Players Battle Board Help

The Battle Board is designed to simulate moving miniatures around a game mat. It's really only there to show position and movement. All action happens back in the Frog's chat room.

Basically....

When you get into an encounter which requires a Battle Board, typically combat, the director will build the board and then post a link to it in the chat room. Clicking this will open the Battle Board in a separate browser window and for the rest of the encounter you will bounce back and forth between the two. Rounds always begin with movement and end with action.

To move a character, you do not need to wait your turn, simply click on the radio button by the character you wish to move (the map should scroll to put its icon in the picture) and then use the silver shuriken-like thing below the map, aka the Mover, to move the character. If you need to rotate your characteruse the green and red arrows in the center of the Mover (the small wedge shows what way the character is facing). Rotation does count as movement and every 180 degree pivot equals 1 step.

Note that your movement is limited by the form of movement you have chosen: walk, run, sprint, etc.... You pick your movement with the "Change Movement" link. You track it by keeping an eye on where it says "Steps Taken" below the battle map. While you still have steps left to move your character's action light (known in this case as a movement light) will stay on . When you have exhausted your movement, it will turn itself off . If you are done moving but still have steps left to take, click the light to turn it off.

Aside from the color of the action light, the character table used in the Battle Board is no different from the one used on the Frog Chat page.

The Battle Board.

This is the actual map. The only thing you actually do with it, aside from watching it is occassionally run your cursor over the icons of other characters and creatures to see how they are moving and how far away they are from your character.

In this sample, Deqqie (the icon with the red border) is two steps away from and looking down towards Zaccheus (the strange alien guy with a purple border). Note that each wedge has a red point showing where the arrow points. Surrounding Deqqie are black bulls-eyes called "Start Circles" Player characters will always enter a map randomly placed on a start circle.	In this example I have run my cursor over Deqqie's icon to find that she is Walking, has 4 steps of movement left, and is two steps away from my character Zaccheus. Finding distance this way is almost essential for ranged combat, especially since not all battleboards will have clean grid lined backgrounds.

While icons cannot move through walls and such, they can move through each other, occupying the same space, and occassionally disappearing in the process. Although most icons are portraits, the map is viewed from above with the top of the screen being north.

The Mover.

This device moves your icon across the table. The arrow points are clickable and move in 8 directions. The red and green arrows control the icons rotation. Every 180 degree pivot counts as 1 step of movement.

Change Movement Link.

It's just to the left of the mover and it creates a popup which looks like this....

The numbers in the table are the number of steps the character can make in a round. The radio buttons on the left hand side control the kind of movement the character can make. Some kinds of movement are faster than others yet many come with action penalties (ex: -20 for running or -40 for sprinting). The radio buttons across the top control how weighed down the character is. For Zaccheus, 14lbs is highlighted because that is the encumberment his character sheet says he should be carrying. The option to change encumberment is left open because it can change due to temporary weight carried (or dropped) or possibly the influence of a spell (ex: Sludgefoot).

Once you choose your movement and encumberment, clicking the link at the bottom (ex: Run, 6 steps) will return that movement choice to the Battle Board. If this link does not say both the form of movement and the number of steps it allows try re-clicking the radio buttons until it appears.

The Chat Box.

This chat box works in the same way as the babble box in the Frog. It can be used to send private messages to other players, and nothing typed into it will be recorded in the game's transcript.

The Refresh Rate

Like the Frog, the Battle Board works by refreshing a small framed page approximately once every half second, thus drawing in info from the server. Because of this there will be a half-second delay on everything done in the Battle Board and the cursor will tend to flutter between a normal pointer and the hour glass. Until a better way of setting up a communication link can be found this should be considered normal and should not effect the game in any way.