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Here's a shot of the action from tonight's 4th Edition Darksun game played over G+!


On display is a fight between the players and some Gith Savages with their Minotaur ally at the mouth of a cave leading to the underdark. I think on there is a zone of ravenous flesh eating flies (the red zone), another zone of DIFFERENT swarming vermin (the blue zone) a wall of thorns (the green zone). Oh and I almost forgot, the yellow zone is an area of Lightning I think!?. Later, multiple opponents were slowed or prone.

Thank god for Maptool is what I say!

Anyone else got some good in game shots from their RPGs?

Been there. Now imagine doing it with erasable markers and keeping track of status effects as you go.

Actually, at some point we just gave up, and used a projector on the wall to put a map up really big, then moved our characters around by smacking sticky notes on the wall (what can I say, I didn't have any fancy image editing or rpg over computer tools. We used what we had). Wish I would have saved a picture of that.

 dementedwombat wrote:
Been there. Now imagine doing it with erasable markers and keeping track of status effects as you go.

Yeah, this. Combat has always been like this in RPGs. You are representing a complex battlefield in your mind. If you want everyone to share that, you need to either be able to describe well or find some way to represent it on the table.

When I started, we were university and used to either do everything via description (the usual method) or sometimes if we could sneak into a tutorial room, we'd use the blackboards for quick sketch maps. The mapping software actually improves play a lot and speeds things up as people know automatically where everything is and can forgo questions. Plus, I enjoy making the maps!

There's some great cards online to speed up 4e combat. Basically, cards for the standard effects, so you can hand them out to kept rack of things easier. Most are relatively obvious, but knowing the difference between stun/daze (if I remember correctly) and a few others is very important.

We use sheet protectors and wet erase markers on our character sheets for 3rd through 4th. That made things a lot easier to keep track of everything.

 pretre wrote:
We use sheet protectors and wet erase markers on our character sheets for 3rd through 4th. That made things a lot easier to keep track of everything.

This. We used different color coded plastic soda pop bottle rings for status effects. Coke is red, and so if a someone/something were Bloody they would get a ring tossed on them. Defenders usually picked their color to use for their marks. As you can see here, Desani water gets you a blue ring.



We also had little tags with the listing of different effects attached to tiny rubber bands one of our more ambitious crafters made. For zones we just used color beads.

that's a cool idea! We had those little marker things that GF9 or someone sold but I like the simplicity of that better.