The second part of the interview with Ben McFarland is up.
Now as we enter the final stretch before development begins in earnest with, here's a new screenshot. This time we're looking at the chat functionality and how this works with dice rolling and macros to make combats slick and fast.
Here the combat has taken a turn for the worse for our players. The rogue breached the magic circle and now the dragon is free to full attack.
In this screenshot I've showed what the chat output looks like for the player and the GM. First you can see the Kellen's attack as he swipes (ineffectually) with his flaming longsword. Now one risk of playing online is that a player might decide to just write in their dice roll, rather than rolling the dice. Maptool offers a way to avoid that (other than just being suspicious of any player that rolls 5 20s in a row...). You can mouse over the number and if the roll is legit, a tooltip will pop up. If it's a dice roll it will show what was rolled. If it's a calculation, such as roll + base attack + strength + weapon focus, then it will show all those bonuses too. So you can be safe in the knowledge that your players are behaving themselves, whether they're on the other side of the GM screen, or on the other side of the world.
The dragon's full attack shows the time saving possibilities in maptool. It would take a decent amount of time to roll all the dragon's attacks at the table, find the relevant modifiers and dice, and then roll the damage. Here one click of one button and the GM (and the GM only) gets a full break down of the attack.
Note that our plan is not to have maptool decide whether an attack has hit or not, or automatically apply damage. Pathfinder is inherently based on exceptions. There will often be odd bonuses or penalties imposed in a fight (+ because you got higher ground, -2 because your character has a phobia of dragons). Equally, the GM may have modifiers for the enemies that they don't want the players to know about. Therefore we let the GM see all the attack and damage rolls. They then decide who has hit, and who has missed, and tells people the damage to apply. If you want to fudge a roll, you can. If you just don't want the player's to know that their sword is actually cursed and gives them -4 to hit dragons then that's fine too. And you can do it without worrying about the code giving you away.
These features make combat easy and quick. I now use maptool for face to face games even if the players can't see it. It makes hp tracking, initiative tracking and running monster attacks so much faster than before. It's nice to have combats that run fast again!
The details of how combat is managed within maptool will be a subject that we'll be debating in detail with our patrons. Sign up now at
The Breaking of Forstor Nagar!
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