I’m a sucker for automation. In my career as a software developer, I’ve found that if I have to do something more than a few times, I may as well invest the time to automate the process. This line of thinking came with me when we started playing RPGs in virtual tabletops, and ever since I’ve been developing tools and macros to help reduce the effort it takes to play games online with my friends.

When we first started playing games online, the tools we had were fairly primitive, and amounted to little more than dice rollers on IRC or Skype. Whenever we attacked, we’d have the computer roll a d20, and then we’d add in all of our bonuses manually, just as if we were playing around a table. As we experimented with more advanced VTTs like MapTool that supported macros, we began to pull in bonuses for things like base attack bonuses and strength modifiers and add them to the rolls automatically, reducing all the basic math of attacking to a single button click.

The more data we could push into our tokens, the more our macros could do, and the more we wanted them to do. “Why can’t that attack macro know my character has been buffed by Magic Weapon and Bless?” This led us to create complex character sheets within the VTT, using HTML forms in custom designed frames to organize the myriad of properties on our tokens. As we added more and more logic into our tools, things soon started to get clunky and slow, required more and more memory to run, and more human effort to maintain properly. It was something of a hassle to keep the in-VTT sheets updated, and the process to “refresh” a token for both player and GM on different clients was a tad cumbersome.

The more we tried to do, the more complicated things became, the more fields needed to be filled in properly, and the harder things were to use. This appears to be a common complaint among tabletop gamers looking to enhance their games with technology: tools are often difficult to use, and just end up getting in the way, creating more problems than they solve. In order to be worthwhile the tools have to be simple, intuitive, and provide tangible benefits with a minimum amount of effort on the part of a GM or player.

For my group and our macros, we started looking for a sweet spot somewhere between automating everything and just rolling dice like we used to. We began to accept that not every bonus or class ability needed to be incorporated into our core set macros, and that it was fine to only worry about the common bonuses for most rolls. For more exotic buffs, debuffs, or other modifiers we chose to use states with generic icons provided by Lorc and others, and have everyone remember what they mean. A clover indicates a luck bonus, a beaker an alchemical bonus, and a little turtle shell is used for natural armor. The exact bonuses and related math aren’t built into any macro, the icons just serve as reminders that a character or monster has some sort of effect on it that needs to be accounted for.

In a game like Pathfinder, there are simply too many things to account for in any toolset you wanted to create. You could spend days trying to get every single NPC statistic and ability into a VTT token, or months to have your macros support every type of bonus or penalty your players could have. Believe me, I’ve done it. However, I’ve found that just automating the basic functionality with the most common modifiers accounted for and relying on the people playing the game to remember the more arcane bonuses works well enough, and saves everyone a load of time, and time saved is time played.

Players that want more advanced macros will make them themselves. Geoff, my friend who before a few months ago had never played an RPG or done anything with a VTT, has quickly become proficient with the PFRPG system and the MapTool macro language. He’s created macros for all of his characters abilities, spells, and powers, and he’s shared them with the world on SyncRPG.

Get the basics right, keep it simple and easy to use, let the users expand upon it and share their creations. The method to our madness.

Discuss 'Automation in VTT Frameworks: When Enough is Enough' on the SyncRPG forums