What's new in battle mapping?

[garyh]

Hi folks! Some of you may remember me, as I used to frequent the PbP boards quite some time ago. In any case, I've got a question for you:

What's new in battle mapping?

I'm going to be playing some PbP with a group of geographically-spread and schedule-challenged RL friends, and I'm curious on if there've been any advances in the technique. When last I PbP'ed, the most common way to map a battle on the boards was a spreadsheet screenshot. Is there anything new and exciting in how battles can be visually tracked for a PbP game? With 4e being even more reliant on positioning, it'd seem to me an illustration would be a must.

Any help you can suggest or examples you can point to would be much appreciated!

 

[garyh]

Bump!

The attached is what I whipped up to show my friend, who's DMing and has never PbPed, how battles were tracked. Anyone doing anything better than that these days?

Thanks!

 

[Zurai]

There's MapTool, a free cartography/game table tool. It's pretty solid and once you get past the learning curve, pretty powerful too. This thread shows some examples of my use of it in a 4E PbP I'm running.

 

[garyh]

That's a REALLY neat looking tool, Zurai, and totally kicks my silly Excel sheet around the block. I'll pass that along to our DM.

Your game also looks like a lot of fun, and I'll also pass that along so the other players (I'm the only one with PbP experience) can get a good idea what we're aiming for.

Thanks!

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Zurai is running me in a game and now I'm totally ripping off his posting style in my own game.

 

[Zurai]

To be fair, I ripped it off from s@squ@tch.

 

[Redclaw]

Where did you get all of the images, Zurai?

 

[Zurai]

The trees I got from a link in the MapTools forum. The logs, firepit, and bedrolls are from the Gallery link on the MapTools page.

The tokens I made myself with TokenTool, which is from the same people that make MapTool. I just used Google Image Search to find an appropriate picture and plopped it into TokenTool and saved out a token to use.

 

[s@squ@tch]

To be fair, I ripped it off from s@squ@tch.

And I ripped it off from Malvoisin/Ye Olde Albatross.

 

[Malvoisin]

And I ripped it off from Malvoisin/Ye Olde Albatross.

You forgot about 10 other aliases, there, s@s....

I learned about MapTool from takasi, but I think he actually used it for its intended purpose, a virtual real-time gaming table application.

But, by fiddling with it, I realized you could make some pretty nifty combat maps for PbP.

'Course, now that I'm stuck with a dial-up internet connection from home, it makes it more frustrating than anything to upload stuff...