GURPS over Roll20 experiments: Tokens

While I really like and actively use D&D Next in two weekly campaigns, there has always been one system that I keep dreaming about: GURPS.
Never actually played it, never actually ran a session, even as a player, but I just love the concepts and ideas in GURPS, have most of the books in 4th edition and have been following some very interesting GURPS blogs for some time now.


Recently, +Peter V. Dell'Orto from Dungeon Fantastic has been poking around GURPS over Roll20 and commented about the experience on his blog, current verdict being: it's not so simple!

Since it's something I might run someday, I wanted to see how I would handle it, and first, I wanted to figure out the proper use of tokens over an Hex grid.


Very quickly, a couple problems came up:

1. Facing matters a lot in GURPS. My current tokens had no facing indicator, which immediately, to me, was a problem.
2. Round base over an Hex Grid doesn't look nice. All my current tokens are great for D&D Next over a Squared Grid but I had to go back into Photoshop and find a way to make them look decent on an Hex Grid.
3. Many creatures take more than one Hex, but sometimes it's multiple hexes long, sometimes it's hexes wide, sometimes it's just multiple hexes. The major problem with roll20 over an Hex Grid is that with magnetism to grid turned on, it will auto center the images to the center Hex...which is a problem for 2 Hexes long creatures such as horses.

After some more fiddling and customizing with a couple of Devin Night tokens and others that I have, results were quite nice actually, at least I think.

Basically, I made a simple Hex Base, which fits perfectly in a Hex Grid (simply took a screen capture of hexes in roll20 and modified that for the base). Then I added a little red indicator for the Front, subtle but immediately visible so no matter the token, everyone can immediately see the facing.

For the horses, I tricked the system a bit. Since it'll auto-center, I couldn't have the horses take only 2 Hexes and had to make them take 3 hexes long, but only represent 2 for the horse itself, the base marking the actual front of the horse. Added advantage? If another 1 Hex creature is mounting the horse, simple put it on the back Hex of the horse :)

I played around with it a bit and it's decent enough. Perfect? Not by any means, but we're talking Hex Grid here, a nightmare anyway. It works good enough.

That done, I can now pretty much apply the same idea to all my customized tokens and be done in about 30 minutes or so, with large creatures taking a bit more fiddling about.

One issue is that in GURPS, there is something called "Close Combat range", which basically means that 2 characters are so close to each other (knifing, grappling, karate chopping, etc) that they share the same Hex!! Nothing can be done about that really in roll20 (and I'm sure it's horrible on a real table too anyway). Trick I think I'd use is to ALT+Move the tokens together somewhat (as you can see in the image with the fighter and gnoll with the fist marking). Tokens were easy to select still, "looked" to be in Close Combat range, and other Hexes around them could still be navigated properly.

Another issue, more because I'm a bit OCD really, and this is true for anything using more than 1 Hex or Square in roll20, is that the status markers for the horse are a bit too far from the actual token (since it takes it as a square, no matter the shape of the actual token). I can live with it...

Next I'll look into Character Sheets and Macros, see what can be done with that to streamline the play.


EDIT
I actually forgot about one problem that +Peter V. Dell'Orto mentioned: the Prone Status for humanoids taking 2 Hexes instead of one.

One solution I found was to make a generic PRONE Token with a facing/link indicator (to show which creature it affects) and just put that next to whoever is prone, representing the lower body. Once again, far from perfect but it's very fast to use (just drag it and orient it, takes a second max) and self explanatory.

Here is what how it looks like in another scene:

Probably gonna tweak the graphics a bit later on, but seems to be doing the trick, easy to use, easy to move around, and you can immediately see who is affected due to the little red marking indicating facing.