DICE PACKS BUNDLE

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  1. MarianDz's Avatar
    Four words story: "[B]Another Nice puzzle Piece[/B]" ;)
  2. Phystus's Avatar
    Thank you! You're in luck, I just posted the next part here. Enjoy!

    ~P
  3. MarianDz's Avatar
    "[B][I]Phystus[/I][/B]" this was .... GREAT reading!!! Thank you very much. Hope next part will came soon
  4. Phystus's Avatar
    Yep, it's true! Unfortunately when I created my original campaign maps (1987) I was working from a reference that said it was 10 miles... So that's how I picked the 10-mile size originally.

    I guess there's something to be said for journeys taking as much or little time as the plot demands. In some ways precise maps aren't very true to a medieval setting - if you check out real maps from the era it's a wonder anyone got anywhere they intended!
  5. LordEntrails's Avatar
    dulux taught me something new today, a league is 3 miles

    I haven't mapped in hexes in a long time. Mainly because when I map a region I'm usually mapping something that has a (mostly) known size, like a specific kingdom that I have envisioned. And then I'm very imprecise when it comes to travel and I always just estimate it using a scale bar (or a polygon length).
  6. LordEntrails's Avatar
    Thanks for sharing
  7. Phystus's Avatar
    Thanks for your comment, dulux-oz. It just goes to show that you can pick whatever scales seem best to you. If I recall correctly, Judge's Guild used 5 mile hexes for their smallest scale, but I don't remember what they used for more detailed maps.

    It's a good idea to do as you have done and make the size increments consistent. It makes life a lot easier when you're trying to draw a larger-scale map from an existing smaller-scale map. I have to do that fairly often as the players start exploring an area that I haven't detailed before.
  8. dulux-oz's Avatar
    All of this is great info, and I'd like to thank Phystus for it.

    On a personal note, I use scales of 24 miles to the hex for my maps (what I call a Small Hex) because players can move 24 miles a day (this is based on the both the old 1E & 2E D&D rules plus my own experience as an Infantry Officer.

    If I need to go larger then 5 Small Hexes make up a Medium Hex, which is 120 miles across (good for a large County or Duchie - give or take), and if I need to go larger again then 5 Medium Hexes make up, you guessed it, a Large Hex (600 miles or 200 Leagues across).

    Hexes can also be used for area measurements, with 25 Small hexes covering the area of a Medium Hex, and 25 Medium Hexes covering the area of a Large Hex (250K acres, 6,250K acres, and 156,250K acres, respectively).

    Going smaller, I use 1 mile for a Tiny Hex and then switch over to square grids for indoor work.

    I hope this additional information is of use to people.

    Cheers
  9. lesliev's Avatar
    Strange - now that I'm playing with this, I can't get the maps to overflow any more at all, not even on 100% scaling. It definitely was not working before on this version of Wine, so I wonder if something changed with FG.

    In any case, it's nice to have it working!
  10. Phystus's Avatar
    Great! I'm glad it's working for you now.
  11. lesliev's Avatar
    95% looks nicer than 101%, in my opinion. I think I'm going with that.
  12. lesliev's Avatar
    Wow, I had tried the 101% scaling trick but it didn't work before. Now it does seem to be working!

    I'm not sure what it is that made the difference: I am now running FG with Wine 1.9.10 and using primusrun (which renders graphics with my NVidia GPU and then displays it on my Intel GPU). Most likely the difference is the newer version of Wine.

    Everything looks a little fuzzy at 101% but it might be worth it for Zooming to work properly. Thanks!
  13. Phystus's Avatar
    Have you tried the suggestion in the last post here?
  14. Phystus's Avatar
    That's a drag. Have you reported it in the house of healing? I'm pretty sure that's a bug.
  15. lesliev's Avatar
    Zooming doesn't work properly on Linux. I try to keep all my images within 800x600 so there's no need to zoom.
  16. Phystus's Avatar
    Sorry, my mind-reading spell has a range of "Personal".

    But that's another good argument for a big map - whichever way the party goes, they're on the same map!
  17. Minty23185Fresh's Avatar
    "Preloading" - Ha, ironic, I thought about asking while I read your blog then forgot to ask. Thanks for the tour down mind-reading lane! So it really occurs in background? I thought it occurred post-logon, but pre-session, thereby delaying the session until all pre-loads loaded up. But background, that's nice - I'll have to give it a go! Now if I can just borrow your mind reading spell - my players always head in the exact opposite direction that I have prepared myself for!! I'm sure to preload the wrong maps.
  18. Phystus's Avatar
    You probably already know about preloading maps, but just in case other folks aren't aware of the option I feel like I should mention it. Rather than waiting until you're ready to show the map to your players to share it, you can preload the map as soon as everyone is signed in for the session. This causes FG to upload the map to everyone in the background, but doesn't open the map window in the player sessions. Once the map is preloaded to everyone it opens almost instantly when you share it. It makes using big maps a lot less painful as long as you remember to do it.
  19. Phystus's Avatar
    That's a good point. Running a homebrew campaign gives me the luxury of tailoring a lot of things to the party's capabilities. Of course sometimes it lets me tailor things to their weaknesses too. Bwahahahaha!

    I think in general you should make outdoor maps pretty big in terms of ground covered. Most game systems include weapons with pretty substantial range capabilities, whether it's bows, firearms, wire-guided missiles or laser rifles, and players tend to buy them, at least in my experience. They also want to play with these toys, so you should give them the opportunity to do so if you can.

    Making maps that encompass a large area also gives the players more tactical options. One of the things I enjoy the most about GM'ing is seeing my players come up with attack plans that I would never have considered, so giving them more opportunity to do so makes it more fun for me as well as for them. It also helps ensure that nobody feels like they're being railroaded, which can be a hot button for a lot of players.
  20. Phystus's Avatar
    Thanks for the kind words, Minty!

    I have one of my players host the VOIP too, but anything I say (or my wife says, since she's on the same internet connection) uses upload bandwidth. I hadn't considered running it on my phone. I'm not sure how much data that would consume, I have a pretty sparse data plan so I'm not sure if that would be a problem or not.

    I think you're kind of stuck with image sizes in canned campaigns. I guess in theory you might be able to unzip them, manipulate the images and re-zip them, but it would be a pain in the butt. I don't know how possible that is with the WOTC stuff either, I think there's some sort of copy protection on those.
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