Playing with the site

Hi, I like the Roll20 layout very much, and I have been playing around with the unconventional possibilities the medium offers. Here are some of the ideas I have used / have planned: Make a map in the style of a blue print (design notes and specifications, blue background white lines for walls, including power lines). Have the players find the blueprint so they start out with a complete overview of the installation (accurate or not, only time will tell). Any inaccuracies will then be updated when they arrive at them (for instance landing the fleeing players in a blind alley, due to a bricked up door). This is a sci-fi campaign, having the players fly into the debris from a battle. As they approach wreckage's or asteroids, gas clouds, radioactive clouds or other surprises are revealed as they move within ranges. Having the players step into an elevator, and changing the map by moving them to new levels. Having doors that close automatically, reinstating fog of war in rooms they are not currently in (allowing enemies / NPCs to sneak around) inducing paranoia in the players (most effective was an investigation of a small space ship with a dubious "ally" they didn't trust, so whenever he broke off from the group, the suspicion set in). Have rooms slowly fill with a damaging / lethal agent (like magma, poisonous gas, decompression), and having the players forced to rush through the complex, filling it in on the map as it advances, to create a sense of urgency. Do any of you have any other ideas or experiences with creating unorthodox maps? I would like to steal shamelessly from creative ideas, to keep my players on their toes.

One thing I did which I found funny was to place a few LOS blocking bits and pieces among the piles of junk at a battlefield, then let some small, dangerous, enemy hide behind one. (mechanical spiders perhaps? or just a rabid dog!) Gives a good sense of constant threat without overdoing it on the damage. Just something to keep them on their toes when they got too comfortable. Another thing you can do is place lots and lots of lights that light a place. (just place a ton of lighting fixtures but make only two or three actual light sources) then turning them off. Instant darkness in an otherwise fairly safe place. If your players are like mine they will immediately scrabble for their flashlights (to get more than just a tiny light radius) and at that point you can fire off some nice attack towards one of them (or all of them). For paranoia other than combat you could always make a scenario during which they are conveniently discovered two or three times while giving two or three hints, discreet ones, that someone must've ratted them out. And, there's always the classic. Plenty of enemies, limited number of bullets. When combined with darkness, ambushes, traps and espionage it can actually make (or break, be careful) a game.

Thank for the ideas, alle of them good. The first two are most applicable for my group (since we have been playing for a while and they are failry geared up on low light vision and the like). I have tried to find discreet ways to force them into low ammo situations, but maybe I should give it another go. They will definitely face the LOS blocking situation soon, muhaha. Their next scenario will include suddenly having to defend the installation they are penetrating, which could possible provide a low ammo situation. I was also considering including an Aliens type scenario with motion scensors for things moving in the ducts. Things powerfull enough to give them damager but not finish them off in a single encounter, so they will be bleeding and fearing the next one. 

Could work. Another would be plenty of very small enemies that come in a horde. They go down with a single shot, even a bad one, but there are tons of them. Eats plenty of bullets, makes burst mode (if there is one in the game system that actually benefits you when fighting hordes) very useful, but also eats munitions like crazy. You don't fear the horde because of it's toughness, you fear it because it eats all your firepower. (of course, if you, on top of that, know that there are five ton heavy monsters that can flip cars running around outside... well then you might even have to figure out how to hide from those weaker enemies, or be unarmed when you really need lethality) As for motion sensors, that would be quite cool. And there's actually a function for it on here. Sort of. You can "ping" an area to show motion. Produces a sound and a visible signal. And btw, if they have low-light vision and similar, there ARE ways to sabotage things like that irl. IR based stuff can be sabotaged just by raising the air temp, "bright vision" stuff can be sabotaged with something as simple as a few very bright points of light (diode flashlights, for example), UV can be screwed over using, well, UV lights actually. And ALL of them can be screwed over using smoke, dust or similar! (of the right type anyways) And if they're really that geared up for it, well, let them get used to it, then let them meet someone who is just as finicky and prep-obsessed as them, who has stocked up on, say, smoke grenades.

Oh, and thanks for the lethal agent idea. I even know how to do that one very well for my current game. It will stress the crap out of my players I think :P

And that, of course, is what we GM's live for. That and the "Oh. We should have seen that coming. All the signs were there!" moments. I think I will implement the "few bright light points" idea. Or flickering flourescent lights. And the ping idea is nothing less than fantastic. 

We appear to have similar tastes in GMing! Let them be heroes, sure. Let them be great. Sure. Even let them be epic. Then let them see what those things are probably like when people KNOW you're that good. When people prep JUST TO MEET YOU. Or, you know, just let them know that others are just as formidable and dangerous. (or just clever) And for the record, this discussion has added three more points to my GMing Tips&Tricks list :P

It appears we do :) I am glad that I could supplement you, your feedback has made me revisit some of the planned encounters. And I agree comepletely with your sentiment. In the campaign there is a recurring villain, who frustrate them to no end. He is not the most powerfull, not even as powerfull as some they have taken down. His power lies in the fact that they have been unable to take him down so far due to advance planning and coming at them sideways. An example was creating a false identity as a law enforcement official, cooperating with them on a mission (the search of a ship above with a dubious ally) and afterwards submitting a report to the local authorities that defame the players completely, and filling it with just enough half-truths that it was not easily refuted (which he set up under way). It is an interesting point that the more reputation the players accumulate in a certain area, the more people will both respect them (on the plus side) and be prepared for them (on the flip side of the same coin).

Btw, about the "blueprints" mentioned before, is the intention that it should all keep being blueprints, or change over to "real" areas when they see them? I think I have a few good ideas on how to do the later in a not-too-strenuous way. (though it would require us to make up some custom map-pieces for you)

If you haven't tried google sketchup up yet, you should. I make all of my maps in the simple to use 3d cad program. The coolest part for your blueprints idea is that sketchup has a "blueprints" style. It changes the art of the sketch over to a blue and white sketch like traditional blueprints.&nbsp; Then, you do a top down image export, and bam blue print map. Change the style of the sketch back to basic textures and violla, your room is revealed in true image format. It's kind of hard to explain, so ill put a link up for a spaceship video I made. It transitions from standard textures over to a stylized blue print. Although I used orange and black instead of blue and white. I don't have any readily available maps, but I could make one in the next couple of days and show you what I mean.&nbsp; At any rate, check out sketchup. The software is free and there are thousands of free user based models to make Awsome scifi tokens or maps from. Sentinel &nbsp; <a href="http://youtu.be/X1K7xm3JAzU" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/X1K7xm3JAzU</a>

Hm. Will have to look it up, though personally I use blender for my 3D work :) How long did it take you to set up that ship?

The ship itself is fairly detailed. But I only modified someone else's work for that. The video took about 10 min to setup and 30 min to render on my hunk-o-junk laptop. I probably have 3 hours in the ship, simply because I was still learning to use sketchup then. If I had tried to build it from scratch, it would have taken me a month, lol. Now I could nock that ship out in a day or so with better results.&nbsp; The style swap is as simple as checking a box. In sketchup (this version without the physics plugin) models don't move. What you see is the camera moving around the model. I've been trying to increase my multimedia presentation value in my PbP games. Bu, I think I am going to use roll20 for real time stuff. Now that I found it. Here is another use of sketchup/photobucket&nbsp; I used sketchup to build the scene and photobucket to manipulate the final image. This entire piece took less than 10 min in sketchup and another 5 in photobucket to find the right style. It's not perfect, but I think it set the tone for the characters escape.

Yes it does. I like it. Good stuff. Used a lot of things like this in your games?

More now that I've gotten over the learning curve. I'm currently working out a body rig system for my pcs toons so I can use them in game images during the story summary.&nbsp;

Mind sharing some of those maps? Bit curious now.

I'll look and see what I can drum up. A lot of the stuff I did before was mediocre. I've also had to learn the hard way about the usefulness of online storage. The great computer crash of 2012 wiped out an untold amount of maps, images and models. But, I'll look and post what I have for general reference. I'm no master by any means. Learning to do it is most of the fun for me.&nbsp;

Learning is fun indeed. New things always add something extra to the game for me ;)

Ok, here is a simple map I had for an encounter in the belly of a starship. Its just the&nbsp;architecture&nbsp;because I used maptools for all of the placeables.&nbsp; There are several examples of the styles I was talking about. You can achieve any desired look you can imagine really. These are all in perspective mode. Like you are looking down at the game table. You can position in in&nbsp;parallel and loo straight down on the map, but you loose a lot of detail. 1) is the style I actually used. 2) is blue print 3) is like the Sentinel Movie clip above The rest are just simple styles that a person might like if they were not looking for much detail. The last one is just to show that it really is in 3d. You can have the shadows on or off and change the "lay" of the sun

Interesting. Will definitely have to peek at that. Could be useful for feature stuff. Will probably stick with making most of my stuff in Blender or by hand though. Variable tools after all! :)

I tried using blender a "very" little. After using SU I found difficult to navigate. Probably just because I was wrapped around the simplicity of SU. May have to look at blender agin now that I have a better understanding of modeling, in general.

I'd highly recommend it, though from what I can see you have the majority of what you need from sketchup. Blender would just be a larger toolbox, not nescessarily one you Must have. Also, it lacks some of the things in sketchup, like the blueprint function.

Asaram, I played around with the idea, but I didn't find any good way to do it. I tried a few different ways to do it, but none of them seemed fluid or functional, so I have settled for moving them around on the blueprint, with updates when they encounter them. If you have any ideas, I would like to hear them.

Make two "pieces" for each sectioned off area (walls) First place the "real" one, then place the blueprint one on top. When they enter a room just move the blueprint "to back". Voila, all updated with very little fuss. You could also place the blueprint on the Token layer, everything else on the Background layer, then move the blueprint to the GM layer (disappears for all players but remains as a see through item for you)

Can you overlay an image as fog of war? If so, use the blue print as fow and the normal image as the map. I'm not familiar enough with roll20 to know.

You can't. Not yet anyways. But the suggestion I made, in effect, makes it work like that.

Asarm I tried to make it work but for some reason (that eludes me now), I was unhappy with the result.

And Rob, that Idea would be awwesome.

Well, just wait for that as a feature then, though I suspect that'll take a good long while. Personally I am going to test the map-pieces and layer-switching idea. See what can be made from it :)

If it proves too tiresome to do, I'll just kill the group in the second room ;)

And complain loudly about all the work that had gone into creating this double layered map.

Hehe. Of course. Complaining is our right as GMs! (one of them, others are, depending on who you ask, to be evil, cruel, biased, insane and many others) Anyways, you're going to try running with it then? You'll have to tell me how that goes. I've very curious now :P

Asaram I jsut got another idea: creating a puzzle for the players that requires moving thing around or placing themselves in specific places to solve it. The visual /spatial nature of roll20 allows for some interesting options I think. I must ponder this further.

Hm. Not sure I understand your idea. Do you mean you would place "puzzle pieces" on the map that players can move, or something akin to a map with hints and stuff on it?

Basically it will be a large oddly shaped room. There are a number of small stepping stones (about 30 or so) arranged seemingly randomly. There are three players in the campaign. When they place themselves on the tright set of stones, a triangle will be revealed (and stay even if the move away from the stepping stones). As they move on to do this on enough combinations of stones, more and more triangles will be revealed. Finally, when enough has been tested and tried, it will sho slowly that the triangles form a part of a larger pattern. This pattern is a pentagon. When all the 3-piece-triangles have been revealed, the entire pentagon changes colour, and stays on the map. This then causes the next piece of the puzzle to become unlocked. Did that make it clearer or?

Yes, much. That would require from fiddling, but is definitely doable. I like that idea, interactive map pieces.

I've done a lot of sprite-based artwork in my day and I love games like Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Final Fantasy(1-6), Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, ect. I'm currently working on tiles for building a sprite-based map with a 2D third dimension (like the recently posted&nbsp; Jade Map Pack &nbsp;has) I plan on also building houses and buildings to fit roll20 and it'll be like the mapping in Wild Arms where outside the house you see the house and you just walk in and you see everything inside and out. I'm still working on it though....

Easily done. Dynamic lighting on each character token, set a big range, set lights all over the place outside, put up DL walls around the house and at the house door. If you don't walk into the house all you see are the walls and black (and outside of course), once you Do walk in you see everything inside and everything outside. Also, nice idea. Seems we have some very creative people here :)

Terratani; using a fake 3D effect has an issue. If you showed the player tokens from that perspective; how do you deal with turning to face? Rotating the sprites will lead to them being upside down or sideways. Do you just hide all the sprites on the GM layer and swap to the one facing the appropriate direction?

I have not gotten to that, I'm just working on maps to start This is a campaign idea for the future. I'm going to be using Disgaea sprites as a basis, made my current RP group in Disgaea style for practice and reference. I will be hoping the multi-face tokens are in effect by the time it starts though, if not will probably use drawings. Or perhaps a ring token with an arrow to accompany the character token