D&D General Your Thoughts on LoS, Dynamic Lighting on VTTs

[tetrasodium]

The toggle for Explorer mode just lets the DM decide whether the players can or cannot see the areas they’ve already explored on a map regardless of whether or not those areas become blocked again by walls/obstacles.

It's called dynamic Fog of War in arkenforge to toggle if FoW blacks out in real time or if the map remember what areas were previously exposed & keeps them lit to whaever your daylight setting is

 

[Nebulous]

I found his Patreon and nearly fell off my seat. If you’re really stingy you can sign up, pay the month, download everything you want and then Cancel but you’d be missing out on the gorgeous stuff he does. These are just samples of his work readily available on Google but on his Patreon you actually get the sets with floor

A guy named James has a patreon I use where he does external view MP4s and still images of well known 5e campaigns. It's not the floor plans (DMs already have those) but the outside views are spectacular.

 

[TheSword]

My three go to Patreon’s are Neutral Party - the best quality generic (and prolific) battlemaps I’ve seen.

Heroic maps who produce some real quality fascinating multi-leveled is maps that link together. The Patreon is really good value too getting 5 or 6 maps a month for $5 a month.

and De Architecturart whose work speaks for itself.

 

[DigestPantheon]

My three go to Patreon’s are Neutral Party - the best quality generic (and prolific) battlemaps I’ve seen.

Just looked those up and those maps are really nice. I found their tumblr page, are there many more maps available on the Patreon?

 

[embee]

My major gripe with VTTs isn't about any one in general. It's simply the nature of the beast.

And that is that once you're invested, you're invested. And I don't mean just buying books for each platform or licenses. There's also having to relearn a new system. For players, it probably isn't as great. But for a GM, learning DL is a hobby in and of itself. It's the sort of thing that you can really only learn by doing. And the more you do, the better you get.

I'm on Roll20. It's pretty good and I'm used to it. But I'm always on the look out for something better.

But how do you define "better" - an inherently subjective term?

What is keeping me is that I have already bought in and I am already fairly competent with the system. It's system agnostic so I don't need to worry about what system my players are on. That's a pretty big "pro".

I see two problems with LOS/DL. First, which is kind of unique to Roll20, is that as the 800 lb. gorilla, Roll20 seems uninclined to innovate too much. It's kind of content to be where it is. Second is the problem with VTT in general and that is what is a VTT trying to be? Is it trying to emulate a tabletop experience? Ostensibly it is. But when you get lots of bells and whistles added in, be it LOS/DL or ambient sounds or APIs for players to be able to do things like open doors, then VTTs veer towards trying to emulate a video game.

And that, I think, is a mistake.

 

[Nebulous]

yeah, Neutral Party is pretty phenomenal. I've used quite a few of those. EDIT: And using a lot of them subsequently, you create an art theme for the campaign, so it has a certain style.

 

[tetrasodium]

My major gripe with VTTs isn't about any one in general. It's simply the nature of the beast.

And that is that once you're invested, you're invested. And I don't mean just buying books for each platform or licenses. There's also having to relearn a new system. For players, it probably isn't as great. But for a GM, learning DL is a hobby in and of itself. It's the sort of thing that you can really only learn by doing. And the more you do, the better you get.

I'm on Roll20. It's pretty good and I'm used to it. But I'm always on the look out for something better.

But how do you define "better" - an inherently subjective term?

What is keeping me is that I have already bought in and I am already fairly competent with the system. It's system agnostic so I don't need to worry about what system my players are on. That's a pretty big "pro".

I see two problems with LOS/DL. First, which is kind of unique to Roll20, is that as the 800 lb. gorilla, Roll20 seems uninclined to innovate too much. It's kind of content to be where it is. Second is the problem with VTT in general and that is what is a VTT trying to be? Is it trying to emulate a tabletop experience? Ostensibly it is. But when you get lots of bells and whistles added in, be it LOS/DL or ambient sounds or APIs for players to be able to do things like open doors, then VTTs veer towards trying to emulate a video game.

And that, I think, is a mistake.

There may be some with some rules for one or more systems & some VTTs support things like dice rolling & character sheets; but at the end of the day they all come down to a digital version of a battlemat & box of miniatures.

 

[embee]

There may be some with some rules for one or more systems & some VTTs support things like dice rolling & character sheets; but at the end of the day they all come down to a digital version of a battlemat & box of miniatures.

And that's really why I kind of stay with Roll20. It does that one thing and it does it fairly competently without me having to muck around with things too much.

Setting up DL walls is pretty simple once you're used to it. Switch layer, polygon line tool, select a color so you can see it, start clicking. I can whip together a DL map in quick order and I have a bank of random encounters ready to go.

Window functionality would be nice but not worth jumping ship over. I've seen animated maps and that's nifty and all but, again, at that point, you're now trying to emulate Diablo, not D&D.

 

[Nebulous]

I used to spend about an hour, hour and a half scaling and printing and taping together battlemaps, especially those huge ones for 5e like Princes of the Apocalypse. I do NOT miss doing that. I should upgrade to a flat LCD one day whenever things get back to semi-normal, but right now the ease of getting people online is so much faster than driving 30+ minutes away.

 

[TheSword]

Just looked those up and those maps are really nice. I found their tumblr page, are there many more maps available on the Patreon?

I got about a 100 maps from the Patreon. All different types. Fair warning some are cutaways rather than simple birds eye view maps but they can still be used for VTT it’s just a different style.