My enjoyment of D&D 4th Edition continues undimmed. I was glad to setup another Con4eR online space this weekend, so that people could get together and get some more actual play of this terrific version of the game.
Warhorn continues to evolve and is proving to be a super resource for managing an online event, that empowers self serve sign up for games. It really makes things simple. Yes, there are some features that I would like to see in this now open source web application, particularly in archiving old sessions, but it really has just about everything you need, with developments continuing behind the scenes.
With some Discord support, now including Forum style threads, it is a great time to be running events with powerful and free tools to keep everyone togetehr and organised.
It would be great if I could get the Con4eR community more involved in the games. We had three games planned over the weekend, though unavoidably that became two as we got to the event itself. I remain thoughtful about how I can encourage the 70+ members of the community to actively get involved in the gaming weekends; to pitch up and play and run games.
I actually felt a bit rusty when I came to run my game, and was using Foundry for the first time with 4th Edition. I had both Paul and, new to me, Mitchell, who are both fonts of 4e knowledge, and hugely supportive as players. It was a really nice group all round!
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| A screenshot after the players had left |
I must say that I think Foundry is amazing and really needs to be my VTT of choice for this type of game. I’d put some time and effort into the preparation of the game on the platform. Some nice ambience to set mood. My ‘Harpys’ Nest’ went down particularly well! The maps and tokens were all ready to go, so that players could quickly tuck into the encounters. I had missed a couple of things on the sheets, though given how much was on them, really wasn’t too bad, and everyone was very understanding. The Masterplan monster import was wonderful, quickly populating my adversaries. This would all be too much otherwise.
I got better at the targeting and automatic application of damage as the game went on. My continual dumping of damage onto poor old Andrey, the halfling rogue, became slightly amusing, even to her player, Debbie!
It was slightly rash of me to upgrade to the new stable V10 version of Foundry, though the 4e module is fully supported. I was particularly impatient to see how the new Dock functioned. Although theoretically able to place the Dock in ‘Left, Right, Top, Bottom’ positions of your choice, by placing on the Bottom it prevented the chat column from properly scrolling with most recent entries disappearing off the bottom of the screen. The ‘Left’ position seemed to be the least complicated, though players really wanted to pop the Dock out of Foundry completely to get it out of the way. I chose to dispense with the Dock and popped out all the AV windows ont the main canvas, enabling me to size and place them wherever I wanted. I’ll stick with that approach for now. The Livekit AV held up strongly throughout the session with no appreciable dropout of sound or video.
I’m feeling very at home on Foundry and will use it a lot more later this year and next.