2011-07-16

Using Fantasy Grounds and Skype

For our last session, we placed using Fantasy Grounds II and Skype.  It was a fairly short session, as Gutboy had a bunch of problems getting his microphone working and it took a while to resolve it all.  Then we had a "training period" where we figured out how to roll dice and fill in character sheets.

Overall, it went fairly smoothly.  I have a few quibbles with Fantasy Grounds, mostly with the "masking" feature for maps.  If you accidentally unmask something, you have to wipe out everything you've unmasked and start all over again.  I'd also appreciate being able to draw arbitrary polygons instead of just free-form and rectangles.  These probably aren't issues for "battle map" style games like 4th edition, but for a megadungeon with lots of odd-shaped rooms it's a big deal.

So the two players virtually attending were a bit nervous, as always, about tackling the dungeon with reduced numbers, so they monkeyed around in Denethix instead.  The old landlord has been jettisoned (and apparently won't be converted to Morlock food, how sad - I was hoping for acts of brigandry and cannibalism), and Mr. Roper has taken his place.  Is this the first campaign to draw inspiration from "Three's Company" ?  I'll toss Mrs. Roper into the mix at some point, and see if I can stir up some intrigue in the apartment building.

I introduced a bit of the seedier side of Denethix - hafnium addiction.  That's one of the less notable narcotics.  Wait til they run into the Variegated Eye-Leech addicts...

There was a lot of focus on Mongo's book, so I was just making things up to amuse myself.  I had no idea what its evil powers were - I was thinking more along the lines of evil stat increases, but then the players decided to have the elven sage cast "identify" on it, and he identified a power.  So I blurted out "it grants desires."  Had to roll with it from there - so now Mongo can trade evil acts for fantastic prizes.  To quote Mongo's player:  "There's no way this can turn out bad."

1 comment:

  1. I run a game on Sunday evenings using Ventrillo & MapTools. All of the game play is virtual and it has worked really well. We've been playing a Stonehell Dungeon campaign since January or so. My only complaint is that dice rolling on MapTools could be better.

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