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DM Helper

Your Ultimate Virtual Tabletop for Tabletop RPGs · By DM Helper

Quick Review: Preliminary findings for running on Tables with built in screens

A topic by Balmong7 created Jul 10, 2019 Views: 307 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 2

So I have not yet run the actual game with my players yet. However I did some quick testing last night to see if this app was going to work for running the game from. Here are my findings:

Player view needs some more control. If I want to display a tall map, there's no way for me to rotate the player view to make this fit the screen. If you are using tokens this wouldn't be an issue, however when you are trying to get the zoom to fit in such a way that the players can put physical minis on the screen, this becomes an important feature. In a worse case scenario I could just crop the long portion out of the larger map and rotate the image before importing into DM helper. However if would nice to just be able to upload my mega dungeon map and do any tweaks within the program.

The rotate function would also help, as my players are sat around a table, so if I'm displaying an image of an NPC, or text I want them to read, the ability to rotate the image to make it easy to view for each side of the table would be nice. 

The encounter builder seems really reliant on the use of the in game tokens and the built in LOS/FOW features. Since I don't plan on using tokens, but rather my own miniatures. it would be nice if I could just edit the fog of war manually during encounters, rather than having to do the fog of war stuff in the maps window, and then just keep hitting publish to update it. 

The initiative tracker is great.

The bestiary is great

I love that I can publish photos of the monsters and NPC's to the player view, rather than just battlemaps (without having to trick the program into thinking the pictures of NPC's are battlemaps).

I would love to be able to have adventure specific NPC's rather than all NPC's going into the "Setting" category. I often have one-off NPC's that are important for an adventure then usually don't return, but might. 

I will probably be back with more stuff after I actually run the game with my players. As a planning and running tool this app seems awesome. Running the maps on the table is the big draw for me in using this app, so whether  I continue with it or not all depends on how quick and easy it is. 

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate the effort! This is a lot to chew on, I'll have to figure out how to fit this in. Rotation is high on the priority of what needs to be done and I definitely agree about editing the FoW in the map screen, it is a little cumbersome. 

So I understand, you're looking to use the battle dialog to be able to run battles, track initiative, etc, but want to regularly and easily edit the FoW while that is going?

Right, rather than have the token based line of sight. I want to just be able to edit the fog of war manually. Because I won't be using the tokens. but my own minis placed on the TV screen. 


I'll also add here that I put these wish list items in here with no consideration for dev time and difficulty. So I understand if something isn't possible, and right now I can sort of make my own solutions within the framework of what you have developed. (currently I'm planning to just using the map screen, rather than the battle dialogue for displaying the map, and just make my edits, then hit publish and resize as needed)

Developer

OK thanks for the confirmation. Don't worry about the dev time, the most useful thing for us to hear is what the features are that people really want to use. Those ones will get priority.

I assume you know you can turn off the visibility of all of the icons on the battleground.

To be honest, the visualization of the battle onto the player's window is a little tricky and will likely need an overhaul to support animated maps anyways, so that may takea  while. Editing the map directly should be pretty straight-forward, but I'll need to figure out how to make it work properly.