Split the party

[tdewitt274]

I was posed an interesting question my GM. Is it possible to split the party during combat?

For example, you have one map with everyone on it. Then, something happens where you don't want the rest of the party to see what's going on (door closing, wall of ice, teleport, etc).

Let's say that you have a room and a hallway, and everyone starts out in the hallway. The PCs come up with a "great" idea to teleport to the other side of the room and unlock it from the inside. Unknown to them, there are enemy monsters waiting to pounce. In the hallway, you planned on the PCs getting ambushed from behind. You had no idea that this would happen, so you only prepared one map. Is there a way to create a second map, sync the actions, share with whoever needs one or the other, and reveal everything when the door opens?

Probably a bit complex. Probably never will happen. But it's a valid concern.

Any ideas?

[Griogre]

You can run the party on seperate maps. I've done this occasionally. In FG its possible to do selective map (image) sharing with individuals. Just drag and drop the link to the image on the character's portrait at the top left.

However, everyone sees chat so when your teleporting guy attacks someone all the attack messages are displayed to everyone.

[tdewitt274]

Good point on the chat, but I think this can be avoided if TheBox is added.

I'll give your suggestion a try.

Thanks!

[tdewitt274]

Hmmm, no luck. It's the same map for both people. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I only have one map. Do I need 2 maps?

Another "illustration" of the issue would be to have two PCs on each side of the map. As they walk toward the center, each one sees only where they have walked. When they get to the middle (or can see each other), then the whole map could be revealed (or kept secret).

Or, in a PC game sense, a "Fog of War" for two armies until they share maps.

In theory, I'd believe that the XML nodes for the map could be duplicated somehow. The tricky part would be relaying the information from one XML node to the other so that the information is updated (possibly on change of initiative in the Combat Tracker?).

[Griogre]

You need two maps. Sorry I didn't make that clear. Because you can drop maps in the image folder on the fly it's not hard to make a copy of the map and drop it in the campaign image folder.

I then resize the frame, zoom and mask the map so it's not obvious the map is the same one.

[Foen]

A couple of points:

It isn't possible to open a duplicate copy of any window (map, image or otherwise) as the FG engine will only display one instance of a window tied to a given database node. You can see this in the third paragraph at the top of the windowinstance documentation (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/refdoc/windowinstance.xcp).
Some rulesets allow 'group chat' (it is in WoD, I think SW3 and the Base Ruleset) so that folks can conduct conversations in sub-groups and the GM can contribute to those group conversations. The GM creates two groups, party A and party B, and then explains what each of them sees.

I've attached a thumbnail showing group chat, which I tend to use when the party is in a tavern and only two of them, say, go over and talk to the strange hooded guy in the corner.

The screenshot shows three FG sessions (GM and two clients) and in the GM session (the left-most one) you can see the grouping of the PC icons with a pale background frame to show them in two chat groups. In each client session you can see notifications to say they have joined a chat group and in one of those groups you can see a conversation being carried out with the GM which is only visible to that group.

Foen