Share your evil DM VTT tricks

[MNblockhead]

I used MapTool for years, but all my tricks are out of date. I use Roll20 now, and the window and doors feature is amazing. I did institute a rule that you cannot click on a door or window (which will reveal if it is locked) unless your pog is adjacent.

Sometimes, for my own sanity, I put all my doors in the locked state to avoid accidental clicks that open doors.

My biggest tool is the GM layer, which I use to hide traps, descriptions, notes, and the like.

Yes, crazy that in Foundry this is a accomplished with a community addon: Scenery. You can have multiple layers with different permissions for each layer. But out of the box, foundry doesn't support this. I believe that they expect you to use journal markers for this, but having things shown on the map art itself it is a superior experience in many situations. I generally prefer to have separate GM and player views of the map. I only fall back on GM-only notes and markup when there are not separate GM/player versions of the map.

 

[Hussar]

Dynamic maps are great in vtt. You can layer maps on top of each other with each map representing a point in time. Reddit has a number of these kinds of maps. You could have the bridge collapse or a fire spread. That sort of thing.