Using VCC with Miniatures
Submitted by Nebulorum on Sun, 2009-04-05 01:49
In my game I don't use minitures. While some of my player like minis, we are in general happy enough with numbered tokens. This was the initial way VCC was build.
I was wondering if there would be something that would make VCC friendlier to mini. I would number the mini, but on another thread fnwc posted this:
I don't have much a case for sorting the reserve, only that it makes it easier to find things when you're doing first battle prep. We use miniatures, so I enter notes into the monster fields to describe the corresponding miniature (e.g., orc with axe, orc with sword).
I have considered adding these short descriptions to allow the PC to have a laptop connected to VCC (via a browser) and allow them to manage the initiative sequence, and how is bloodied (but not total HP or other combatant stats). Are there thinks that could help?
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Regarding your idea --- if I
Regarding your idea --- if I understand you correctly, that means you'll have to run a web server of some sort to expose VCC to port 80. Personally, the description field is enough for my group. I just use the description field to essentially be a larger ID field; only I have a laptop at the table, I probably wouldn't use this feature, but it seems like a cool idea.
I had another idea which would take a lot of work, but would help with the annotation of combatants. The problem is, it would use up a lot of the UI space.
Basically some kind of basic grid/token UI that would tie the combatants to a location.
The idea isn't to replace the physical mat that the players use, it's just a reference for the DM within VCC since a lot of the times it's not feasible to mark miniatures easily. This does seem like a bit of work to implement, however, since you'd need to be able to drag and drop the tokens as well has have sizable tokens for larger creatures: screenshot.
Interesting Idea
Yes the idea is to have some kind of web interface. Maybe some simple views of the current combat state. I have a friend that event thought of create a PDA or i-Phone viewer. This is kind of in the future. Another use of the web interface is the capture of data from D&D Insider. I have a Firefox extension that allows you to send pages from D&DI to the webserver (eventually VCC).
As for the battle grid, there are a lot of compelling reasons to have one. It allows controlling: zones, auras, flanking, line of sight, etc. But I wonder if there is enough space on the screen, and if a practical way to implement it. This is in my long range plan. Plus table top D&D has to deal with things like flying, varying heights, and complex terrain. There are good reasons to have one, and good reasons to avoid it :)