Roll20.net + Computer Games

Greetings. I'm VERY new to this site, but already very excited about it. Currently I am still studying wiki, everything is quite unusual, but interesting. As the DM of unexpierinced group I would like to create "sandbox" campaign, to introduce my freshly converted DnD meat to the wonderful world of boardgames. But. The problem is: you need A LOT of locations for sandbox campaign. Interiors, exteriors, cities, villages. Just 'cause you don't know where that crazy party wants to go. And, despite being DM for years, I am very bad at drawing things, especially on PC, and I don't have time to manually create parts of the world players adventuring into. So, I thought - what if I could use Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2? If you didn't know, those games have powerful built-in tools to create locations with tile system - much like on roll20.net, but with much better possibilities and variation. I have been using those Toolsets since 2005, I can create almost anything. But how can I transfer handmade locations to the virtual table? That's the question. The only way I can think now is to create a lot of screenshots of, for example, 64x64 location, and mend them together. Any advice or expierence with that? Please?

(I'd question if a sandbox is really the best way to start off new players, but you didn't ask that.) Screenshots - yes. You can use those as the map for a page or as handouts from the journal. I wouldn't try and create everything. You're trying to create the important locations that need a map. The other locations can just be described and left at that. You don't need screenshots of every step between Village A and Village B if nothing happens there. If there's a battle, maybe then you want a map of a section of the road. If nothing is happening in Village B, you don't need a map there. You can just explain it's a small village with an inn, a mill, and some homes.

Paladintodd said: (I'd question if a sandbox is really the best way to start off new players, but you didn't ask that.) Maybe. But boardgames and DnD were promoted as "Do what you want" type of games, contrary to Warhammer/MTG wargames they know about. The thing is: JPEG screenshots will be blurry, and PNG will take a lot of space. I'm a bit worried about that ._. >The other locations can just be described and left at that. Even monopoly has some graphical features. Playing location in the imagination only could be rough for new players. And I myself fond of as much images on the campaign as possible. Thanks for the reply.

Sir I. said: The thing is: JPEG screenshots will be blurry, and PNG will take a lot of space. I'm a bit worried about that ._. I wouldn't worry too much about having blurry screenshots in JPEG. Using my own resolution as a guide, a 1600x900 laptop screen will generate a screenshot that fits a 23 by 13 map page using Roll20's 70 pixel square grids. I pull interiors of houses from the Sims 3 with regularity for my games and even with some stretching and skewing of the image, it's perfectly playable and not blurry. I don't see why Neverwinter Nights wouldn't work - in fact at least one person on Roll20 is/was already doing just that. Given that a game on Roll20 tends to move at a little slower of a pace than real-life tabletop games, you're likely to need less locations than you think you'll need off the bat. It's all too easy to get burned out on trying to make everything when prepping for a sandbox game.

Nice. That means I am not the only one who thoughts of that game! It will make prepating campaigns SO much easier.

You should also get a support subscription if you want more storage just in case if you use a lot of pngs. But let me tell you one thing by the way. BMPs have more bytes than PNGs. I'm just saying.

Just a warning: do not use PNGs for map images or map tiles unless you need a transparency. They are system resource intensive and may bog down you or your player's computers. The suggested format is JPG/JPEG. If you have an image in a PNG format and you do not need transparency then I suggest reprocessing the image into a JPG via an image editing program such as GIMP.

I ran a NWN server for 4 years. If you really want to go with a graphical based narrative, I'd recommend generic woods, fields, and hills maps, for when you have an encounter. Maybe a tavern, or two. I also enjoyed first person screenshots, showing woods, the sky, the sun or moon, as a "You see this" kind of thing. I still do that a lot, in fact using my old NWN, SoU, etc. as a screenshot generator, showing a dock with a keep, or shops in a market. Some great memories there via NWN, over a few years. These days I do almost all narrative style, sometimes with a picture as the characters see an orc camp, etc. I also make a lot of use of travel maps, but it's mostly description. If you try and map out every location you have with a tactical map, it's tough to organize. I suggest decide what you'd put on a real table for any encounter, and then use roll20 to do that. If you currently do not use a tactical map for each and every place, don't do it on roll20, you'll invest a lot of time for things that might not get used. The trick with NWN as a game platform was that characters could literally go anywhere built, and the software managed all of that, keeping track of where characters were. If you do that sort of thing in roll20, it will be work that you are doing, effectively replacing a CPU commanded game module running the AI with yourself doing all of those tasks. Good luck.

Izumi-sama said: Greetings. But. The problem is: you need A LOT of locations for sandbox campaign. Interiors, exteriors, cities, villages. Just 'cause you don't know where that crazy party wants to go. My simple solution this is to work a two-stage game. Stage one is the preperation, done via emails, where you and the players work out the path, the non-action stuff. For me that's character generation, and then the boring travel bits. Then the game session [which I am aiming at about 3 hours] is just the action in one or two locations - known from the preparation work! That and the generic bits and pieces of course.

Update: Works pretty well. Except the fact that NWN Aurora toolset has 10m*10m tiles, and even small rooms are pretty... big.

On the Page Settings bar, you can change the SIZE of the grid and the SCALE to make the visual layout match what it should be, grid-wise. You'd just have to resize your tokens, but once the grid is set they'll snap to the correct size once you do.

Mark G. said: On the Page Settings bar, you can change the SIZE of the grid and the SCALE to make the visual layout match what it should be, grid-wise. You'd just have to resize your tokens, but once the grid is set they'll snap to the correct size once you do. But... but D&D has 5 ft squares!

You might have more luck if you scale down the resulting image via a graphics editing program, so that you wind up with the 5 foot square properly sized. I'd work out a conversion factor for you, but I no longer have NWN installed. The quick solution is just to shrink it down on the map page 'til it looks about right in relationship to your token. Very few players are going to quibble about distances.

Izumi-sama said: Mark G. said: On the Page Settings bar, you can change the SIZE of the grid and the SCALE to make the visual layout match what it should be, grid-wise. You'd just have to resize your tokens, but once the grid is set they'll snap to the correct size once you do. But... but D&D has 5 ft squares! Right, but VISUALLY, your map's size is making those 5 foot squares look more like .15 foot squares. By adjusting the SIZE and SCALE, the grid size, spacing, and distance markers will closer match your visual map

Some map image grids have a scale in 10, 20, or even 30 feet per square. To deal with that do the following: 1) Fit the map image grid to the roll20 grid as normal. 2) Once step 1 is completed use the set dimensions tool to multiply the size of the map (for example, a 10' scale would be doubled in size). 3) Move the map and make any needed size adjustments. If you need further help let me know.

Maybe you are all right. But in terms of realistic gaming: shrinking 10m tiles to 5ft ones is too much. For example, the Forest tile in NWN can have several trees on the 10m*10m square, maybe 3-4 or even more + some placeables, rocks, grass and nature stuff. With converting to 5ft*5ft each token would occupy several trees at once and the whole party can fit tightly to the whole grove. Futhermore, IMHO, the right size of the town with scaling included would be... I'd say, 30x20 tiles divided on several aread (Market area, Central, etc). It means roughly 300x200 meters in NWN, and with "Honest" scaling this means 200x133 grids on Roll20 map. I don't honestly think this is SO much, it gives a lot more immersion, and I wouldn't see messages like "Oh, my character matches the size of this village house. Hm...". Encounter-related: In a particulary wide cave (10m*10m) you can have several characters fighting in a line. Like 3x3 or more. With 5ft*5ft rule corridor battles are 1vs1 mostly. But you are right on most points, maybe I'll try to count NWN tiles as 5m*5m to reduce excessive grids on my game. The screenshot is 12x12 Center of village made in NWN, 80x80 5ft units on Roll20, 10% zoom. Ok, MAYBE (lol) it's a bit big, but you can have the Inn, barracks, farms, poor and rich houses, shrine (down left), roads and much more on single big map. Worth it for me, but I'll definetely try downscaling 2X as I mentioned above. And... and I think I'll need supporter level soon - each location eats from 1 to 2 MB on my quota. Hehe...

Izumi-sama , if you send me a join link I can take a look at your setup.