Okay, so I just finished my third session using Shmeppy. I would have posted about the second game last week, but I had basically no time so I’m including it here.
Overall, things went really well. People seemed to enjoy the sessions and there wasn’t much friction on the player-side of things when it came to the game. The whole issue of players dropping tokens in the fog of war went away when they found out that they could just undo, apparently it just hadn’t occurred to any of them that it was an option.
The big things I noticed:
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When I first started drawing on the map it was a bit slow until I cut it about in half. (Specifically the big green square in the first image that is a farm with a bunch of corpses, was about twice as big as it is now) This cleared up next time I loaded the map and as can be seen, I went well beyond that in size.
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I’m not sure the best way to describe this, but I guess it’s that not being able to pan in the mid of an action and then continue that action is a bit jarring. I was trying to clear a big area of fog of war, but I couldn’t zoom out to see it all, so I kept panning with the middle mouse button while simultaneously trying to remove the fow with shift and right click which resulted in a bunch of smaller sections being removed, if that makes sense?
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I’m really like that Shmeppy is making me feel like I can be spontaneous in my map creation and running a game. I think I mentioned in my last debrief that for a physical table I tend to spend several hours doing what is ultimately a fairly simple map because I don’t want to make mistakes with that during the session when drawing it (plus I’m pretty slow with a dry-erase marker in general), but fixing errors here is a lot easier and faster. (And the players don’t necessarily even need to see it happen with fow)
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Drawing this map has made me realize how glad I am that multi/region select is already on the long-term road map
Edit: I was looking through the forums and got reminded of this comment from another thread:
Being able to fog tokens separately from that map could be really useful in general, though I have mixed feelings about it. I had a couple situations where I had monsters I wanted hidden but not the tiles under them (specifically, there are some assassin vines hiding in the vines). Previously I I’d just hide them in the fog of war outside of the map, but that didn’t quite work this time. I came up with a work around that I liked, essentially turning it into a puzzle. While it would be a nice feature to have, not having it forced a bit of a creative solution that I think improved the encounter, hence the ambivalence.
Anyway here’s the map I was working with the past two sessions. I’ll likely be using it again next week.
