In the last session, there was a very long combat, 41 turns, involving 3 PCs, 2 NPC allies, and as I recall 10 NPC enemies. The whole thing took about 4 hours to resolve, and also included limited vision (night combat), which in turn meant some calls of “Where did I hear that sound?” followed by some spacebar beaconing on the map. So I guesstimate that was a total of about 700 or so actions, or about 10 actions per hour, including breaks, questions, defense rolls, damage calculations, a couple of rules lookups, descriptive speech, etc. That’s an average of just under 30 seconds per action. Compared to some reports I’ve heard of of anywhere from roughly seven minutes per action or 2.5 hours to get to round 8 on MapTool in GURPS (to be fair, text-only games without voice chat there), 30 seconds per action seems blazing fast.
And it still feels slow.
Read the rest of this entry »
I think MapTool is a great tool and has worked out pretty well, but at the same time I have a significant problem with it: it gets in the way of being a GM. At least, it gets in my way. Part of this is my own fault as I can’t play with a tool without trying to fiddle with it to make it a little bit better, part of it is just unfamiliarity (despite the fact that I’ve logged a lot of hours in the kit), and part of it is just that it’s an additional barrier between me and the players. None of this is really MapTool’s fault, well, not most of it anyway.
Read the rest of this entry »
The problem with using MapTool is that it’s easy to see how much stuff you can get done in it, so you start thinking in terms of BIG structures and macros in order to make things smoother for the players. This is one of the problems I had in Neverwinter Nights; it was a lot of times more fun to hammer out code to make something happen that shouldn’t (given the toolset) than to write or GM the game. Especially GM the game in that case.
Read the rest of this entry »
The second, or rather third, session using Maptool and Skype went a bit smoother thanks to some on-the-fly fixes in macros and better familiarity with the system. On the other hand, a 20 man combat lasting 14 rounds (seconds) took about two hours to run. Granted it was a lot more combatants than in the second session, but it still felt glacially slow, to me and the players. I am making some notes on improvements to the framework to help speed things along.
Read the rest of this entry »
This went surprisingly well I thought, given play over TCP/IP and using an unfamiliar tool. We did run some quick trials before game time to show those unfamiliar with MapTool how it worked with the macros that we had set up, and since MapTool was only really used for die rolling and tactical play, we did not rely on it a lot for general gameplay, which consisted mostly of the party talking and reveling in their non-heroicness. The biggest technical problem we had, amazingly, was Wendy’s Skype dropping a few times, and the biggest non-technical problem in my view was that it took almost twice as long to do the writeups than it did to actually run the session.
Read the rest of this entry »
Award systems are tough in RPGs. You have two basic varieties:
- You get XP for accomplishing certain things like killing stuff, getting rich, blowing up the enemy ship, etc., to the exclusion of everything else.
- You get an arbitrary reward from the GM basic on ephemeral concepts like “good roleplaying.”
The second system is what is outlined for the GURPS system, and it’s touted as being better because it encouraged roleplaying as opposed to munchkin killing machines. Unfortunately it’s also totally unfair.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Cago campaign was an old GURPS campaign (originally in 3rd Edition) I ran in NJ about fifteen years ago or so. The players and I were a tiny core of crazy RPGers who spent an inordinate amount of time moaning about poor game systems, making fun of each others’ boneheaded decisions, retelling old funny RPG stories ad nauseum, and generally feeling pretty arrogant about how much other players sucked. To be fair though, we did meet a lot of truly horrible players throughout the years. Due to this, we pretty much didn’t play with many other people, were very picky about the systems we used, and naturally ran out of people to play with as soon as we got busy and moved away from NJ (except for Shad, who is serving out some sort of cruel sentence for a heinous crime by continuing to live there).
Read the rest of this entry »