Lighting system for spell area of effects

[Tooting Dog]

The new lighting system is great. I've kind of played around with it for use as a spell area of effects on the map. You can set a 20' bright light with no dim light and even set the color to denote the spell; say, green for Entangle, and save it as a preset. It won't work for everything like Wall of Fire but it will for the majority of AOE spells though I am guessing you could get this to work for a square area. The trouble is, you can't typically see this light on a bright or well-lit map because there are only two brightnesses: dim and bright. If one were able to bump a light option a bit brighter so it definitely dominated you could make this work. One could make a light preset to drag onto the map for an orange flickering 20' radius circle for the Fireball spell to see who is in the area of effect, etc., though it really would work great for spells that last a while. Plus, it would naturally get blocked by walls which will block most spell AOEs. It just needs a shading that would be dominant over the current lighting. Right now I use the Pointers but this lighting system just had me thinking of some further potential.

[johnecc]

Wouldn’t it be easier just to use spell tokens? Then you can have your wall of fire.

Also, creating a light effect for fireball, which only lasts for the combat round it is cast in, is a bit overkill, not to mention the more lights you have, the more cpu/gpu usage.

[Tooting Dog]

I thought the Dev stated the lights really cost nothing on CPU. As for that Fireball example, it is just a nifty way to graphically put on the map something to show who would be in or outside of the area of effect and could be created and saved as a lighting preset to then be easily dragged onto the map when needed. For that Fireball, it would be removed after the casting. As I thought I emphasized, this idea of mine would be more pertinent to AOE spells that last a while. But you may be right and it's not a good idea.

I've never tried spell tokens because I thought they are tokens and they cover other tokens on the board.

[LordEntrails]

You can use spell tokens as tokens, and have overlap problems, or you can add them to your map as a "stamp" and then you don't have overlap issues. Though only the GM can move them and you end up with extra layers if your not careful.