Hand-Drawn Map and Tokens

Brennen drew a quick map and scanned it in.   As much as I give Brennen a hard time about hassling me for ad-hoc drawing tools, he’s right—they’re necessary, and I want them too.  I “drew” a river with blue stones in a session, which is something I don’t want to ever repeat.  Over the Easter holiday, I prototyped some drawing support….  Ah, but until then…Brennen draws maps and scans them in.  He then sets them as his background on a tabletop or a map.  (There’s really no difference except a map can have a grid, and will be able to support vision later—actually supports it now, but it’s turned off in the beta thus far, because vision opens up a whole new can of worms.)

The tokens here are an accidental variety.  We have a couple of square ones, which is the result of a couple of us setting the same image for portrait and token.  (One of us should have known better.  One of us wrote the code that creates a pog-style token from the portrait, if you don’t supply a token.)  The wolf token is an example of EpicTable creating a token automatically from a portrait.  The other small round token was a separate token image supplied by Brian for his character, and the red stones are game pieces that are in the EpicTable game piece gallery.  Brennen’s using them here for enemy minions, rather than digging up images.

Interactive Flash version   •  Open Image

Brennen actually ran this game, so all I have are screenshots.  He and I will do a screencast of a walk-through in a future session and focus on using various EpicTable bits to create something like a character sheet.  In the meantime, I’ll post a series of annotated screenshots from our session.

You have a couple options for using the screenshots here.  If you have Flash, you can just load the Flash version and hover over each of the bubbles to get more info.  If you’re morally opposed to Flash, you can read the same timeless prose right here and correlate it to the bubbles the old fashioned way.

Game Intro Tab

Brennen put together this nice intro to his game to set the stage for us.  It has an overland map of the area, some adventure background material, and even a set of suggestions for setting-appropriate names.  This is a great, creative use of EpicTable tabletops. 

Interactive Flash version   •  Open Image

Screen Maximizing View

You can maximize your screen real estate in EpicTable in a number of ways.  You can minimize the ribbon from a right-click menu or a double-click on any of the tabs at the top (Main, Characters, etc.). 

You can set the various panels, like Chat, Dice Tray, and Portrait Bar to "Hide" or "Auto-Hide", or you can detach them and drag them to a secondary display. 

In this screenshot, I have the Dice Tray and Portrait Bar hidden, and I’ve dragged the Chat window to my second monitor.

Overland Map

Brennen drew this overland map and scanned it in for use with EpicTable.  Drawing tools aren’t integrated into EpicTable (yet).  Those of you wanting ad-hoc drawing tools in EpicTable will have Brennen’s relentless campaign for them to thank when they arrive.

The map is, I think, part of the background he used. Alternatively, he could have used an “image object”. The adventure text and name list are “rich text objects”.

Like any other surface in EpicTable, you can use game pieces or character tokens on this map.  What I’ve found helpful is using stones or map pins (from the gallery on the Tabletops tab) to mark the group’s position or important landmarks.

Adventure Background

Brennen used a rich text note (from the Tabletops tab) to provide a brief set of adventure notes to get us all on the same page (so to speak). 

He could have used a plain old notecard, but those are plain text and he’s way too into typography for that.  <g>

Sample Character Names

Brennen included a couple lists of setting-appropriate character names right here on the game intro tab.  That’s a great idea.  Not only did it help guide the naming of our own characters, but it gave us a set to draw from for NPC names.

In EpicTable, this is a "rich text note" (accessible under the Tabletops tab) placed on the tabletop.

In case you’re not familiar with Fudge dice, they’re six-sided dice with two “+”, two “-”, and two blank sides. Rolling four Fudge dice gives you a range from -4 to +4. Fudge is a “rules-light” game system originating in the 1990s. A number of game systems draw upon Fudge in one way or another. For instance, Spirit of the Century, a popular pulp RPG, traces its lineage back to Fudge via FATE.

Take a closer look at the screenshot (which you can do by clicking on it, if you haven’t already).

The speaker is identified

As you’ve seen in other posts, each persona in EpicTable’s roleplay-centric chat is identified by name and icon. In this example, you can see that each dice roll came from the GM.

Color schemes are supported

Here, I’ve played with a number of color schemes. “WhiteSmoke on DarkRed” is my default, and the big roll of d4s uses that scheme. The others used color schemes specified on the roll. I’m not happy about the outline and drop-shadow of the white die. My colorizing algorithm is doing that to high-brightness colors. I have some ideas to prevent it, but haven’t implemented them yet.

Modifiers are displayed.

Most of the examples here don’t use modifiers, but the second roll is a 1d20+6.

The sum of the dice is displayed.

This is handy if you have a large number of dice, like the d4s in this screenshot, or if you’re dropping some of the dice. I’m using the white d6 as the container for the sum of the roll…. I thought it would look cooler than it does.

Dropped dice are X'd out

In My Life with Master for example, you roll d4s and drop 4s. This screenshot shows a “12d4 drop 4s” roll. Notice that the sum does not include the dropped 4s.

Dice wrapping

This was one of those beautiful moments where code you wrote to do one thing drops seamlessly into another context and makes everything better. There was a bug in the line wrapping in the chat window when lots of dice were in play, and the layout code I wrote for the Dice Cup Designer dropped in and fixed everything. Woohoo.

The dice cup designer won’t be the only way to create a dice roll in EpicTable. If you need a quick d20 or 3d6, there’s no need for the designer. But when you have to put together something really interesting, you can pop this open and build up a dice cup that does just what you need.

Dice Cup Designer In Action

The first screenshot shows the designer with a dice cup for the game, Don’t Rest Your Head (which I’m completely enthralled with—but that’s a topic for another post). As you can see in the screenshot, there are some things still under development. Here’s an annotated version of that same dice cup designer screenshot (click either for their full-size version).

As you click on a die in the lower pane of the designer, a corresponding die is added to the dice cup panel at the top. Hopefully, it’s clear that the dice in the top panel of the designer are to-be-rolled dice. That is, we’re building up a set of dice to roll, not actually rolling them yet. There are dice for all the well-known polyhedral dice, plus a Fudge die.

Dice Color Schemes

You can choose the color of the die to be added, as well as the color of the numbers. This can be totally aesthetic—choosing a color scheme that suits the game or your character. However, you can also use this capability to build dice cups for game mechanics that differentiate dice by color. In this example, I’ve build a dice cup for Don’t Rest Your Head with 3 white dice for discipline, 2 black exhaustion dice, and a single red madness die.

How many choices? I haven’t done the math. There are dozens of pre-defined, named colors that I think may originate from the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) specification. In addition, you can define your own by RGB value.

Special Evaluation Examples

Here are another couple examples. Note that the “Special Evaluation / Finishing” pane is used in both of these to accomplish the special handling needed for the roll.

This one shows a roll for My Life with Master, where the player has invoked the desperation die (the orange d6).

Rolling stats for a d20 character: 4d6, drop the lowest die.

User Experience Questions

Special Handling for Just Some Dice

There are some things that are making me scratch my head a bit from a user experience perspective. Take another look at that My Life with Master dice cup with the orange d6. The special handling clause “drop 4s” only applies to the d4s. My current notion for how to signal that is to let users select multiple dice in the dice cup and apply the “Special Handling” section to just the selected dice. That’s not horrifying, but it’s not apparent in the user interface once you’ve moved on to something else. Another notion would be to turn that textual representation into something more structured—basically, click a clause, and see the corresponding dice light up and the “special handling” selection updated accordingly. That’s a lot of work for something that’s maybe still not that intuitive. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

Evaluation vs. Resolution

Another issue I wonder about is how clear the line is between dice roll evaluation and resolution. The way I think about this, evaluation is anything I can do on the dice in isolation—in other words, doing helpful things like summing or counting or sorting dice. Resolution involves comparing the roll to other characters’ rolls, or to difficulties or targets set by the GM. I don’t want to get into the latter, because it’s very game system specific and situation specific. I don’t want the tool to ever get in the way of the GM, and I think this might be a case where trying to get the tool to do exactly what you want in every situation is more painful than helpful to the GM. Also, I have no interest in actually replacing the need for the rule books. EpicTable is an environment, not a game unto itself.

The Slippery Slope of Success (Counting Successes)

The grey area for me is a roll that where you count successes. For instance, if you’re rolling 12d6 and a success is a 1, 2, or 3 on each die, it’s pretty helpful for EpicTable to count those for you. I really want to do that, but different games have different success targets…and sometimes they change, so I’d need to also allow you to tweak the success target occasionally. There’s the first bit of grey.

The next bit is introduced by games like Don’t Rest Your Head, which evaluates individual dice pools in addition to the dice roll in its entirety. In the example I gave above, the dice cup had 3 discipline dice, 2 exhaustion dice, and 1 madness die. Well, in DRYH, successes are 1, 2, or 3, but it also matters which of those pools has the highest single die result.

For example, if I roll 1, 4, 5 white, 2 and 3 black, and 6 red, I have 3 successes, and the red pool (madness) is dominant, since it had the high roll. I don’t think I want to go that far. Enough games use successes that I really would like to implement something in terms of success counting. Game-specific stuff like dice pool dominance is a step too far, I think, even though it still stops short of resolution (because it hasn’t been compared to the opponent’s roll yet).

Beyond the Dice Cup Designer

So, beyond just building up an ad-hoc dice cup in the designer, what are your options in EpicTable? You may or may not have noticed the little dice cup icons at the top of the EpicTable window in previous EpicTable screenshots. Those represent dice cups that you’ve built and want to keep handy. In addition, EpicTable character sheets will support dice cups that incorporate character attributes. That’s a topic that warrants its own discussion. I’ll talk about how you can create dice cups for EpicTable character sheets in a later post.

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits: Die images by Brennen Reece.

Customizing Your Speech, Multiple Personas, and Tabs

Notice that in the first line shown in the chat log, Feldspar is outraged at Drayla’s earlier suggestion that they hide from an approaching monster (the ettin). This was accomplished through Feldspar’s player using the Tone of Voice feature. You can see the Tone of Voice selector in the chat input pane near the bottom of the screen. The GM used this same selector to convey the ettin’s anger at finding the adventurers in his cave.

Let’s talk more about that chat input pane. This smaller pane is where players and the GM enter their messages. In this screenshot, we see the GM’s view. He’s opened several tabs so that he can quickly switch between different kinds of interaction. He has his GM tab, a tab in which he’s carrying on a private conversation with Scot (Drayla’s player), and a tab for the ettin. He can add, remove and rename tabs as he sees fit during the game. Players have the same capability to open multiple tabs for different lines of communication.

Each tab allows the user to control whether they’re speaking in-character or out-of-character (the toggle button with the comedy/tragedy masks), which persona they’re speaking as, their tone of voice, and whether they’re speaking to everyone or carrying on a private conversation.

Integrated Dice Rolls

Now, lets take another look at the chat log. Notice the integrated dice rolls. The chat windows shows the result of each die as well as any modifiers and the total score. This example uses rolls from a D20 game, but the dice roller can handle rolls for many games (more about the dice roller later).

Dice rolls can come from a number of sources. One can enter dice rolls directly from the chat input window, but players are likely to make most rolls directly from their character sheet. I’ll show you the dice roller and the integration of dice rolls and character sheets in a later post.

Q & A

Finally, lets see if I can proactively answer a couple questions that I’m guessing you may have:

Can I eliminate or control the size of the portraits in the chat window?

Yes. You won’t be able to make them a lot larger, just from a screen real estate perspective, but you’ll be able to make them smaller or hide them completely.

That chat window looks awfully large…. or My group uses voice chat….

You can resize the chat window, auto-hide it, even close it completely if text chat doesn’t fit into your game.

Can one player play multiple characters?

Absolutely. And he can open a tab (or more) for each character.

How do I keep my players from taking on the personas of NPCs or characters that aren’t theirs?

A player’s choice of personas is limited to the characters he currently controls. The GM can use the GM persona or that of any of the NPCs or monsters currently "in the scene".

What do you mean by "in the scene"?

EpicTable uses the concept of scenes to organize available NPCs, monsters, etc. For example, the PCs are normally in the scene, and the GM brought the ettin into this scene when he started the encounter.

I sometimes write long messages. How do I manage responding to incoming messages? Also, that chat input window looks pretty small….

Not to worry. First off, you can just open up a separate tab or tabs for your lengthier messages and use another to respond to more urgent matters. To give you more room to write, there’s a slider between the input and output panes, so you can make the input pane larger if you need to. Also, the input pane scrolls, so even if you keep it rather small, you don’t have to worry about running up against a brick wall. You can write to your heart’s content.

Credits: Portraits by Fiery Dragon Productions. You can find them on my Links page.

TrueVision is easier shown than described, so I’ll use several screenshots. Let’s look at the situation from the eyes of each of characters involved.

The Game Master or “GM”. This icon is used to represent the GM throughout EpicTable. Whenever you’re speaking as the GM, viewing as the GM, whispering to the GM, this icon will be involved.

While the GM can opt to see the scene through the eyes of any character, by default, he sees everything. This is what’s shown in the screenshot below. It’s nighttime and an ettin lurks outside a tavern. Two of the characters are inside waiting, while a third approaches from the north.

Drayla is the leader of our band of heroes. A young woman with a righteous cause, Drayla is returning from a meeting with the local clergy. Later than expected, she has no torch, and has to rely on only the light streaming through the windows of the lively tavern where her friends await her return. Notice that because she has no light and is not illuminated, her token is only dimly visible. This is so the player can find the token. It’s fair to say that Drayla can’t see her hand in front of her face, but it’s not reasonable for the player not to know where she is in relationship to the light she sees up ahead.

Morgrim and Kalinstil are Drayla’s companions, anxiously awaiting her return (though perhaps Morgrim, behind the bar, is not so anxious as Kalinstil, who waits by the window).

In the first screenshot, we see Morgrim’s view from behind the bar. He can see the whole tavern, illuminated by a fireplace on the west wall. He can also see out the windows in the east wall to some extent, though his line-of-sight is limited.

In the next, we see Kalinstil’s view from the window. He also can see the whole tavern, and he has better line-of-sight on the grounds outside the tavern, but still can’t see much due to the darkness. Notice how he can see the area lit from the southernmost window, even though he isn’t in position to see through the window itself. He’s not quite able to see the ettin, though, nor Drayla approaching from the north.

A monstrous, two-headed ettin lurks in the darkness outside the tavern. Unlike Drayla’s companions, he sees the young woman approaching the tavern quite clearly, due to his darkvision. He’s also able to see Kalinstil in the window. Will that deter him, or is the approaching morsel just too tempting to pass up?

Credits: Tavern tables by pedrov. Bar based on tavern benches from GreyTale. Tokens by Fiery Dragon Productions. You can find links to all these on my Links page.

Center screen, you see the player tokens on the map. Naturally, these can be dragged around as well. The entire map is illuminated because we’re looking through the GM’s point of view. In a later screenshot, I’ll show you TrueVision in action— where each player only sees what his character would see.

Notice that you have your chat window at the right. (That’s dockable in case you don’t want it on the right.) Notice also the user-defined dice cups at the top. Often, you’ll roll dice right from your character sheet, but you have the option to use these ad-hoc dice cups.

Finally, it’s worth noting that because this is the GM’s view, there are some things available that wouldn’t be there for players; for instance, the ability to add images to the handout gallery and the buttons allowing him to create more maps. We’ll get deeper into some of these features in later posts.

Credits:
Map made using Dundjinni with textures and objects from the user art forum; notably, Cistacola’s cavern textures, Greytale’s arches (which became bridge rails), and Dragonwolf’s tile (north of the bridge). The tokens are courtesy of Fiery Dragon Productions. You can find links to all these on my Links page.

Beneath the game list, a double row of buttons gives you the chance to join or host, as appropriate, to invite a player, or to accept an invitation from the GM. This invitation mechanism is how GMs let players into their games. In the first version of EpicTable, invitations are handled outside the product; for instance, via email, phone, or Skype.

To the left, under the EpicTable logo, you’ll see a couple options for out-of-game functions, such as creating characters and character sheets. This area is under active development and more given to change than some of the rest.