Gollwyn
June 28th, 2021, 14:12
Good Morning,
I haven't been able to locate a good tour of map masking/lighting that is comprehensive (I prefer a document to a video, but a video will do) - I think I have somewhere between map level controls, dynamic masking and lighting controls just managed to screw things up good and proper:
My scenario -
Running Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Trying to find a good way to interact with the large level maps - having players move 30ft at a time is not ideal on a map that size so I was using the old fashioned mask and reveal to move a party token around the map and then adding the character tokens when combat broke out. Is that entire approach a bad idea?
When that led to odd issues (the players not being able to see, or getting stuck on open doors) - I left their tokens on the map and then moved a "party position" token to show general movement and then used DM move to put their tokens where a fight broke out. This worked better (I am guessing because the tokens were not leaving and re-entering the map), but still had some quirks and odd behaviors around the masking (I had some characters that could not see through doors that were open, and other strangeness).
The party left the dungeon and want to preserve a light fog of war over places they have been before but have a fuller fog of war over the places they have not been - is there a way to do that? Some combination of masking? When I re-introduced them to the map the entire map was fully blacked out by fog of war and I didn't know how to fix it other than taking a character with a torch and dragging them through all the corridors they have already explored - which was time consuming and a bit immersion breaking (though the players were humming Yakkity Sax so they made their own fun).
Basically I need:
1) A thorough tutorial that not only shows how to manipulate the masking and lighting system controls individually
2) But also a tutorial that shows how you are *supposed* to use them - if you are not, for example, supposed to use old masks in tandem with new lighting (which I am starting to suspect)
3) Any advice from someone with experience running a big map dungeon like this to avoid making the players drag tokens around it to just go back to places they have been before.
Thanks!
~G
I haven't been able to locate a good tour of map masking/lighting that is comprehensive (I prefer a document to a video, but a video will do) - I think I have somewhere between map level controls, dynamic masking and lighting controls just managed to screw things up good and proper:
My scenario -
Running Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Trying to find a good way to interact with the large level maps - having players move 30ft at a time is not ideal on a map that size so I was using the old fashioned mask and reveal to move a party token around the map and then adding the character tokens when combat broke out. Is that entire approach a bad idea?
When that led to odd issues (the players not being able to see, or getting stuck on open doors) - I left their tokens on the map and then moved a "party position" token to show general movement and then used DM move to put their tokens where a fight broke out. This worked better (I am guessing because the tokens were not leaving and re-entering the map), but still had some quirks and odd behaviors around the masking (I had some characters that could not see through doors that were open, and other strangeness).
The party left the dungeon and want to preserve a light fog of war over places they have been before but have a fuller fog of war over the places they have not been - is there a way to do that? Some combination of masking? When I re-introduced them to the map the entire map was fully blacked out by fog of war and I didn't know how to fix it other than taking a character with a torch and dragging them through all the corridors they have already explored - which was time consuming and a bit immersion breaking (though the players were humming Yakkity Sax so they made their own fun).
Basically I need:
1) A thorough tutorial that not only shows how to manipulate the masking and lighting system controls individually
2) But also a tutorial that shows how you are *supposed* to use them - if you are not, for example, supposed to use old masks in tandem with new lighting (which I am starting to suspect)
3) Any advice from someone with experience running a big map dungeon like this to avoid making the players drag tokens around it to just go back to places they have been before.
Thanks!
~G