Even More Roll20

Doug and I messed around on Roll20 this morning, trying things out.

Move To Front - I've gotten a lot better with swapping around characters in the inevitable dogpile. But still, it's hard to see who is there.

Standing, Kneeling, Prone - I need to make some statuses that show the posture of standing folks, and have a way to quickly swap a one-hex standing icon for a two-hex prone icon (which we could mark face up or face down.)

Hex Facing - It's hard to see where folks are facing. One idea Doug said he stole from someone else was color-coded facing. Green for front hexsides, yellow for side (-2 defenses), and red for back (no defenses.)

Copying Monsters - Is there an easy way to copy monsters and then change the token? I can't seem to. I dropped down two identical monsters (same stats) but I wanted to then give them different tokens. How, I don't know yet. Seems like the "easy" way is to put down a new token, and then cut-and-paste details, then add in the various statuses, auras, HP, etc. Which isn't really faster to me.

Turn Order - I'd love it if I could click on someone in the turn order, and then, if it's a piece I control, that I select the figure. I'd also like to right-click on a piece I control in the turn order, than I get the right-click character details. In a messy fight, it would be nice to have a combined turn order and pick list.

I'd throw Roll20 some money if it was more natively GURPS supportive, but I can't justify spending money to then spend time making it more GURPS supportive. My gaming budget - in money and time - simply isn't that big. Heh.

And not really Roll20 related, but worth saying:

Stupid Ideas Are Worth Investigating - Doug and I are trying a rules variation out that we sort of like and are trying to turn into publishable material. One thing that happened with it, though, was an odd breakpoint issue. I put out what seemed like a bad idea - rescaling everything to make that breakpoint go away. Basically, what if we did this whole thing differently? Turns out that it might not be a bad way to go, and in fact smooth out other issues with this idea we're having.

Which just goes to show that, there are no truly stupid questions if they're on-topic. It's worth investigating even what seems at first blush to be a bad way to go in a game. Try it, look into it, and if it's truly bad, it will turn out badly. But it might emerge as a better choice, or at least reinforce the knowledge that the way you took was really a better choice.

Live Playtest Beats All - Doug and I would never, never, never have caught so many errors, odd behaviors, issues, places for improvement, and places to add cool stuff without trying this all out "face to face" in actual play. A couple hours on Skype or Google Hangouts with an open combat map in front of us vastly improved our "product" in less time than a hundred emails would have taken.