.

#2: Building a better portable projector rig: This is one of my personal favorites, because I’m proud of what it documents.  In this post, I describe how I built the final version of the rig that holds my projector above the game table so that I can run in-person games using MapTool.  I was inspired by a post from Sean Pecor in which he details the construction of his portable projector setup, but after some trial and error and some investigating online, I went in a different direction.  I would love it if other people followed my lead and built a rig like mine and used it to play RPGs with their friends – that would be quite cool, in my opinion.

#1: My online campaign begins. This one isn’t so much about the post itself as the game behind it. I knew when I started this blog that it was entirely possible that I would someday run a game completely online – finding strangers online to play with, running the game, keeping a campaign going.  Amazingly enough, I’ve succeeded on my first try.  The group that gathered online for that first session in July is still playing together in November.  I had to cut the size from eight players down to five, but those five are still playing with me in the same campaign that we started four months and 12 sessions ago.  They’re great people, too – even though we’ve never met in person, I legitimately consider them friends.  And it’s all thanks to playing D&D on the internet!

To those of you who regularly read my blog, I thank you.  I appreciate those rare occasions when you leave comments, and I appreciate those of you with whom I’ve communicated regularly.  I enjoy blogging about this hobby whether anyone reads what I write or not, but it’s always nice to hear that someone is out there.  Thank you!

Virtual Table announcement – My thoughts

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Wizards of the Coast made waves in the online D&D community on Thursday, November 18, when they announced that they are working on a Virtual Table program, the closed beta of which would be starting on November 22. (FAQs are here.)

Obviously, we don’t know very much about the Virtual Table yet, but we’ve been given some information.  The approach is similar to MapTool – two-dimensional, top-down view of the battlemap with circular tokens to represent player characters and monsters.  It’s programmed in Java, but apparently within a web application (for what it’s worth, MapTool is also a Java program).  It will also apparently have integrated voice chat.

This leaves much room for speculation, and there are many unanswered questions.  Let me first say that I see this announcement as good news.  I love MapTool and would be perfetly happy to keep using it forever.  But if WotC brings out a better product, great!  I’d be happy to switch.  I’m already a Dungeons and Dragons Insider (DDI) subscriber, so I obviously approve of their tools.  I also REALLY want to get in on the beta – I’m a great play tester and I think my input would help them improve their product.

Anyway, below are the questions to which we do not yet know the answers, and my thoughts on those questions.

Pricing

What will the Virtual Table cost?  From the announcement, they haven’t figured this out yet.  This means that it’s unlikely to be just a part of a normal DDI subscription.  I see a few possibilities here.

  • Free program to everyone.  Pretty unlikely, unless they think this will drive new subscriptions to DDI or something like that.
  • Free to DDI subscribers.  This could happen, but I think it’s unlikely given the announcement.  If this is the case, I imagine that every player in the game would have to have a DDI subscription, not just the Dungeon Master.  That’s a bit of a bummer; I don’t think all of my online players, for instance, are subscribers.
  • Included as part of a “higher tier” DDI subscription.  The existing DDI could still give you access to everything it does now, but the “Gold Tier” subscription would provide access to the Virtual Table as a DM, the Monster Builder, a potential Campaign Builder, etc.  This seems like a reasonable possibility.
  • Microtransactions.  This one makes me shudder, but I fear that it might be the way they go.  The basic program would be part of DDI (or potentially totally free), but the DM would have to pay for dungeon tiles, map objects, monster tokens, trap tiles, etc.  For players, who knows?  Maybe they would have to buy access to races and classes and even powers individually (or possibly as packs that would give access to a book’s worth of content).  This has some similarities to Magic Online, which has been successful for WotC.  I really don’t like this approach as a customer, though.

This is obviously complete speculation, but my guess is that they’ll make the Virtual Table part of a regular DDI subscription, and it will include tokens for the monsters in the Monster Vault and some basic Dungeon Tiles.  You’ll probably also be able to have character tokens from Heroes of the Fallen Lands.  If you want more than that, they’ll charge you for it.  To be fair, it takes me about 10 minutes to create a new monster token in MapTool (finding the image, making it into a token, setting its properties, programming its attacks and abilities), and if I could pay a dollar and have a pre-made token, that might be worth it to me (my time is worth more than $6 per hour).

Creation of maps

I think it’s pretty clear that the Virtual Table will support Dungeon Tiles (whether you have to pay for the various sets of tiles, of course, is an open question).  So, building maps out of Dungeon Tiles will be the default.  Will there be support for drawing custom maps as in MapTool?  What about importing JPG maps?  What about extra objects to drop on top of Dungeon Tiles?  I have no idea.  If MapTool can handle custom drawing and importing and objects, it seems like it would be a failure for Virtual Table to not be able to do this.  But I won’t be at all surprised if it’s Dungeon Tiles only.

Creation of monsters and PCs

The announcement says that there is currently no integration of Virtual Table with the online Character Builder or the future online Monster Builder (I’m glad that they’ve confirmed that there will be a new Monster Builder – I had assumed as much).  Maybe that integration will never come, but that seems like leaving it out would be completely stupid.  Let’s face it, the big win for Virtual Table over something like MapTool would be easy importing of PC and monster tokens, complete with stats and powers and everything.  I know that some folks have built tools to do this with MapTool frameworks, but having it built-in as part of the program itself would be nice.

The other possibility is that you’ll have to buy PC and monster tokens individually or in packs.  Sigh.

Built-in rules support

MapTool and its ilk generally have no knowledge of rules – they’re just virtual tabletops.  I’m guessing that the Virtual Table will have some kind of rules support built in by default (though to be clear, the announcement does say that you CAN use it with older versions of D&D, just with no built-in support).  This will likely mean that the player can click a button for their attack, click for their targets, and have the effects of the attack be handled automatically (hit or miss, damage, ongoing conditions, etc.).  It could possibly keep track of triggered abilities, reminders for saving throws, and so on.  Again, some frameworks do this for MapTool, but built-in support would be cool.  D&D4e is a complicated game, though, and I think it will be tough to do this right (especially since abilities are so open-ended and interactions with other abilities are nearly infinite).

Customizability

I said above that it would be nice to be able to import monsters from the Monster Builder, but I certainly hope that there’s some support for customization.  What if I want to give a monster an extra ability or tweak some numbers?  This is easy in MapTool, and I think it’s important to keep it easy in Virtual Table.  What about house rules?  I love the Bonus Point mechanic (more on that in a future post) and I intend to keep using it.  If I can’t do that in Virtual Table, that would stink.

This is an area where I could see the Virtual Table starting off with very little support and then having some of that support get added over time.

Finding a game

I think it’s likely that there will ultimately be an “online community” around the Virtual Table, just as there is for Magic Online.  There will probably be a server that the program connects to, with various “rooms” that you can go into to meet your friends and then invite them to the appropriate “table” where your game is being held.  This would also allow for the possibility of pick-up games, which is a cool idea.  I could see this being a place for weekly Encounters games to be available to people who can’t come to their Friendly Local Game Store, for instance, or for big events that take place with multiple tables playing the same adventure at once.  If this works, it could be a big advantage over something like MapTool.

The downside of this approach is that the game runs on the WotC server, and is therefore prone to slowdowns and crashes.  This was definitely a problem with Magic Online when I played during the release of new sets, so I worry that it could be an issue the with Virtual Table, too.  We shall see.

Usability with a projector on a physical table

This one probably doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people who are interested in the Virtual Table, but it matters to me.  I am an all-MapTool DM.  I use it for my weekly online game, my weekly in-person game and my occasional turns as DM at my local store for Living Forgotten Realms.  I really need the functionality to have one instance of the program running on my main laptop screen as the DM and something like a second instance running in full-screen mode on the projector.  Would I need two separate DDI accounts for such a thing?  I have no idea.

This is another area where I could see support not existing at first (because, let’s face it, most of the users don’t care) but perhaps being added later.

Wrapping up

Overall, I’m excited about the idea of the Virtual Table.  It has the potential to be tons of fun and to make it even easier to prepare for and run D&D games using a computer (which would make me happy).  It has the potential to stink horribly, of course, but I like that they’re announcing their beta plans and that they’ll be letting beta testers blog about their experiences.

And if anyone with any connections at Wizards of the Coast is listening: Please send me an invitation to the beta test!  I would be extremely useful to you, I promise. 🙂