Nostalgia Quest

The misadventures of a New DM running his first campaign using DungeonSlayers 3.5.

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The dust settles....

The first combat encounter is over, and I think that it went rather well.  Overall the speed with which we were able to comment on the wall posts via Smartphone helped move the pace along considerably.  One round was almost as fast as sitting around the table.  In the end, they succeeded:

With all four Goblins killed, the Party moves forward to explore the wagon and campsite immediately North of them.

On a side note, I thought that this encounter may have posed some challenge for the adventurers, but the two Wizards in the party dominated, scoring all of the kills while the Fighter and Healer occupied the Goblins.  I will definitely being making some adjustments to future encounters to actually pose a challenge.

I've been slightly intimidated of running this campaign as two of my players are highly experienced Roleplayers, but they have actually helped immensely.  Just watching them play has helped me feel more comfortable in my seat and help develop my own style.

So far, this little experiment is going well.  Now, off to the next encounter!

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First Encounter!

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Coming up on the first encounter.

Ok, so things have moved a little slowly in my game, but still not bad.  We've actually had a large amount of player interaction within the Tavern, and a good amount of Roleplaying.  But things are finally moving along for some action!  My PC's just moved out of the city and ventured into the foothills.  As they made their way up the road, they encountered Goblins! 

This is actually where we stand at this moment.  This is the trial by fire of how well combat will be handled here and the strengths or weaknesses of my Maptool and Facebook pairing.  I will post a follow up to the encounter once the dust settles.

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Screenshot of the current setup of "The Rusty Flagon" from my campaign.  Example of using Maptool, TokenTool, and the Dungeon Tiles loaded into MapTool.

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Jumping in Headfirst

I've been playing Tabletop RPG's for a long time now.  Always off and on due to my job.  See, I'm a U.S. Marine, and it keeps me always busy and always moving around so I've never really been able to settle in with a game group anywhere.  But, thanks to the advent of technology on the web, I've been intrigued with starting a play by post style campaign so that I can get my fix.

Enter DungeonSlayers.  While searching the web, I stumbled upon this great Classic RP System that uses D20.  The beauty of it is that it fits on 10 single sided pages!!  Completely nostalgic and hearkens back to nights spent around the Kitchen Table.  I promptly grabbed everything I could from their page.  You should too, it's FREE!

I have decided to start a campaign using the DungeonSlayers rules via Facebook.  I created a Closed group and invited friends that I knew would be interested, and asked them to invite people they thought would be interested as well.  Facebook has all of the tools that are really necessary to run a nice Play by post style RPG.  I'm using Events in the group to notify members of important timelines and significant events.  This works really well as I'm able to set a time-table and scene and then hear back from who plans on attending.  I did this for Character creation, and that way I know who is actually wanting to play and be active from the group members.  Once we have a full party of players, we will boot everyone else from the Group.

The Group Documents feature of Facebook works great for posting House Rules and important links like the Google Drive Shared folder that I use.  See, in trying to keep everyone as active as possible, I've set everything up so that the only thing you need to play is your computer or your smartphone.  Google Drive gives you 5GB of Cloud Storage that you can access from your computer or smartphone.  The Epic Loot part is that you can post the rulebook in a Folder that you share and provide the link to your players.  Also, I spent a little bit of time creating an Auto-Calculating Character Sheet in Excel, then uploading it and converting it to a Google Document Spreadsheet.  I then posted enough sheets for all of my Players into the Player Folder I created in Google Drive.  Now my players can access and edit their character sheets anywhere they are.  No need for printing or carrying anything!!!  And the best part is that as the DM, I always have an up to date character sheet for all of my players!!!

As far as BattleMaps go, I'm using Maptool to manage all of the maps for my campaign.  I asked every player to email me a picture of their character, and then I uploaded that into TokenTool to create a custom PC Token for each Player in the 256x256 size.  I then added the Tokens into Maptool via the File-Add Resource option.  I grabbed the D&D Dungeon Tiles out of the Dungeon Tile Mapper download and added them to Maptool in the same way.  Last part of setup was again going to File-Add Resource, and downloading everything off of the Maptool Repository.  Now I'm able to make some pretty sick BattleMaps!  I made sure the I turned on "Show Token Labels" so that the PC's can see who everyone is.  Make use of the Hidden Layer in Maptool to keep things out of the Players view until need be.  I export screenshots as PNG choosing the Players View option and then I post those screenshots to Facebook as wallposts for my players to see.

I'm keeping things organized by posting DM speech as Wallposts and asking that my players comment on that post for their actions during that round.  So far, so good.

Well, that pretty much sums up my setup so far.  I've got 2 players actively plugged in at the moment, and we should have the other 3 slots filled by today, but initial reports show a positive feedback from the group.  We'll be ready to kick off the action tomorrow if all goes well!  I'm stoked to try this out and even more excited by the prospect of being able to utilize the smartphone for everything you need.  It should drastically speed up the pace of Play by Post by letting you access the game no matter where you are or what you are doing!

I'll post a screenshot from my Maptool setup so you can see what the maps and tokens look like, and I'll try to post something everyday as I learn more and more.  Hopefully some of you will find these things useful, and take some of the things I learn into your own toolbox!

All of the tools and sites that I mentioned are available in the "Links to Goodies" page.  Check them out!!