It works very similarly to playing with others except, it's over a server connection. There's a game board that the Zargon/Morcar player can populate with monsters, furniture, etc. Zargon/Morcar can set the game up in real time or ahead of time with the Invisible feature. All tiles, figures, and furniture can toggle between invisible and visible. This cuts down on the time a lot. Speaking of time, drathe and I have been playing the Ogre Horde quests for about a month now. I'm Zargon and he plays the Heroes, and it takes us anywhere from 5 to 6 hours to play a quest. (drathe, can you confirm that timeframe?) That might seem like a long time, but we have a lot of fun (and the Ogre Horde quests
are kinda hard). There's a message window where you and the other players can tell each other what they're doing, or even better, talk in funny voices pretending to be the Heroes.
It's really a blast! What's even better is that if a quest is going too long and some of the players have to leave, you can save a quest in the middle and everything stays in place til you load the save again.
There's a treasure card deck that automatically shuffles before you draw a card (we think). Or if you want to use a custom treasure deck, you could probably let one player draw the cards wherever they're at and then type the result in the message window.
There's also players' inventories windows, where the Heroes can put their equipment, artifacts, potions, gold. There's a window for Morcar's stuff too, but the Hero players can't open that window. I usually put the treasure potions in there, so that as soon as drathe draws a Potion of Healing, or a Heroic Brew, I can immediately put it on the board for him to transfer to his inventory. You can make any kind of item or potion you want, but they really don't do anything, they're just names. If you lose or gain body points you have to change your BP value by yourself, just like crossing off BP on a character sheet.
Our last quest on Saturday took a little less time (3.5 to 4 hours) because we decided to get on Skype and talk out our actions (when drathe opened doors and searched for traps, etc. and when I pointed out traps and secret doors, etc.) instead of typing them in the message window.
All in all I think it's a lot of fun, and now that I'm a little more familiar with Vassal, I'd love to play with some of you from the Inn. All we'd have to do is PM or email each other to find a good time for everyone involved. I'll start by saying I'm free Wednesday through Saturday nights this week. I've gotten really used to being Zargon/Morcar so I could run a quest for people who want to try out being the Heroes. If you don't have a lot of time but you just wanna hop on and see what the module is all about in a sort of "dummy quest" we could do that too. I've learned a bunch of tips and shortcuts. If there's someone who'd really love to be the game-master, I can play the Heroes too. But I'm really familiar with the Game System quests, so if you'd like to play those, you might wanna change the layout a little. I'm not as familiar with KK or RotWL so I could play those as Heroes for anyone dying to be Zargon.
Posted: October 22nd, 2011, 9:20 pm