Resourcing Hero games on Roll20

[Doc Democracy 753]

There have been a few threads talking about using Roll20 to play Hero games.

 

It is a lot of work to get things looking decent. I have created a sandbox over on Roll20. I will make anyone who joins a GM so that we can all work on generating resources that we can bring back here to share.

 

:-)

 

If you want to go look at the sandbox I have been playing with, you would be more than welcome. You can join the sandbox at https://app.roll20.net/join/1628298/KcEqwA and I will give you GM rights so that you can look at the guts of everything.

 

 

 

 

 

Doc

[Doc Democracy 753]

OK.  First character is done.  I have put Maelstrom in the sandbox and uploaded the macros as a PDF to the boards.

 

Right now if you are on the site you can use the macros to see how it looks on the chat.  If you sign up then you can tinker with both the text and the functionality.

Right now it only does basic stuff - I have not attempted to draw out the defences or even to check if the attack hit or not.

 

The dice do not, to my limited knowledge, allow me to display STUN and BODY and so I have gone with STUN.  If you hover over the result in the chat box then it displays all of the d6 results - highlighting sixes in green and ones in red - allowing a quick calculation of BODY.

 

I have also included some additional information that could be useful in play. 

 

Doc

[Doc Democracy 753]

I am beginning to get a hang of the macro language on the site.  There are limitations - the big one being you cannot display both STUN and BODY of a the same roll of dice (though I coming round to the idea of rolling twice and displaying - it should not be too disparate too often and it might even be reasonably interesting not to always know that a high STUN is accompanied by high BODY and vice versa).

 

If folk do play on Roll20, please chat here to see if there is stuff I might play with and see if I can find a resolution or come over, join the sandbox and try it yourself...

 

 

Doc 

[Doc Democracy 753]

I was having problems in creating a list of manoeuvre macros.  I have worked it through and produced a guidance document that might prove useful to others.

 

You can see that document here.

[Nolgroth 1,145]

Wow. That has really extended the Roll20 utility. 

[Doc Democracy 753]

Thank you. I am hoping to put together a HERO toolkit, documenting my construction of that to help anyone else that wants to use Roll20 not just to be able to use the stuff I have done but to extend and adapt it to their game.

 

It us all pretty simple once you are in there meddling but it looks awfully difficult and abstruse from an outside perspective. A bit like HERO really! :-)

[Doc Democracy 753]

If anyone is on here and there is something they would like to automate in their Roll20 game, pitch it here, or join the HERO Sandbox game on Roll20 (link above) and pitch it over there.

 

Sometimes the big issue is trying to work out what to try and do rather than how to actually do it.

 

There are 117 games on Roll20 with 939 players. I am presuming a chunk of these are playing regularly. It would be nice if more of them were aware of the sandbox and were keen to jump in and play or just to call out wants that others might try to meet. Like build conversations on these boards.

 

 

Doc

[Shigeru 18]

I'd just like to point out how much progress DD has made in Roll20 for the purposes of allowing a GM to implement some time-saving macros to their game. Its impressive and I can't wait to start playing with the results. 

[Doc Democracy 753]

Aw shucks! Thank you. Long way to go and plenty of room for folk to improve and add more.

 

Would be useful for people even to set challenges and highlight problems. :-)

[Nolgroth 1,145]

I tried very hard to use the Roll20 macro language, but my mind is stuck too deeply into MTScript. I will probably try again after my current project is completed.

[Doc Democracy 753]

Yeah, dont worry about it.  However, if there were things you wanted to try out just tell me and I can tinker while you finish your project.  When you are you may come back to all the things you wanted to do, done and be able to go onto better things.  :-)

 

I am enjoying tinkering - who would have thought that of a HERO advocate....

 

 

Doc

[Nolgroth 1,145]

 

 

I am enjoying tinkering - who would have thought that of a HERO advocate....


Doc

I don't get the connection.

[Doc Democracy 753]

I will begin bringing things over soon. This displays an aspect of my Belbin profiling (analyses the role you play in a team). I scored 0 in "finishing/completing". I am not the guy who crosses the t's, dots the i's and ensures everything is delivered. I am, apparently a mix of what they call Plant (creative, unorthodox and generators of ideas) and Shaper (people who challenge the team to improve).

 

What that seems to mean is that I am incredibly excited about new stuff, want to introduce it, want to keep tinkering until it is good enough to do the job it is intended for and then loses interest in the last bits that might make it usable for everyone else...

 

:-)

 

So I a tinkering and solving problems but not packaging up and bring the solutions back to the boards...

 

I will force myself to overcome my natural inclinations and in time will continue posting character solutions here.

 

 

Doc

 

PS: this post is an exercise in self-shaming. Part of my process to overcome that lack of finishing by making public promises...

[Shigeru 18]

I will try to implement some of this stuff in the near future. It is already a lot of time to get my act together for my two games as well as "run my regular life" but I am still interested.

[TheDarkness 451]

Out of curiosity, I know from my limited and recent experience on Roll20 in a D&D game, that turn order can be automated.

 

It seems to me that that might be even easier for Hero, since turn order is set. Have you messed with how to set this up?

 

[As an aside, in a few days I will join the sandbox]

[cptpatriot 58]

Here is an example I use in my V&V game.

 

This macro puts up a small box that shows the selected player's roll and adds them to the Turn Order box

&{template:default}{{name= Initiative}} {{@{selected|token_name}'s Initiative Roll=[[?{Agility}+1d10 &{tracker} ]]}}

The key is this:

 

[[?{Agility}+1d10 &{tracker} ]]

 

This sequence takes the number (Agility + 1d10) and adds the result, sending it to the Turn Order Box

[Doc Democracy 753]

Out of curiosity, I know from my limited and recent experience on Roll20 in a D&D game, that turn order can be automated.

 

It seems to me that that might be even easier for Hero, since turn order is set. Have you messed with how to set this up?

 

[As an aside, in a few days I will join the sandbox]

 

Turn Order is something I have wrestled with.  It is not obvious from the Macro language - you cannot appear twice on the turn order but for HERO to work you need to appear multiple times per turn and each person appears a different number of times.  It actually shows the complexity.  I am not a pro subscriber and so don't get to use the scripting tools, I think it would be possible to do it using them.

 

Doc

[TheDarkness 451]

Here is an example I use in my V&V game.

 

This macro puts up a small box that shows the selected player's roll and adds them to the Turn Order box

&{template:default}{{name= Initiative}} {{@{selected|token_name}'s Initiative Roll=[[?{Agility}+1d10 &{tracker} ]]}}

The key is this:

 

[[?{Agility}+1d10 &{tracker} ]]

 

This sequence takes the number (Agility + 1d10) and adds the result, sending it to the Turn Order Box

Thanks!

[TheDarkness 451]

Turn Order is something I have wrestled with.  It is not obvious from the Macro language - you cannot appear twice on the turn order but for HERO to work you need to appear multiple times per turn and each person appears a different number of times.  It actually shows the complexity.  I am not a pro subscriber and so don't get to use the scripting tools, I think it would be possible to do it using them.

 

Doc

Ah, that makes sense. I suspect I'll be spending some money soon. Between being in China and wanting to run some Hero, and developing my own game, scripting is something I find myself in need of getting more knowledge of.

[Shigeru 18]

I don't do much with scripting for my Roll20 Hero game. In fact, I have done more with it since stealing from Doc Democracy's work in the Champions sandbox he built than I ever did on my own. He's got some good ideas as to how to accomplish some things I'd never considered.

 

Roll20 is good for flexibility at the expense of a DIY approach to everything.

[Shigeru 18]

For TURN orders, I usually load up the pertinent Heroes, villains, NPCs and vehicles for my session in Hero Designer and export the Combat Record, sorted by SPD and DEX, as an HTML file. Then I open that up in a new browser tab, so I can go to and from Roll20 and my participant data. I keep a Notepad file open to manage things like Flashes, Entangles or whatnot. 

[Christopher R Taylor 2,993]

If I ever manage to run another game it will probably be on this platform.  I liked Maptools but its an enormous expenditure of labor up front for the GM every time.

[Doc Democracy 753]

Well, Roll20 does need some effort to get it properly working and it can make you feel you need to do more. However, you can do it all with a couple of very basic maps and tokens and do everything else on the fly...

[Cantriped 575]

Instead of trying to replicate the Speed Chart within Roll20s extant Turn System; would it be easier to use the extant turn structure to represent Segments instead (and therefore only include in the turn order the characters who have a phase that segment)?

I've never used Roll20, so I know very little about it... and don't actually know how easy/hard it is to add/remove characters from the turn order.

[Doc Democracy 753]

I think that the best solution in Roll20 is likely to be a custom card deck where each player has the number of cards as they have phases, with some design work, I think it should be possible to do a player by player run through of who should be next. Trouble would come with delays etc but I think it might be workable. Will be my next experiment, haven't actually played with the cards much...