SQART

[Beoric]

Ugh. I'm trying to google an image of a halfling woman with a crossbow to use for a PC token, and all I'm finding are either seriously asymmetrical homely women, or horny AI images with beautiful and creepily childlike faces and mutant arms and hands that merge in bizarre ways with the crossbow.

I think Dall-E has a bit of a loli fetish. Of course, it got that way by scraping the web, so...

 

[squeen]

...all I'm finding are either seriously asymmetrical homely women, or horny AI images with beautiful and creepily childlike faces and mutant arms and hands that merge in bizarre ways with the crossbow.

...and your point is?



I'd try to draw one if I knew what a typical PC token looked like.

 

[Beoric]

...and your point is?

The images have a certain JonBenet Ramsey quality to them. Kinda squicky.

I'd try to draw one if I knew what a typical PC token looked like.

This is what I ended up with. The artist intended it to be a halfling, although it doesn't exactly scream "halfling" to me. But at least it isn't creepy.

Once I select an image, I drop it into a program that can make various borders. I pilfer the web for these things, since they are for my home game. I would link the artist, but I'm having trouble finding the image again (EDIT, I found the artist, here is the link).



Above is a token for a nameless NPC. If they get elevated to named/recurring NPC, they get a headshot instead:



I can use these tokens in the virtual tabletop I use (MapTools). I can then assign properties and macros to the token. So if the NPC is going to make an attack, I click an attack button that is attached to a macro. It then asks who I am attacking, and I click on the victim's token. It rolls the dice, adds appropriate modifiers, and compares to the victim's defences to see if I hit; then it calculates damage, and assigns any conditions to the victim's token.

I haven't run any other VTT, so I don't know how they compare. I do know you can do a lot with MapTools if you are good at coding. I'm not good at coding, but other users share their macros, and I know just enough that I can usually integrate them into the framework I'm using.

This may be old hat to some of the people here, but I'm assuing you (@squeen) don't use a VTT.

 

[squeen]

This may be old hat to some of the people here, but I'm assuing you (@squeen) don't use a VTT.

Never have so it's news to me. Thanks.

Do you then have a laptop or iPad at the table when you play? Or is it all on-line?

 

[Beoric]

Never have so it's news to me. Thanks.

Do you then have a laptop or iPad at the table when you play? Or is it all on-line?

I always have a laptop. I usually play in person, and most of my players also bring laptops (they get a different screen than me). If anyone is there without one, I open a second window and project the player map to my TV, so everyone can see it.

I have important hard copy material on an end table next to me, so I'm not having to look through too many windows to find stuff. But I also cut and paste the dungeon key for each room into an information token for that purpose. The information tokens may or may not be visible to the players, but even when it is visible, it can have hidden DM information on it.

I also make a lot of the objects clickable, so a player can click on, for instance, a chest, and get a brief description of it (so I'm not repeating myself if a player missed something). The chest also has DM information for the stuff that isn't immediately apparent - locks, traps, contents, etc.

The VTT is great for tracking combat - initiative, position of everyone, tracking conditions, etc. And it can really add to the mood during dungeon exploration, when the players can only see this little circle of torchlight in a sea of black. But it is a bit distracting when we are doing things other than battles or movement, so I'm starting to look at software to project a slideshow of D&D/fantasy art.

 

[Beoric]

So, this is what I see (sort of, I had to reduce the resolution to post it here). The initiative order is on the left, the selected PC token's attacks and other actions are on the right. At the bottom is a chat window which can be used for chatting, but also for die rolls and descriptions of the results of attacks etc. that are carried out using the tokens' macros.

Note in the intitiative order there are two semitransparent monsters. This is because I have hidden them because they are not yet visible to the players, and they won't show up in the players' initiative window.

 

[Beoric]

And this is what the players see.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Pretty cool. How long on average would you say it takes to set up a map like the example one you've given? I'm only familiar with Roll20 (from early COVID times), but it was a pretty speedy process using that one (because everything was already built in to the system; no code required).

 

[Beoric]

Pretty cool. How long on average would you say it takes to set up a map like the example one you've given? I'm only familiar with Roll20 (from early COVID times), but it was a pretty speedy process using that one (because everything was already built in to the system; no code required).

That room is simple, and I'm very proficient with the program. I just deleted the vision blocking layer and reapplied it: applying vision blocking to all of those walls took 3 minutes and 48 seconds, including moving a token around the room to test that I had done it correctly, and fixing a couple of things I missed.

Lining up the grid lines on the map image with the virtual grid takes a bit longer, especially if the map grid isn't quite evenly spaced (3e modules are terrible for this). The bits that really take up my time are when I encounter a situation that I don't really have a tool for, and have to build something; as I mentioned, coding is not my strength. Also, "have to build something" really means "I lose control of my perfectionist streak." If it weren't for that it would go a lot faster.

Programming tokens from scratch can take a while, again, because of perfectionism. Somebody wrote a macro that allows you to copy-paste powers from the old compendium and character builder into the macro, which does a decent job of translating that information and programming most of the token's macros for you. It always needs testing, but it saves a lot of time. And back when the 4e compendium was still online, someone else wrote a macro that scraped the monster compendium and programmed tokens for each monster. I can't really remember how it worked, but that is why I have a library of 5000+ monster tokens, pre-built with all of the stats and macros.

I also spend a lot of time searching the web for the exact right creature image, when I could really just use the image "M-1" or something similar.

 

[The1True]

We use top-down figures instead of tokens. Finding art for those things is a total bitch and a time-sink. It was a little easier with the Trove. God I miss the Trove.
I want to switch over to Foundry, but everyone's used to the Roll20 interface and going nowhere now.

 

[Beoric]

Hey @squeen, I know you read Grognardia, so you might have seen this, but if not, there is an art contest in memory of David Trampier and David Sutherland.

 

[squeen]

I did see it on a thread over at K&KA. Coincidentally, I was working on a Tramp-inpsired piece. If it doesn't turn into a mess, I may enter it.
Thanks for thinking of me.

 

[squeen]

Watched Allegro Non Tropo, which lead me to another 70s animation classic, the Taarna portion of Heavy Metal which eventually got me sketching again after a long hiatus.