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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 8872106" data-attributes="member: 6796661">For those of you using running your TTRPGs on a VTT, what VTT-specific tricks do you use to either visually telegraph traps, hidden doors, etc...or...falsely  telegraph.When I started using VTTs, I found sometimes it was difficult to place the walls perfectly, especially on maps not designed for VTT use. Sometimes I mistakenly revealed too much and because of that, whenever I had a wall that seemed to not follow the artwork perfectly, like when it would show a bit of the filler/rock outside of the drawn wall in the artwork, and then not even show the artwork of the edge, players would think I did that on purpose to help hide something hidden (rather than me just being lazy or the VTT no cooperating will me to follow the wall on the artwork well).Because of this I would start doing this on purpose, just to keep them on their toes, and to help cover when I was, in fact, trying to keep something hidden, such as a secret passage for which the drawn wall was too thin to draw in the VTT wall without revealing the secret passage beyond, or completely obscuring the wall of the passage way. I've also been having fun with lighting effects and vision settings. Any time things start to look and behave differently, it puts the players on their toes. Another favorite tool, is teleport effects where when a token is moved to a certain area, it is automatically moved to another area on the map or onto a different map. I use this mostly to make things easier to run. E.g., when a map has a passage that leads from one map to another. It is easier to just have them move their token to the end of map 1 and have the tokens appear on map 2, instead of having to manually re-drop all their tokens on the new map.  But it is also great for teleportal mazes and traps.I don't use music and sound much in my VTT. But Foundry has a cool feature where you can put a sound affect and it is get weaker the further you are away from it and can be muffled or blocked by doors and walls. That can provide a cool situation where the party tries to find the source of a certain sound. I think less is more here. I don't use this a lot, which gives more impact when I do. Another thing that can be fun is telegraphing that certain monsters or NPCs may be more powerful by using different token border art. This was unintentional at first. I would use one board for PCs and another border for all NPCs/monsters. But Frog God Games has token art for many of their monsters and they use a different border. Many of these were more powerful or at least different than the standard DnD monster-manual monsters. So, now I have a collection of token borders and will occasionally put a different border on certain monsters just to keep the group guessing.Another token effect I use is a community mod for Foundry that will change the tint of a token to an increasingly dark red as that token takes damage. It is helpful when there are many actors in a combat to not have to constantly having players ask "how damaged does he look?"  A cool side effect of this is for monsters that have regenerate or magical healing, players can see the enemy token get less red. I'd love to read about any other tricks other DMs have used in their games run by VTT.</blockquote>

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