I wish I had a tablet. It would make everything a lot easier. I recently downloaded AutoREALM, so if anyone can give me a review (good or bad are both helpful) on that I'd appreciate it. I also own Corel Painter X, which I've used a little bit for some artwork, but might be handy here too.
What is Fantasy Grounds? It sounds like a program for running a game in. If this is the case, I need to get it a year ago.
But being free, MapTools is my likely choice. I hope it does everything I need.
If you have any questions about MapTool, please let me know...Originally Posted by Leylia
But being free, MapTools is my likely choice. I hope it does everything I need.
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Some questions I have about Maptool: How integrated are the other RPTools? Can we load characters into the system for HP tracking and saves and things like that? How easy is it to make maps on the fly during a game? It looks like no download is required, but is it preferred? Is the only requirement Java 6 as far as system specs? It looks like Fantasy Grounds takes care of most of that, but I really don't want to pay or pirate if I can avoid it, and I love the open source community.
Integrated: Not... DiceTool and MapTool both use the same underlying dice library, as does CharTool and InitTool. MapTool has it's own "mini" initiative tracker, but it is far less feature rich than InitTool in terms of functionality. Depending on the game system you use and preferences, there already exist many frameworks which have automation of one level or another (some include fully adding/removing hitpoints as you "hit" a creature). CharTool can convert characters into a specific framework token, but at this time, there are only conversion "files" for one or two frameworks(and I believe D&D 4E is the only game system someone has written the conversion for at this time.)
Maps on the fly.. can be done, you just have to stock up on image resources from the net to use in your maps. However, maps can be made far prettier if you make them in advance, especially out of "stamps" (premade objects from .png files). Check out the video tutorials (do note though that they may not contain the latest features!!!).
Download: well... no matter what you are downloading the Maptool code, it's just a matter of control over where it is going to be stored on "your" machine. I prefer the download so I can make subfolders for each build I download and then can choose which version to use as I build my campaign, but that's just me...
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
----------------------------------------------------------
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Right now my biggest concern is ease of use and getting my players to adopt it. We started on Yahoo chat but that system has major flaws in a conference chat (such as some players not seeing the text entries of other players) and have moved recently to Chatzy but we don't want to pay for a premium room that would store our conversations better, but we do want a log of the games for future reference (especially helpful to me running the game so I can see what BS I came up with last game, I have to make up crap on the fly all the time because my players are insane, as most RPG players are.)
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