Hi All!

I was thinking (and I don't do that often) about respresenting ship combat but without the use of miniatures on a table. Now, I don't really have the room to start placing models/counters/etc on the table and using rulers, or placing down a grid map. To be honest, the table isn't THAT big once we get character sheets, coasters for drinks, bowls of nibbles, books, dice, pencils, rubbers, and the laptop onto it...

...so I was wondering if anyone new of some kind of simple (perhaps Flash Based) program which maybe showed a grid map and pieces which can be placed and moved anywhere? Maybe with a zoom function, but I'm not too fussed either way.

Or if anyone has any other ideas how to conduct ship combat without it being entirely in our heads (cos that would be such a ball ache )

Any ideas?

For those of you who don't use miniatures/counters/etc, how do you deal with it?

I haven't started my games yet, but I'm planing on using BattleGrounds to do exactly that. I'll have my laptop plugged into a monitor that the group can see, while I work on the Laptop screen.

the program is at: http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/ This is a full fledged VTT - but for what you described it will work perfectly... then if you wanted to dip in to some of it's other features you could do that at your leisure.

There are several VTT's I personally own and have used Battlegrounds, Fantasy Grounds II, iTable, and Maptools.

Map tools is free, and would do what you want, but like I said, from your description, Battlegrounds sounds like the way you'd want to go.

zWolf -out.

I'll check them all out.

Thank you very much for this information, I'm sure it will prove invaluable... since my Google-fu is weak

Again, many thanks!

I've had lookt theabove mentioned programs and I seem to like the fairly intuitive nature of Maptools.

I just have a couple of problems holding me back at the moment. Firstly, can you give your counter a "facing"? This is obviously so we can tell which way the ship is heading. And Secondly, is there a way to import more counters, because I'd rather not use and elf and a dwarf as ship tokens,

Otherwise, this is pretty much spot on for what I need!

If you are using MapTool I'd suggest getting TokenTool from the same website. Dead easy to make new counters that way, you can use any image you wish if you're not a great artist like me, just drag and drop.

I'll not try and explain facing and things myself but I would suggest watching the excellant video tutorials available at www.rptoolstutorials.net .

I've used Maptool very successfully to run a WFRP campaign. I really liked it, and I think a few guys over on the WFRP board here at FFG still mess around with it... Any questions people can't answer here you can pitch over there!

Maptools is so cool! Been tinkering with it all morning. Now all we need are some top-down views of 40k starships to convert into counters.

The trouble is, what with GW's ability to crackdown on even a slight sniff of others using their IP, I find that possibility highly unlikely

That's where I think a lot of the big gaming companies are missing a trick. Look at the high number of onlines games, both console and PC, but still, when a new ruleset for either an RPG or wargame is released why not release a digital version along with official tools to run a campaign online?

It would certainly make sense for GW, given the collection aspect of the minis. Why not sell digital versions of the same minis to be used in an online version of Warhammer or 40K? Look at Magic Online for something similar, you still have to buy the cards to play.

You immediately open up your games to a much wider audiance, it allows players more convienience, it won't have a massive effect on sales of the minutures in stores, people will still want to collect and paint a "hardcopy" and the extra revenue bought in will more than pay for any software development costs incurred.

Well isn't blood bowl online kinda a feeler for that. As far as I was told GW will want to go on with it if it can hold its own without too much marketing ect. Its a tester, so we might see something like that in the future.

UncleArkie said:

I suppose it is, although something like Bloodbowl is probably easier to covert to a video game as it has set rules and functions so keeps easily within set boundaries that can be hard coded in.

In regard to RPG's, you still need to leave a little room for the GM to develop and tell the story while the computer does all the fiddly book keeping bits and assists you in visualising it all to the players. Think Neverwinter Nights with a lot more on top.

Actually, there is a funny little story about the new bloodbowl PCgame and copyright. Gather round you all.

For many years there was a sweet little java-scripted program, strictly non-commersial and free to own and play. This java program was created by some BB-fans who wanted to be able to play BloodBowl over the net. It worked so well that tens of thousands of BB-fans played it and the fanboys who created it always kept it up to date with the proper rules and all the offical teams. Sometimes some things got a slight change of names to not make the copyright infringement too obvious. A few years ago GWs dreaded army of lawyers of doom descended upon these happy geeks, and the java-game was no longer available. There was much grief on the net. But lo and behold! GW announced:
-Hey guys, you did a great job on computerising this game. Would you like to do it properly with a budget and stuff this time?
The happy bloodbowl geeks had feared for they and their families would have to pay recompensations for generations to come, but now they were mightily relieved and said:
-We'd love to!

Thus the BloodBowl computer game was born and produced in a record short time. A more interactive actionn-mode of playing was added to sell the game to people who usually play computer games. The original turnbased was left in place for us TT-gamers. And they lived happily ever after!

Use Excel

It works really well actually, and is very simple to use. Adjust the grid to a square pattern, and simply add Autoshapes to represent the models. Drag'n'drop, fill with different colours, etc.

It sounds like you've got thing's figured out but you could always look at a piece of hex paper or graph paper and find some equally size appropriate tokens as a space saving alternative to a big miniature board!