> There are so many excellent deck plans out there and floorplans and
> battle maps.... I like that aspect (you give up something not being
> together but the visuals seem to really help us with clarity and with
> engagement).
I tend to not do set-piece encounters very often, so I like to draw out
any maps on the spot.
Nor do I. Traveller (to me) lives as a sandbox. That gives players agency.
That said, I have a trove of wilderness maps and relatively blank grids with some texture and caverns, and ship deckplans and so on. So I can pull something from my library faster than I could draw it.
I've not struck a way of doing that super fast on
a computer, and then load it into a tool that can share it, and even
then I'd still be manually managing fog of war, etc., because it'd take
too long filling in all the LOS blocking stuff, etc.
Fog of war, if it is done right, should be a fast implementation. When I was using IPC, once you set the grid, either you clicked-held-swept the mouse around squares you wanted to reveal (or maybe that was MapTool) or else it was a round brush that you swept around. In any case, it seemed fast to cover up, fast to reveal. I mostly want reveals of what the players see on the map, but not tokens. You can usually see a copse of trees a long way before you see the dude lying down in it...
I'd love to be able to do LOS and fog of war using a PC tool and share
it, but if I get my players to install and setup something that does
this, and/or I pay for such (I note most allow non-paying users to link
to one person's paid subscription, or some similar plan), I'm committing
to a given tool, and I'm also committing to using it, which means a
change in how I do my encounters, more prep time spent on maps and such
(and thus either more time overall or less time on other prep), and so on.
MapTool is free.
There have to be some map presentation systems that would run through a browser or something too.
Roll20 might do. My main issue is all of the platforms seem to be D20-ish and fantasy-ish. They may have open systems, but there is often an arcane way to describe game rules in a file or way to describe a character sheet in a file and that leads to a lot of work to debug a not-formally-supported system. (aka Traveller/2D6)
Most free art assets with these sorts of tools seem fantasy/medieval focus and most token type art assets for sci fi seem very... stylistic of pulp or really strange and impractical looking space fantasy or epic space fantasy vs. sort of work-a-day space stuff (which is how I see a lot of Traveller design aesthetics - not Vargr or other alien stuff, just the human stuff).
One thing I wish some artist would do a cheapie gofundme or kickstarter for would be some VTT sci fi images for different characters and aliens for Traveller. Then anyone, regardless of platform, could have a token set for PCs and baddies. I know we have some 3D models for vargr and aslan and such I've seen on the net - how hard can it be to snapshot a top view of one of them with various bits of gear and in a few poses? Same with the humans. Do that at a size/resolution that can be shrunk to token size easily.
It's something I consider from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have
the right cost/benefit ratio *for us* at this time.
--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=RDHE7iRpfwqlHvVvWBIhpJZsbTiD5NnL