As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve gotten into D&D for the first time with a group of frineds. With casual gaming sessions where the game is more of a story than an actual tabletop game, we hadn’t used much in the way of maps or tabletop grids to plan out how we were navigating our adventure.
However, when one of the other players ran the game for a session, he produced a series of maps that we used to plot and plan our battle strategy. This was a good aid to supliment our adventure, as he could talk about the architecture in detail and have a way to keep it relevant to the game.
I was looking at ways that we could play games that used a map that wouldn’t take much time to set up, or would be possible to do from a distance. I stumbled upon maptool, which seems like the perfect tool for playing D&D over the Internet.
Basically, with maptool, you make a map, drop some tokens onto the field, and use it like a virtual whiteboard. It’s pretty straightforward and very easy to do. I was able to make a map representing one of our adventures in a few hours learning the ropes as I went.I just grabbed some art from rpgmapshare and followed the tutorials.
The cool thing is that the DM can control what the other players sees using layers, so as the players move their tokens down a path, the DM could spring an ambush by revealing some monster tokens that had been hiding behind trees. You can set visibility, so if your characters aren’t looking in the right direction, they won’t be able to see everything. There are all sorts of tools that make the game authentic.With the other tools included, you can roll dice, manage encounters, and do all the other mechanical things required to run a game of D&D over the Internet.
If we were going to play, we’d probably connect to maptool, run Skype or Ventrillo for voice chat, then play by moving tokens around in maptool. There are macros built in to automate all the major feats we’d be required to do.
This would pale to any live game session where we all meet, but this has the advantage of being availble to people that live anywhere in the world. There was already talk of inviting someone to play in our game that lives somewhere else. It would also be easy to keep up with our gaming session if someone moved. I think it’s a tad more work when someone is used to just talking about what happens, but if we ever shift to D&D 4.0 edition rules, where tactical placement of units is built into the game more, it might be important to have as a backup.
