RedmondStache
March 16th, 2020, 12:26
I've run my past two weekly 5E games with FGU rather than FGC, and thus far I'm liking it quite a bit. It doesn't run quite as smoothly, but it's in beta and so I can look past that for now.
My players and I all agree that dynamic LoS is a fantastic feature that really adds to our game and is worth any beta-related hiccups.
That said, we've encountered some things that prevent us from fully enjoying it. I won't include lack of distance limits or light sources or any of that here, since I know at least some of those will be addressed.
1. The way tokens are only revealed if their center is within LoS leaves something to be desired. For medium and smaller creatures this is acceptable, but still not ideal, as all D&D systems I've played feature a cover system that allows for line of sight to creatures within a square even if you can only see a small part of that square. For large and larger creatures this means that characters can have LoS to entire squares of their space and they still wouldn't be displayed for that character.
An option to have tokens be simply masked by the fog of war, so that if any part of them is revealed then characters can see and target that visible part, might be ideal for my use case. At the very least, having tokens that take up multiple squares be revealed if the center of any one square they occupy is within LoS would be a great improvement.
2. Having token visibility tied to LoS doesn't seem to work for creatures that are hidden on the CT. I like when my players walk into a room or turn a corner and are surprised to suddenly realize what they're up against. Unfortunately, this isn't possible the way things are now. I like letting my players see what the initiative order is for creatures they know are in combat so they can plan out their turns and know when they might be able to duck out for a moment here or there, but there's currently no way to have a token automatically appear before revealing its CT entry, and this ruins some surprises, with me having to tell them to stop where they are or sometimes even to take back some of their movement so I can reveal something.
The fix for this one seems like it'd be a simple one: Let LoS visibility supersede CT visibility. Or, ideally for my particular use case, let LoS visibility determine CT visibility.
3. There's no option I know of to make tokens the GM moves respect walls. Sure, sometimes it's handy to be able to move things through walls. Maybe somebody teleported. Maybe they can phase through walls through some spell. But the single most common cause for me moving things through walls is that either FGU hiccuped and interpreted my one arrow key press as two, or that I wasn't as careful as I should have been when dragging a token to save time. When I'm moving NPCs, this is fine because it doesn't reveal anything to the players other than maybe that I made an oopsie. When I'm moving a PC token, on the other hand, both of these mistakes can reveal entire areas of the map that they shouldn't have been able to see, once again spoiling surprises.
A toggleable option to make the GM respect walls would be fantastic.
3a. I mentioned teleporting. That's a thing that can happen in games where magic is a thing, and it sure would be nice to have the ability to designate teleporters like we can doors. An interactable object that players could click to whisk their tokens away to another designated space would be delightful. This only gets a sub-heading, though, because it's not LoS-related except in that if I drag their token to another spot on the same map with LoS active, they get reveals along the way that they really shouldn't have. Though I think maybe re-dragging their token from the CT, rather than from the map itself, might avoid that issue? Haven't tested.
Again, my players and I all really like the LoS system and think it adds a great deal to our games even as-is. There are just a few ways it could be improved even further so that the reality aligns more with how we (or, in some cases, the game system) would expect or want things to function.
A few other miscellaneous wishes:
An option to disable token rotation, or at least make it require holding a key. Scroll wheel is too easy and too eager to rotate tokens when trying to zoom in or out.
My players can't see each other's pointers, though I can see all of theirs. We'd love a fix.
The "remove all pointers" feature doesn't seem to work. Removing pointers one-by-one can be cumbersome, especially since my players seem unable to clear their own.
I remember way back when in one of the fx layer preview videos, there were effects applied only to specific areas on the image. I want that, and was surprised to find it's not implemented.
Having an option to make certain tokens function like terrain (can see in, but not out) would be a neat feature to have for certain bulky creatures.
I don't know if it's a thing already or planned to be a thing in the future, but tokens that can function as doors and have different visual states for open/closed would be really cool to have.
Basically the ability to apply LoS definitions to NPC tokens in general would be kinda neat.
I'd love it if there was a section of the FGU support wiki that specifically looked at the parts of FGU that differed from FGC. As-is it's fine, but for people coming from FGC this would definitely reduce friction when it comes to "relearning" how to use FG, rather than needing to wade through all the things that are still the same.
None of these items on my wishlist is a dealbreaker; they're just things that would further improve my experience. FGU is already pretty great and I sincerely look forward to it only getting better from here.
My players and I all agree that dynamic LoS is a fantastic feature that really adds to our game and is worth any beta-related hiccups.
That said, we've encountered some things that prevent us from fully enjoying it. I won't include lack of distance limits or light sources or any of that here, since I know at least some of those will be addressed.
1. The way tokens are only revealed if their center is within LoS leaves something to be desired. For medium and smaller creatures this is acceptable, but still not ideal, as all D&D systems I've played feature a cover system that allows for line of sight to creatures within a square even if you can only see a small part of that square. For large and larger creatures this means that characters can have LoS to entire squares of their space and they still wouldn't be displayed for that character.
An option to have tokens be simply masked by the fog of war, so that if any part of them is revealed then characters can see and target that visible part, might be ideal for my use case. At the very least, having tokens that take up multiple squares be revealed if the center of any one square they occupy is within LoS would be a great improvement.
2. Having token visibility tied to LoS doesn't seem to work for creatures that are hidden on the CT. I like when my players walk into a room or turn a corner and are surprised to suddenly realize what they're up against. Unfortunately, this isn't possible the way things are now. I like letting my players see what the initiative order is for creatures they know are in combat so they can plan out their turns and know when they might be able to duck out for a moment here or there, but there's currently no way to have a token automatically appear before revealing its CT entry, and this ruins some surprises, with me having to tell them to stop where they are or sometimes even to take back some of their movement so I can reveal something.
The fix for this one seems like it'd be a simple one: Let LoS visibility supersede CT visibility. Or, ideally for my particular use case, let LoS visibility determine CT visibility.
3. There's no option I know of to make tokens the GM moves respect walls. Sure, sometimes it's handy to be able to move things through walls. Maybe somebody teleported. Maybe they can phase through walls through some spell. But the single most common cause for me moving things through walls is that either FGU hiccuped and interpreted my one arrow key press as two, or that I wasn't as careful as I should have been when dragging a token to save time. When I'm moving NPCs, this is fine because it doesn't reveal anything to the players other than maybe that I made an oopsie. When I'm moving a PC token, on the other hand, both of these mistakes can reveal entire areas of the map that they shouldn't have been able to see, once again spoiling surprises.
A toggleable option to make the GM respect walls would be fantastic.
3a. I mentioned teleporting. That's a thing that can happen in games where magic is a thing, and it sure would be nice to have the ability to designate teleporters like we can doors. An interactable object that players could click to whisk their tokens away to another designated space would be delightful. This only gets a sub-heading, though, because it's not LoS-related except in that if I drag their token to another spot on the same map with LoS active, they get reveals along the way that they really shouldn't have. Though I think maybe re-dragging their token from the CT, rather than from the map itself, might avoid that issue? Haven't tested.
Again, my players and I all really like the LoS system and think it adds a great deal to our games even as-is. There are just a few ways it could be improved even further so that the reality aligns more with how we (or, in some cases, the game system) would expect or want things to function.
A few other miscellaneous wishes:
An option to disable token rotation, or at least make it require holding a key. Scroll wheel is too easy and too eager to rotate tokens when trying to zoom in or out.
My players can't see each other's pointers, though I can see all of theirs. We'd love a fix.
The "remove all pointers" feature doesn't seem to work. Removing pointers one-by-one can be cumbersome, especially since my players seem unable to clear their own.
I remember way back when in one of the fx layer preview videos, there were effects applied only to specific areas on the image. I want that, and was surprised to find it's not implemented.
Having an option to make certain tokens function like terrain (can see in, but not out) would be a neat feature to have for certain bulky creatures.
I don't know if it's a thing already or planned to be a thing in the future, but tokens that can function as doors and have different visual states for open/closed would be really cool to have.
Basically the ability to apply LoS definitions to NPC tokens in general would be kinda neat.
I'd love it if there was a section of the FGU support wiki that specifically looked at the parts of FGU that differed from FGC. As-is it's fine, but for people coming from FGC this would definitely reduce friction when it comes to "relearning" how to use FG, rather than needing to wade through all the things that are still the same.
None of these items on my wishlist is a dealbreaker; they're just things that would further improve my experience. FGU is already pretty great and I sincerely look forward to it only getting better from here.