Yesterday and today, I had a little bit of time.
I spent it carefully tracing walls on the uploaded map for our game, and fixing the sloppy walls I put up myself earlier. It's going well. I don't need to switch maps if I have the whole dungeon down. I may need to start putting down foes in their rooms ahead of time, so I can just move them around as needed.
I have to clean up a few tokens for next time, too. GCA4 and Foundry don't talk to each other perfectly, and I'm not GCA5-fluent enough to swap over to that. My players use a mix of GCA and GCS so we're not even all on the same page.
Overall it's going a little better as I get more skilled with it. But I still need a more solid system for uploading and building maps. Vic has some ideas, and a program, that I can look in to. Anything that will make mapping easier would be good.
One note on playing on a VTT - player maps are perfect. Not "close," but perfect. They can see the map and easily copy it down. That's not a bad thing, but it's a very new thing to a game based on an old principle of Theater of the Mind description and close-enough-is-good-enough mapping. It's something I need to get used to.
You could try doing the maps in separate chunks? Then use TotM when they aren't in combat and swap in the "encounter area' when it's needed?
ReplyDeleteToo bad VTT doesn't handle map drawing on the fly very well. What I used to do (when drawing maps in on erasable hex maps) was roll against the PC's map-making skill and then if they did poorly draw the map wrong so it wasn't reflective of 'reality'. And since they only ever had "small battle area' chunks (never the whole map or even large swathes at once), they were never exactly sure if their maps were accurate or not.
Of course if you're putting all of Felltower into the VTT... well, that's not as helpful to you.
I'm considering doing that, if there is some way to make it work out. But I think there is a bit of an idea - just don't use the map until battle starts, and then put the PCs where battle is. Don't let them just move tokens around lighting up the map and copying it down as they go . . . do that TotM and then only bust out the sections I need for battle purposes.
Delete