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Saturday, December 17, 2022

I hate VTT game prep

Let's just say this right now, clearly:

I hate VTT game prep.

- I spent a good 2 1/2 hours of prep time putting in three monsters and one NPC. The NPC ended up with weird issues in the mook generator and I had to bail.

- I used to be able to just drop minis on a map or grab a box with the minis I own. That's not a think with VTT.

- I find all of this a frustrating version of what I used to do in IT, except I get paid $0 for it.

- my HP 8620 printer just died. Well, it's not dead, but it says, "Printer Failure" so I can't even use it as a scanner. None of the troubleshooting works. I need to take pictures of the maps I'll use and then upload them. I'm probably just going to junk the printer and not even try to fix the piece of junk. It was great for a while, and then bad ever since. I'm totally unimpressed with my experience with HP and Dell and Brother printers. So what's left? Nothing I can see.

I'm not fully read for game tomorrow but I'm ready to just stop now. It used to be that having the game in my head was the most important thing, and stuff written down second, and any props a useful way to make game better. Now it's the reverse. The most useless thing is having the game in my head, and everything I write has to be in the correct format for upload and on the VTT or it may as well not be done at all.

I don't miss driving home from game at night and carrying all of my minis, but it's a damn sight better than this.

6 comments:

  1. Somebody wrote a macro for the VTT I use that imports stats and powers based on D&D 4e Character Builder and Monster Builder output. As a result, I have more than 5,000 preprogrammed tokens I can drop at any time from before those tools were discontinued.

    Of course, I have a bunch of homebrew monsters, but I have been programming those over time so they are available when I need them. Fan macros have also made that task easier though.

    Programming PC tokens though? That takes forever.

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  2. FWIW, I've had an Epson WF-7720 for over 4 years now that continues to work beautifully with generic ink. Granted, sometimes I don't use it for a month or two, and then it loses the date/time. It must not have a lithium clock battery and relies on something rechargeable internally. Aside from that quirk, Epsons have been performing well for me for decades. YMMV.

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    1. I may have to look into an Epson. I really need a printer that will scan even when it's out of ink, print in black and white even when it's out of cyan, or yellow, or magenta, and one that isn't to expensive to operate.

      This one was free, but the ink wasn't. I have to see if anyone has an 8620 or other printer that uses 950XL cartridges . . . I have a few partly full or full cartridges I'd sell for shipping & handling cost.

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    2. Like El Rando above, I had an Epson that worked fine for almost 20 years, finally had to ditch it when something finally broke in it and it refused to print anymore.

      Current Epson was a hand-me down from a buddy who'd had it for ten years, it's still working fine and scans regardless of ink capacity (it's one of the ones that reads the ink as empty even if it's still full once it's past a certain "expiration" date though, so I do have to buy new black ink every couple of years to print anything).

      [evileeyore posting as Anon, still fighting Blogger's inability to work with Chrome and Win7)

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    3. I had a Lexmark and a Canon and they have both been great. I went high end (for inkjet, not for laser or dye sub) rather than cheap, so a $300-$400 inkjet with 6 inks, automatic document feeder, automatic duplex for double-sided printing, scanner, fax, and even 11x17 paper support in my current model. These guys hold up really well as long as you use Windows (didn't have much luck using them in Linux). The down side is 6 inks can cost over $100 (even $200) to refill depending on how you get your ink. The Lexmark eventually got replaced because I used it so little that the ink dried in the heads and even after getting new ink the heads couldn't be cleaned by the self-check routine. If you get the $60-$100 no-frills printer it is cheaper than the ink, true, but you open yourself up to problems. Those things are built to be disposable.

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    4. After watching an $1100 printer die about 4 years after it was originally purchased, I'm not sure I'd consider any printer to be less than disposable. The high-end printers at my job spend a good bit of time down, too. I'm halfway to just getting a disposable printer and a quality scanner, because the scanner is what we use the most and I'm sick of printer problems taking out the scanner function!

      That all said, I'll look at Canon and Lexmark. Thanks!

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