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Comment by miah_ | Hacker News Reader

This is neat, but so far every thing like this that we've used for our D&D game has been overkill.

What we do currently:

Take a map from a PDF, load in Paint program (paint.net/photoshop/gimp/whatever), create a layer of BLACK over it. Share the screen. The DM slowly erases BLACK as we move and discover the map.

This way, the players cannot see the map. The DM can see the map. The players get to slowly discover the map.

We do dice rolls and type their output into chat. Our player sheets are player sheets, and we scanned and sent pdf's to DM. We keep group inventory via chat. Everything else is basically overkill, because it requires the DM to redesign maps via some web app and DM's already don't have time.

*edit

to be clear. we've looked into them all. the solution above is what we've now been doing for _years_ on our D&D game. Goddamn erake (our BBG).

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Totally makes sense - different groups are different and whatever works for your group, works.

With Diceright (and Im sure with other VTTs), my goal was to help streamline certain aspects of the game so players can focus on the fun stuff. Mostly around combat and tracking all your character details. So for combat, on Diceright, you can target enemies when you attack and then when you damage them, the player gets an alert with a CTA to apply the damage - so players aren't always asking, wait who did you attack? How much was the damage again?

And on the character sheet side, with a standard character sheet, I've often found myself looking at my AC or one of my stats and not totally remembering how I got to that number. Diceright keeps track of all your bonuses for you and shows you how your stats were calculated.

Those are definitely all things you can do on your own, but it can be nice to have a computer automate them for you.

Again, totally agree that the system you've got works. Just sharing some of my considerations when I went into building this.

The #1 issue I've had with online VTTs is getting the VTT's grid aligned with the map's grid. I tried this with your solution and the problem was the same; it creates a grid and assumes the grid starts at the very edge of the image and goes to the other edge, meaning that if I want those grids to actually line up then I have to crop the image carefully, which is a huge hassle.

Two things that would make this tool easier to use:

1. Let me manually tune the grid in the VTT to the size of the grid in the image, either by selecting one square and having the system adjust the size and position of the grid to that, or by selecting some number of squares and specifying how many squares I selected, which would give a more accurate measurement.

2. Let me draw rooms with a box tool as well as walls with the wall tool, and let those rooms (by default) snap to the grid. Extra points if I can create a box and then add new vertices to drag out a less boxy shape (i.e. to add alcoves, cutouts, etc).

I haven't yet seen a VTT that can handle grids and boxes and rooms automatically, but as soon as someone figures out how to do AI or machine learning-powered map analysis to turn an image of a map into a (mostly? partly?) usable setup (with tweaks to be done afterwards) is going to get a lot of attention.

The big reason we do this is that being a DM, it's REALLY hard to predict what your players are going to do. I used to spend days preparing for a game, only to have the party turn around and wander out of the dungeon 10 minutes into the session, negating all my prep. This way, I can just throw up a map and have them dungeon crawl.

I suppose it make a difference that we are playing Rappan Attuk and not a mainline D&D campaign. There's a lot less dungeon crawling in today's D&D, but Rappan Attuk makes up for all of it with about 600 pages of one dungeon.

I don’t understand how dungeon crawling really felt fun for people. Or random encounters. It just doesn’t seem like a good system for fighting for fun.

I always hear the cursed phrase “I guess I attack?”

And that’s how I know the fight kind of sucks.

The unlimited potential for creativity and collaborative story telling is what sets TTRPGs apart from video games. The mechanical side of D&D combat is fun, but I don't think going all in on encounters is what makes D&D shine. A good combo of game mechanics and creativity is the sweet spot in my opinion.

I often prefer "theater of the mind" over maps as that can be much more open-ended and encourage creativity. Many of the D&D podcasts use "theater of the mind", and they are great (special shout out to naddpod.com)

Nowadays we have multiple genres of combat and mechanics focused video games. (FromSoft games, to CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, to tactics games like Xcom).

In the 70’s, that space was much less populated, so pencil and paper RPGs might have been the best small tactical games people could get their hands on (not everybody wanted to sell their houses for Warhammer miniatures).

some people love and thrill on dice.

D&D is rooted in a dice and miniatures, wargame, light on the scenario building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)

enough people liked it, and enough model,miniature, hobby was around that it held, and became more embellished over time.

The dungeon itself is the game/puzzle/challenge that the players are trying to overcome, either for the default goal of finding its treasure or for a specific goal like find a specific macguffin or other target. In this mode, the players trade their resources to overcome challenges and if you can achieve your goal without fighting or expending resources at all, the more the players are able to achieve. The default is not to fight every monster you encounter but to decide if you need to engage to achieve your goal. Random encounters are a way for the dungeon to fight back against the players and to put a clock on them - the longer they take to explore the dungeon or the less efficient they are in their exploration, the more they will have to deal with encounters that are unlikely to have any treasure at all.

It’s a very complex and interesting game to play. Unfortunately newer editions have gutted this gameplay by removing xp for gold (thus removing the default goal of most dungeons) and removing all of the procedural dungeon crawling rules. The tabletop form is still superior to CRPGs as your ability to interact with the world itself and overcome challenges in interesting ways is only limited by your imagination and ability to creatively apply the tools available to your character.

I like dungeon crawls.

Not every story has to be about emotions and intrigue and a contest of minds. Sometimes you meet a monster and kill it, and loot its corpse and the only thing that's missing is taking a selfie next to it.

Then again Call of Cthulhu is one of my favourite games. I guess it's fun seeing things from the other side of the fence sometimes. But still, it's not all about feelings: you can tell a great story about how you keep running from madness-inducing monsters.

Basically every single tool available can support this, and so much much more.

I wouldn’t suggest you change, but to suggest this method is in any way superior to actually learning the tools and how they work is ridiculous.

And if a DM can’t spare the hour or so to reach parity with this method, that’s gonna be a long term problem for the table.

The cost, and setup time to use any of these tools has been far greater than loading up a image and sharing it.

We've found no VTT tool that can do basic fog of war _without_ loading in a bunch of other features we simply don't need.

Is it superior? I never said that, I said that the feature set was overkill.

A long term problem? Like I said above, our game has been going for _4_ years.

A big problem with these tools is the assumption that your players won't do something you didn't plan for. Which the system I described deals with well. Our DM has many times spent hours planning our game only for us to spend the entire time slot in one location, or deciding to go somewhere else. When that happens, all he has to do is roll out the setting for us to use our imaginations, or to load up a new image and black layer and share it, 5 - 10 minutes tops.

No, a big assumption of using a map is that your players will do something you didn’t plan for. Nothing changes with a tabletop engine.

I suggest checking out https://tarrasque.io/ it might just be exactly what you are looking for.

When I was still playing tabletops a lot, we had the luck of having an extremely creative game leader who was a graffiti artist. So our maps were drawn during the game, which was super awesome!

So do you just play online with strangers? Or do you also play in person?

Ah, that were great times back then...

ive used a large flat screen beneath a glass table. started with ducttape, built a mount later.

same idea starting black and slow reveal, laptop,and 2nd display, with players around the table.

the enviro sounds came later.

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