DM Secrets

[epithet]

I need a way to hide a twisting path on an unmasked map from my players.

In a couple of sessions, my party will be needing to follow a complex path through an (apparently) open field. This path will be twisty enough that I will have a hard time keeping track of it myself if I have to refer to a "cheat sheet," so I need a way to draw it on the battlemap. Encounters (probably involving combat) will be going on as well.

I have thought about assigning hidden npcs to, in essence, point the way. The problem with that is there will be many, many turns, and that will congest the combat tracker pretty severely as well as dropping a couple dozen tokens in my way that I can mess with by accident. I was hoping that the Enhanced Images extension would offer me a hidden layer to draw a path on, but it doesn't seem to keep any secrets.

One possibility might be to create one NPC and make a token that is the route through the field, then hide that npc in the combat tracker and put the npc on the middle or lower layer of the battlemap using the Enhanced Images extension. The token would need to be scaled up to a massive size to cover the entire (large) map, and I don't know how easy it is to hide tokens or npcs on the middle or lower layers using that extension.

Has anyone done anything like this?

[damned]

Chop the map up into encounter sized chunks and just drop these on the screen for the encounters.
Have the players keep their own map old school?

[epithet]

The challenge is following the path as indicated by a magical lantern, and if they don't meet the lantern's requirements for a particular round they get reset to the beginning. I need to have the entire map up, and the encounters can be pretty mobile. As for kickin' it old school, this party loves battlemaps. I've tried some theatre of the mind encounters, and they clearly would rather draw their AoEs and see the flanking.

I think what I'll do is make some path tokens and drop them on the bottom layer of the map using the Enhanced Images extension, then set them to always invisible. That way I won't have to load up my combat tracker, and the tokens should be save from my clumsy clicks as long as I don't mess with that layer. Since there won't be a mask on this map, it shouldn't be a problem.

I still wish there were a completely hidden layer I could draw on, but this should work.

[Andraax]

Make a copy of the map (maybe even at smaller scale) which you *don't* share with the party, and use tokens on that map to track locations.

[Trenloe]

Pre place tokens which aren't on the combat tracker and use the right-click menu to set them invisible to the players? https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Tokens#Visibility

[LordEntrails]

My first thought is two maps, a GM map with the path shown on it, and a player map with it not shown that you also use as battle maps. But not sure that will work better than any of the other ideas. Sounds like you have a good grasp on the pros and cons of the various methods though. I think you're just going to have to play with them to see which one you like best.

[epithet]

I think I have a good solution worked out. I outlined the path on a transparent layer over the battle map in Gimp, then filled it with an appalling electric blue. I scaled that down to 10% size and exported that layer as a png, which I stuck into the host tokens folder.
Back in Fantasy Grounds, with the Enhanced Images extension loaded, I dropped my path “token” onto the middle of the bottom layer and mouse-wheeled it up to full size and, with some effort, tweaked it into place.
I set the now gigantic token to “always invisible”. I dropped a spell token on the second layer, also invisible, to reveal as the destination point.
I am now ready to drop the party and my encounters on the top layer, with the ghost of my bright blue path token visible only to me.

[Trenloe]

Sounds like a good solution! :)

[Nulk]

Mind adding a Screenshot? (one that doesn't give your secrets away to the players of course!). Sounds like a interesting method that may come in handy for the future.

[epithet]

I don’t mind at all, but I’m not sure what to screenshot for you.

[Wookiee420]

The problem with that is there will be many, many turns, and that will congest the combat tracker pretty severely as well as dropping a couple dozen tokens in my way that I can mess with by accident.

Unless i am mistaken at what you are saying here, why don't you make encounters in the encounter tabs, and then drop pins on the map in their spot and load encounters that way? you can even preset the tokens on the map and they wont get in the way untill needed.

Just create an encounter, drop them from the encounter to the map to the tracker. then you can delete them off the map and drop the encounter pin on the map and just generate the encounter when you need them

[epithet]

To clarify, the problem was never the tokens associated with the encounters. The problem was making a trail of hidden tokens, winding around the map, hidden so that the players couldn't follow the trail but ghosted so that I could see whether or not they were on the path. I was thinking in terms of hiding npcs on the combat tracker, but then I remembered that unassigned tokens can be hidden. Then, I decided to try making the entire path (with a transparent background) into one token, and blowing it up to cover the map, and hiding it so that only I could see the ghost of it. It really only works because of the layers extension (Enhanced Images) that allows me to put the overblown token on a layer where I won't mess with it every time I move an npc. It has to be tweaked just right to get it into place.

[Andraax]

Actually, I probably would have just marked the path with pins.

[epithet]

I thought about pins, but it would take a lot of pins to mark out that path. The other disadvantage to pins is that they get in the way; when I click a pin to open up a room's encounter, I move the pin off into dead space before I click to load the encounter into the combat tracker.

Also, I will be using pins on the map to shortcut to encounters, and as far as I know there is no way to color code the pins currently. I would be trying to find the red encounter pins among a grove of red pathway pins.

No, I think the circumstance called for a colorful stripe that only I can see, winding its way across the map. As far as I know, the path token blown up to massive size, tweaked into place, set invisible and locked in place on a layer of its own was the best and easiest way to achieve that.