Revision as of 07:14, 27 January 2017

Misc Tips and Tricks

Character Sheets

• To allow all players to see each others character sheets, but not to see "through each other's eyes" for dynamic lighting, make a copy of each character sheet and give edit privileges to all players.

Dynamic Lighting

• Use a bright color for your dynamic lighting lines. They'll be much easier to see.

• To simulate the glint of light off reflective surfaces, like metal, or animal eyes, give your monster tokens 1' of light with *all players see light*

• To allow players to see doors, pillars or rooftops while still blocking vision past the object, use the dynamic lighting polygon tool to draw an X through the object instead of going around it.

• To make sure you can select doors later, draw their dynamic lighting line in a different color. Also, include a handle (shaped like a hockey stick) extending outside of the map.

• To make it easy to adjust later, make separate dynamic lighting segments for each room. (ie: Don't try and make one super long polygon shape around everything.)

Annotating Maps

• An easy way to add notes to a map is by placing tokens on the GM layer. Grab free tokens from game-icons.net. Use the title for essential info and the notes for detailed info.

NPCs, Monsters and Mobs

• A quick and dirty way to add NPCs: Create a token macro to output the text of the red bar: "@{selected|Bar3}" and put their attack roll in the red bubble. eg: "[[1d20+5]] to hit [[2d6]] damage"

Pages vs Handouts

There are many strategies for organizing information in your game. Here's a few ideas from the forums:

• A page can be much bigger than the current battlemap. You can put two or three maps on one page, and still have room to store notes and thematic imagery.
• For theatre of the mind, use the page as a theatrical set, with evocative imagery. One page can hold multiple "sets". You can use shift-click to ping the map and forcibly direct your players' view.
• For keeping campaign notes, give every player their own handout with edit privileges.
• Make liberal use of shift-z on page graphics to present an enlarged image to your players.
• Use dynamic lighting walls to construct enclosed light-boxes for thematic imagery. When you want to light one up, drop in a group token with permissions set to controlled by "all players", plus has sight, casts light, etc.
• If you have a lot of handouts, organize them into folders