Had another VT Beta session #2 last night.
"Carver prepared the range fighters, Onyx and Vanchu, behind
him so after he pulls the lever to be ready whatever might storm us. The door
open and 1 Rot Hound showed up down the stairs. Carver diced him, but a lousy
1XP came out of it. Carver did do a bit of an 25Damage overkill so the XP
gained was mostly over the walls. *nasty*. Moving the party down the stairs, 3
Kobolds noticed us. Looked like 1 had a "fling" for Carver because it
did not use the free melee attack...the group wonder what's up with that.
There's another lever but 1 Kobold took 3 turns before it actually got hit,
guarded it pretty much with it life. Well, for as long as he had life left."
Issues:
The session was again longer than 1hr for 4 monsters on a small staircase against 4
players. Zedex managed 2 PC's while Jes321 and I managed 1 PC each. Looking at
the flow a lot of the time is spent chatting via the keyboard instead of using
voice. Reason for not using voice, well because it keeps breaking up. This
could be because we are in UK and the VT host is in USA. Will need to
investigate this because this is a must have status feature in VT.
We also had a minute of GUI blackouts. This was great to test the fall over
capabilities of VT. The DM only has to close and start again. The rest of the
PC's are still in the game. It would appear the VT site signed me out and
therefor cause the GUI issues.
The initiative panel also started to duplicate monster and could not be deleted
unless the initiative panel was cleared and re-rolled again.
The monster panel had a scroll glitch on a kobold's power tab.
Overall it was great! I made a mistake of removing HP from the wrong monster again due to selection negligence. The PC's started to use more advance attacks that
started to make things interesting but quite a lot of information (and reading)
for me as noob DM.
10 Lessons Learned:
1) Draw a game flow diagram and keep it in front of you as reference
2) Have a bigger notepad than A6 for taking notes
3) Beta Testing - Note down test cases and evaluate them. especially usability.
Bugs are just unfortunate, but must be noted.
4) Design the game to accommodate player motivations.
5) Ask players help about rules. You will only remain an idiot for not asking
to understand.
6) Table rules. Especially in the VT!
7) Think about the DM styles explained on P12
8) It's nice to keep all actions visible, even from the DM. It keep things
interesting and suspense. What causes more stress? Not knowing if there's a
monster or Hearing there's monsters but not how many and type?
9) In VT surroundings can be noted in a
10) Players have to be clear on WHO they attack, with WHAT they attack, and
WHEN they attack. Sometimes PC's only apply attack after they done the move.
Need to find out:
1) Assign DM role to someone else if DM can't attend session.
2) Manage dead monsters so that adventure PC's can search corpses, but also not
to confuse the DM.
