I've been looking at mapping tools for tabletop rpg gaming, and by far the most capable one I've found to date is Maptool, from rptools: http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=maptool.  I've been hoping to make use of this with a couple of laptops in a face to face game.   While this is conceived as an aid to long distance gaming, it's capabilities (especially the fog of war and vision handling) seem useful even for an in-person game.

It's really quite a powerful tool, and offers:

• shared maps visible to all players
• movement measuring
• movable tokens representing players and other, non players
• vision blocking
• light sources
• fog of war with automatic reveal

The demos at their tutorial site are pretty exciting, and got me really pumped to start using this.

I've spent quite a bit of time working to convert a traditional module, which I have in paper form, into a Maptool campaign.  I chose one of the basic dungeon crawl style adventures, the old AD&D module B2 Keep on the Borderlands.

I started by scanning the 2 page map from the module, stitching the maps together, and then creating maps in the Maptool campaign.  Actually, I created two maps, one for the surface, and one for the dungeon layers.

Then for the dungeon layer in particular, I thought the easiest path forward was to just import the scan as a background / map image.  This has the risk of revealing information to the players like traps or secret doors, which I'm dealing with by either covering up key stuff on the map or just extending trust to the players.

I then draw a huge vision blocking rectangle over the whole dungeon map, and carved out exceptions on a tunnel by room basis.  I further covered the whole map with fog of war.

That said, there's been a number of issues that've prevented me from using this map so far:

• The user interface is, at best, clunky and non-friendly:
• Consistently, operations that should be obvious in the UI are non-obvious.  
• Scrolling the map is right click drag, instead of left click drag on any open map area.  There are no visual controls to scroll (e.g. the google maps rosette)
• To reverse the sense of an operation, hold down the shift key.  For example, drawing a vision blocking rect with shift held down removes vision blocking from an area.  Hold the shift key, click a token and drag to change it's facing.  Things like this should be a separate control.
• The UI is inconsistent.  For example, clicking a token to select it doesn't always work on the first click.  
• When moving tokens, enabling snap to grid has the effect of visually displacing the token destination from the apparent token position, and tokens can end up somewhere different than expected.  With large vision blocking areas set, players can easily accidentally lose their token in an area where they can't see it to click on it again.
• If there's multiple 'player' tokens on the map, it's not always obvious which player token's vision is being used to reveal stuff on each player's map.  Nor does there appear to be a way to select which player token is used for which connected player.
• I've had problems with different java versions on linux
• I've had problems with loading a large campaign map from network connected clients, on a lan.
• The interactions between vision blocking and fog of war are weird.   I have instances on my map where stuff which is completely covered by a vision blocking rect are shown as having been revealed to the player.  Reapplying fog of war to these areas have no effect.  Note that players can't see into the area.

Unfortunately, the problems above have been significant enough that so far it's stopped me from using this. I'm really bummed, 'cause I'm enthused about the possibilities here and have put a lot of time into making this map.  I'm still working on it, and hope to be successful at some point.  I'm also willing to put in quite a bit of time and learning on my own sake.  However I'm not going to impose a tool that requires a considerable UI learning curve on my players.  Have to see how this goes.


-- Pat