Well we had our first session of Dungeon World using Maptool and went reasonably. Only 3 people showed up but that was enough to start with, seeing as this first session was exposure to the rules and the tool. Of course, after telling them all to read the rules for weeks I ended up with one person having read some of the rules and the other 2 not. Par for the course. It didnt take long however to sort of get into the rhythm of the game, which encourages free form expression and the GM interpreting what they are doing. However it also didnt take long for the players to fall into the trap of mechanistically using the action tags to describe what they were doing, will have to work on that a bit more.
Maptool, apart from some macro bugs I over sighted, worked reasonably well. We had some lag moments now and then but that was mostly because everyone was trying to do something at the same time. One habit you have to try to get your players used to is restricting the number of people moving tokens at one time. There are tools for locking out players moving their tokens, which I used in my Savage Worlds module, but I have yet to do so in this module, might have to look into it.
The session ended with the players taking the worst possible path (danger wise) and going up against the EyeLord, the main monster... its really amazing how players can make a bee-line for the monster they are supposed to run into last. They managed to handle it, although it was close, which is good.
As one of the players will be having a baby in the next week and one other is her husband, we have put off the next few sessions.
In the meantime I have been thinking about what other online tools you might use for running a game. One that occurred to me was using a Minecraft world to display the world in 3D, giving them a nice visual element to their exploring. When they run into monsters you simply jump over to whatever combat/encounter tool you are using. In the Minecraft world encounters would be indicated by simply laying down a marker of some kind. I might do the first dungeon as a trial and see how it goes. The benefit of using Minecraft and Dungeon World is the map as you go, create on the fly, method that DW encourages. Converting this to Minecraft is simple as you simply carve out an expanding world as the players reveal it. So you dont have to craft a huge world map to begin.
The other tool I have been looking at is the Roll20 VTT. I am a big fan of Maptool VTT simply because it has fog of war and vision layering, which no other tools had. Well Roll20 now has it, although it is a subscription based feature. It is very much like Maptool, a new layer on the map with tools to lay down vision blockers, and lighting effects. It seems to work quite well. It needs some more tweaking but it a big plus in their favour. With this feature Roll20 compares quite well with Maptool. Maptool still has a much more extensive macro language to automate things with, but Roll20 is much more user friendly, plus it has a 3D dice roller which players like. I'm gonna have a play around with it and come up with an opinion. Certainly the other big thing in their favour is that they are actually working on their tool and upgrading, whereas Maptool seems to be stuck at the moment with updates and trying to move to a 1.4 version.
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