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.
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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.
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I’m so sick of this damn melee macro that I’m not even going to explain it. Suffice to say that I’m really missing the days of rolling dice on a table.
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Quick macro based on the add new weapon macro. Shields will be classified in the weapon list as they are held in the hand and can be used to bash. They get another property, “DB,” which will be used to check for Block defense options during defense macros (if the left hand weapon doesn’t have a DB, the character can’t block). Also, I added the skill “Shield (Buckler)” to the SkillsMelee array, and added the “none” option under the parry dropdown list, which is good since I forgot there are other melee weapons that can’t parry.
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I made some modifications to the new weapon macro, based on the idea that labeling different attacks Attack1, Attack2, etc. is really stupid. This was mostly so I could then write clean code for adding new attack types to the weapon.
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Currently working on a bit of the framework to list available weapons and stats in MapTool so they can be called, bit by bit, onto characters as needed. This is one of the most annoying of the MT tasks I want to accomplish in the next couple of weeks, but should lay the groundwork for future improvements to help make combat faster and easier, as well as improving my understanding of MapTool, thus taking care of two glaring personal deficiencies at once.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Spent a fair bit of the day mucking about with MapTool. Thanks to Randy’s better-than-mine code skills and knizia.fan’s skills at this tutorial, I had enough code to steal study and customize to finish a fairly complicated macro for determining damage effects in MapTool for GURPS. I haven’t plugged in any sort of crippling calculations yet, and not sure if I want to (GURPS is so complicated that it doesn’t make sense to try and automate every function, even if it wasn’t against the strange TOS at Steve Jackson games regarding play aids). I’m planning on being light and fast enough initially so that criplling can be figured out on the fly, and indicated with a simple state graphic if we need to.
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