VTT Settings

[Jaxilon]

When you say 'token mapper' are you meaning if you want to print the map?

[Redrobes]

Yeah, with most of these apps they implement a set of tokens on the top of a base map. If it can handle quite a lot then you can make maps from the tokens. Mine, Battlegorunds RPG and MapTool are some for example that you often have more tokens on the playing area than just characters and monsters. You can have doors that open, torches and chests, chairs etc then even start on the walls and floor too. If you want to print the map then its good to have plenty of res in the tokens to make a good job of it.

[heruca]

Most VTTs used a standard resolution of 50 pixels per grid square, but 100 pixels seems to be gaining popularity of late.

Battlegrounds (aka BRPG) uses a resolution of 122 pixels per grid square (or hex), but the maximum map size is 4000 x 4000 pixels.

As RedRobes said, bigger is usually better, since users can easily downsize a graphic to the size they need, whereas if you try to enlarge a graphic beyond it's native size you will get pixelation/blockiness.

[torstan]

Yep, 100px per grid works well for maptool, and it's easy enough to downsize to 50px which will run beautifully and will still look decent on a monitor. I know the standard for Dunjinni is 200px per 5' grid as that's geared towards printing as well as online play.

The important thing in maptool is to have an integer number of pixels per grid. That may seem obvious, but a number of published maps are printed having been resized which makes it tricky to get them to line up to a grid without a little editing.

[MadCartographer]

I use ScreenMonkey alot for all my role playing (D&D Online) All of my maps are at 2500x2000, which puts the file at 1.7 mgs. But the detail is great.
Image is below (a dungeon my players are in now)

This is for a LVL 1 party.

[Midgardsormr]

Battlegrounds (aka BRPG) uses a resolution of 122 pixels per grid square (or hex)…

Where the heck did they come up with that number? That's even more arbitrary than 72 (which is at least divisible by 9. I just figured out why the chose that number for the nonsensical "screen dpi." You'd think that would have been far more obvious to a math geek).

Anyway, I shoot for 100px / square in my D&D 4e game, which I display to my face-to-face group on a HDTV. My maps are about 5-10 MB in jpeg format, and my 32-bit png tokens run to about 30k. That's a bit on the large side, really, but since I'm not having to transport the assets over the 'net it works out.

[heruca]

Where the heck did they come up with that number?

Battlegrounds originally had a resolution of 61 pixels per cell (square or hex). I arrived at that as a result of subjective testing of various resolutions. 50 seemed too low for the amount of detail I wanted to be able to show, but I was afraid that going too much higher would lead to file size and bandwidth issues. So I was about to settle on 60 pixels per cell when I realized that, for the snap-to-grid feature to perfectly center a unit in a cell, I would need to have an odd number of pixels. Hence 61 was decided on. At this point in time, Battlegrounds didn't have a zoom feature. When I added zooming, all the graphics ended up pixelating when fully zoomed in. Since Battlegrounds maximum zoom level is 200%, I doubled the resolution of the graphics so that there would be no pixelation even at full zoom. That's how Battlegrounds' resolution ended up being 122 pixels per cell.

Improvement in broadband bandwidth and hard drive sizes over the last few years have resulted in the increased file sizes not being as bad as I'd originally feared when I first started development.