Pathfinder on the Tabletop

For about the last 8 months or so, me and the family have been playing through the opening adventure path for Pathfinder, Rise of the Runelords, and have been having a blast with it.

We had been playing the old fashioned way, with inch squared paper maps and figures which was working great through the first 2 chapters, we hit something of a snag when it came to Retaking Rannick - a full on assault by the PC's on a Fort occupied by Ogres. I drew the map on paper in pencil in 1 inch squares and it was truly massive. Barely a quarter of the map would occupy our entire table which would not do at all, neither would setting it up on the floor as we have pets and arthritic knees to consider these days.

Spurred into the idea of an alternative method of portraying the map I mounted my projector above our table and ran the cables around the ceiling and down the wall to an eager laptop.

Next came the mission of finding a way to get the map displayed in a way that I could limit what the players could see, which led me to Maptool from RPTools. A few hours of tutorials and playing around with it and my maps were ready.

We had some teething trouble with the tech to start with, accompanied by a less than perfect battle strategy by the PC's but finally got to the combat which ran a lot smoother from that point onwards.

Overall I'm rather impressed with what I managed to cobble together in about 2-3 days, and especially impressed with Maptool itself. Just thought I'd share the experience.

 

My better half got me some mini's for xmas (paid way too much for them since she didn't really know what to look for), painted the first pair of figures a couple of weekends ago...

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Avc-9M3GAF0BpcVEECQr6gQOwTngvw

 

Ok, time for a little update on how our game is going.

After being initially impressed by Maptool, I figured I'd try out Fantasy Grounds... reason being, even though Maptool is funtionally pretty good, the UI is an ugly brute, so my thinking was if I splash a little cash, perhaps I can get a Virtual Table Top program that does what I want it to, and looks good too.

The ability to purchase preconfigured adventure paths from Fantasy Grounds and/or get discounts on preconfigured adventures already purchased from Paizo was a nice touch, and for an added bonus, Fantasy Grounds is the only VTT (other than Maptool) that I found that doesn't require a monthly subscription fee. A one off payment for a players licence isn't too steep, and there is the option of upgrading to the DM's package which allows you to connect remotely to any Fantasy Grounds player even if they only have a free account.

Fantasy Grounds currently doesn't support a fog of war effect that uncovers the map as the players progress around the map, instead the map is uncovered manually by the DM, there are plans to include fig of war in the future, once Fantasy Grounds gets ported to the Unity engine. Maptool however does have this feature, and I can move the PC and NPC tokens around and show what is visible to players from wherever they stand.

This past month or so however Fantasy Grounds has been giving me some issues, whereas before it was working just fine, recently it has become laggy when connecting the DM's server instance of Fantasy Grounds to the Players instance of the program as a LAN game (my DM's screen is effectively the back of the laptop screen with a DM screen around it to help shield dice rolls from players) and the players use the projected map images on the table for the figures and monsters etc... I think perhaps it has something to do with some huge custom maps I've added recently.

I added the maps of Turtleback Ferry and Sandpoint blown up to the point that players can use these town maps as battle maps of extremely low resolution (which looks ugly, but the functionality of being able to scroll in/out with the wheel mouse on battles straddling multiple locations a large distance apart is awesome).

We have perhaps one more session before taking on the Stones over Sandpoint part of Chapter 4, Stone Giants attacking the small town where the adventure began, I've been looking forward to this bit for months, but since FG is unreliable currently, I'm reverting back to using Maptools which seems to run these huge maps just fine.

 

It probably is to do with the size of some of the maps I've added, which is both avoidable and reversible, but not in line with how I want to run these large scale battles.

I did click the update button after the last patch, thanks for the suggestion though. I think I read also that sharing many resources with the players uses a lot of memory, which is probably another contributing factor.

Incidentally, our game has been running for 1 year exactly, and we're only half way through this first adventure path. I don't think I've had a group of players advance higher than 13th level so far and I have never had a PC die in any of my games... these are statistics that are going to change. Mwahahaha.

 

I would LOVE Dwarven Forge, unfortunately it's prohibitively pricey for someone on my income, so for now I'm blowing what little spare cash I have buying up monster miniatures for my tabletop game.

I was pricing up all the mini's I need for the last 3 books of RotRL on the Reaper website... £367 - and most of that was the cheaper Bones mini's. I opted to just grab under a 3rd of that to tide me over for now.

I did buy the AP on Fantasy Grounds, so the whole thing is pre-configured, they will soon be releasing Fantasy Grounds Unity (hopefully) which does have the dynamic lighting and fog of war options, so I'll probably hold out for that release, but if it ends up being awful I'll look into Roll20.

 

Fantasy Grounds do offer reduced price products if you already bought the PDF files from the Paizo website and link your FG and Paizo accounts, they basically reimburse the cost of the PDF if you already own it. At least it works that way for the Adventure Path modules.

 

Just in case some of you are unaware, the Pathfinder 2 Playtest pdf files are available to download for free now from the Paizo website. Syrinscape are also giving away free sound sets to accompany the free 7 part playtest adventure.