Map Pins are here in Early Access beta for Pro and Elite subscribers!!

I like the concept overall. My main feedback is: Let us use any Token-art for Map pins (and also Doors/Windows/Curtains) instead of a generic Roll20 icon for them. Make a setting for what the Map Pin Icon art is, that can be configured for each Map Pin.&nbsp; I'd like to be able to use Map Pin art from the Roll20 Marketplace (or custom uploads) for this feature. These ones, <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/search?keywords=pins" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/search?keywords=pins</a> This will help with immersion, customizability, system agnostic, fitting different settings and genres (horror, space, fantasy, western, etc). For example a space theme map pin might be a planet, a Western themed map-pin might be a wooden sign-post. It will also honor the Marketplace artist creators, and increase sales. It will also help to implement Map Pins Roll20 feature on pre-existing maps and Modules that are already outfitted with graphical map-pins and don't want to cover them up with the generic Map Pin icon.&nbsp;

Fran said: Now - I want to see your pins!!&nbsp; Ok.&nbsp; This is just a test, but the idea is that I'd have a hidden pin on the desk.&nbsp; If someone picks up the book (mentioned in the room description or similar), then I'd show the pin, if they tell me they're reading it, they get the full handout. It makes for a nice mid-point between "you see a book" and "I read the book", and I'll probably try it on an upcoming game.

Very nice feature. But if the function to jump to map pins is restricted to the GM and not available to the players, that’s a huge drawback. Players should be able to do that too — it opens up so many new possibilities.

Fran said: Ya'll have some incredible points in here &lt;3&nbsp; I've got this all noted for the team, we have lots to talk about and we are super excited to keep improving.&nbsp; Now - I want to see your pins!!&nbsp; This is the base that my superheroes use in a game I run. I just redid it from a boring architectural map style version that was all white with lines to represent walls. They don't really know where things are yet. The new map I designed in coordination with the map pins and their descriptions really makes the map amazing. So super grateful for this new feature. (And really hope that locking pins becomes a possibility!)

I have just tried this with the handout for Yester Hill, CoS.&nbsp; It gives me the whole handout even though I drag a pin from a sub header (Y4 in this example) - I would prefer to just have the relevant section open up,&nbsp; I can see the whole handout by doing what I have been doing for years, so this isn't bringing much, unless I am misfiring when setting it up, but I don't think so because it jumps to Y4. I have the default setting of opening windows in a popout, this means I don't get the pins next to headers and have to turn that function off to set up, then turn it back on. Not the end of the world, but inconvenient. I get that I have to lift any text from GM notes into the player section, because, well, GM section, but it appears I also have to share the handout with all players in order to avoid the "your GM has not granted access" message when clicking the text in the pin as a player.&nbsp; This presents problems because so many handouts include a map of the area, which I'd rather not have to edit out.&nbsp; I can disable the image on the pin, but they still get it in Journal.&nbsp; If sharing the handout is a requirement, can this be done from the pin interface for ease of use please? It's been a long week, have I just completely made a hash of this, since the general feel seems to be "Yayyy, this works a treat" ? BTW, I do like this feature, just in case that comes across all grumpy, and it may well be that this comes down to the way handouts were set out in older games compared to how we will structure handouts going forward, but thought I'd chuck my two penneth in

I've just started playing around with the pins, and I'm loving &nbsp;them as a replacement for room keys on the GM layer which you then have to scroll around a handout (or flip through a physical book) to find the room description. I've had maps laid out something like A2 next to A30, which can be a big pain depending on which way the players go! My one customization request is to allow us to change the icon, especially when it comes to pins that are visible to players. Different kinds of points of interest on a hex crawl, icons representing different kinds of establishments on a town map, heck make a treasure chest "pin" for the players to interact with! I've previously used tooltips to similar effect:

Hiya.&nbsp; Another piece for feedback from me.&nbsp; When selecting a custom tooltip, it would still be useful to have the handout image visible.&nbsp; Is there a reason why it has been removed as an option for custom tooltips?&nbsp;&nbsp;

One other piece of player feedback from my group:&nbsp; Where a map pin is placed near the top of a map image, is it possible to have the tooltip populate within the the map boundaries rather than outside in the blank space outside of the map?

I can confirm via testing that this bug is caused by newlines (not &lt;br&gt;) in the HTML of the handout. Newlines in the HTML get rendered (correctly) as spaces when displayed, but the map pin is terminating the preview instead. Removing the newlines fixes the problem, but it was a surprise to see. Edit: I have also discovered that pins are unable to link to a header with &amp; in the header text.

This is cool. Now if only Transmogrifier allowed copying of folders could be a thing so can easily move these new map pins and handouts from game to game easily. :)

Loving these pins, I will definitely use them.&nbsp; Too mimic some of the others, I would love to have different icons, especially&nbsp; for a world map, to identify different types of places (towns, dungeons, etc).&nbsp; Similar to what you see in Skyrim or Octopath as a example.&nbsp; Being able to see what "type" of pin it is without clicking it would be amazing.&nbsp; Example - <a href="https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/the-elder-scrolls-5-skyrim/5/5e/Throat_of_the_world_location.bmp?width=1920" rel="nofollow">https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/the-elder-scrolls-5-skyrim/5/5e/Throat_of_the_world_location.bmp?width=1920</a>

This looks great!&nbsp; The process looks like it's pretty intuitive, just drag the handout onto the map.&nbsp; This is something my players have asked for for so long that I've been using the hacky workaround of using character tokens for map pins for awhile now.&nbsp; I will need to wait until it supports changing the artwork for the map pin, since things look pretty beautiful the way I've got them setup using characters as the tokens. Basically this is where I am with using character tokens with custom images for a map and it would be great to have a similar look with the real map pins.

Pins vanish outside of vision range. There needs to be an option where pins can sit above darkness that you can turn on and off. This way you can have large world maps that have explorable darkness and when they find a place and it's pinned it won't vanish once they get to far away.

I tested them with my The One Ring 2e game. I found the UI confusing, because I didn't realise the Pins would be Hidden when I dragged them to the Token Layer, unlike everything else in Roll20.

Hi Andrew R.,&nbsp; Map Pins behave like Doors, ie: they are on every layer. Whether they are hidden or not is a matter of a setting on the door (and map pin).&nbsp;

Here's my screen shots. I keep an organized token page, and was previously using token-based map pins. I have written a master Token Page handout, and populated the groups with corresponding real Map Pins. This is great, because I can edit or update the master document, and the changes are immediate. Combining these with tooltips on all the tokens, makes this an essential Who's Who in the campaign world. Love it.

Hi, The "Go To Pin" button is available only if there is a "Pin with sublink to header" placed on a map :( Can we have this functionality with a pin without sublink ? Thanks

I think these are great, but they really make handouts ugly with the drag to pin and header link buttons. We need a way to hide those for when taking screen shots etc.

Great feature! However - and it has been discussed here already (but this is the FIRST thing I thought of when I put the first pins on my maps) - the size has to be arbitrarily adjustable and different icons would be great (this I can do on my own with workarounds, of course), but the initial size on an overview map was way too big for me.&nbsp; Thank you again for the great development work!

DrHappyAngry said: This looks great!&nbsp; The process looks like it's pretty intuitive, just drag the handout onto the map.&nbsp; This is something my players have asked for for so long that I've been using the hacky workaround of using character tokens for map pins for awhile now.&nbsp; I will need to wait until it supports changing the artwork for the map pin, since things look pretty beautiful the way I've got them setup using characters as the tokens. Basically this is where I am with using character tokens with custom images for a map and it would be great to have a similar look with the real map pins. Ah, now, that is a nice idea! Thanks for sharing!!

Fran said: Simon, can you show a screengrab of what your pin (Yester Hill) looks like and explain what you would prefer?&nbsp; Turning the popout setting on and off is annoying, ill talk to the devs and see if there is something we can do. For your sharing comment, i wonder, are you finding that alert message annoying? As for sharing it from the pin, will note that down for the team. It has been a long week and i enjoy your not-grumpy two penneth, simon, thank you. Simon G. said: I have just tried this with the handout for Yester Hill, CoS.&nbsp; It gives me the whole handout even though I drag a pin from a sub header (Y4 in this example) - I would prefer to just have the relevant section open up,&nbsp; I can see the whole handout by doing what I have been doing for years, so this isn't bringing much, unless I am misfiring when setting it up, but I don't think so because it jumps to Y4. I have the default setting of opening windows in a popout, this means I don't get the pins next to headers and have to turn that function off to set up, then turn it back on. Not the end of the world, but inconvenient. I get that I have to lift any text from GM notes into the player section, because, well, GM section, but it appears I also have to share the handout with all players in order to avoid the "your GM has not granted access" message when clicking the text in the pin as a player.&nbsp; This presents problems because so many handouts include a map of the area, which I'd rather not have to edit out.&nbsp; I can disable the image on the pin, but they still get it in Journal.&nbsp; If sharing the handout is a requirement, can this be done from the pin interface for ease of use please? It's been a long week, have I just completely made a hash of this, since the general feel seems to be "Yayyy, this works a treat" ? BTW, I do like this feature, just in case that comes across all grumpy, and it may well be that this comes down to the way handouts were set out in older games compared to how we will structure handouts going forward, but thought I'd chuck my two penneth in SPOILERS - If you haven't played Curse of Strahd yet, look away now!!!! So the Handout is Areas of the Hill and I have put a brief description of what the characters can see at the top and written two headers P1 and P4.&nbsp; I drag the pin next to P4 out, make it visible and what I get is in the small image.&nbsp; All OK so far, that's what I want the player to see.&nbsp; Player now double clicks that for more detail and gets the final image - so they get the map, which I would rather didn't happen (OK, I can fix that by changing the handout art to something with no spoilers, but for a campaign like CoS that's a lorra lorra work) but they also see anything else in the player section of the handout.&nbsp; I will be using these pins to replace numeric map markers and all I want to pop up is the description relevant to the pin I dragged out, not the whole handout.&nbsp; In short, what I want to see as both DM and player is the first image (sans map), but what we get is the last.&nbsp; This means instead of 1 handout covering all of Area Whatever&nbsp; (as most games are setup right now) I am going to have to have a handout for each individual room or special in that area, which doesn't feel right as that could be a huge number of handouts for a complex dungeon area (DoTMM anyone?) I hope that makes sense?&nbsp; Still not grumpy (got a game 2mrw yayyyyyyyyy)

Simon G., I definitely see the problem you are seeing.&nbsp; We start by creating a map pin from a "map level" handout's room description. The map pin's text window truncates the handout information. So now we are forced to give the players access to the handout to see the room description. But that creates a problem: The players can now see information in the handout that is part of other rooms.&nbsp; The obvious solution (albeit a lot of work) is to create new handouts for each room. That way the player and GM information can be split up (GM info going to the GM section), and the handout only contains the information for that room.&nbsp; But, aside from the work involved that creates another problem. The Journal tab's file structure will explode in size. 10 handouts for 10 map levels becomes 200-400 handouts (assuming 20-40 rooms per map level). From what I've seen a very large amount of objects in the Journal tab can cause lag when creating/deleting new elements.&nbsp;

I'm not sure I understand. You can keep them from opening the referring handout by not granting them access to it. Or am I missing some piece of the puzzle? Regardless, you should be seeing the entire subsection, and only that subsection in the pin. (Subject to the height limitations of the pin preview). I suspect you might be running into an issue with some invisible HTML causing weird early truncation behavior. Try this: Do a clean paste into the notes area (completely clear it first, by deleting the content and backspacing a couple of ties for good measure to eliminate any hidden html). Copy the section from the notes area, and ctrl-shift-v to paste as plain text. Then format your headers. This will ensure as clean a format as possible. Here is an example:

Markdown Formatting? Feature enhancement request. I know it's unlikely we will have full access to html editing in a custom pin description, but would it be possible to allow markdown formatting, like we do in chat? This could not only allow for formatting utility, but allow for command buttons, rather than constructing them in the journal.

Quality of Life improvement 1. Persistent Properties Currently, if you create a path, a door, or window, it comes into being with the properties you set on the last selected object of that type. If you lock a door and change its color to orange, and then place a new door, it comes in as a locked, orange door. This is not true of map pins. If I am setting up a page of pins that are all intended to be player facing, I must set this manually on each pin I drop. It would be so much more useful to have an open handout, drop a pin, set the desired properties, and those properties persist on each new pin dropped until I change a pin, or refresh the game. 2. Mass Selection Currently : Dragging a selection rectangle on the VTT selects only graphics Alt-dragging a selection rectangle only selects paths and text objects This is useful. How much of a lift it would be to institute a third option, may shift-alt, so that a selection rectangle only selects layerless objects (doors, windows and pins)? Ideally, even more granularity would be nice, but this would probably require the creation of a new selection tool or preferences palette.

keithcurtis said: I'm not sure I understand. You can keep them from opening the referring handout by not granting them access to it. Or am I missing some piece of the puzzle? Regardless, you should be seeing the entire subsection, and only that subsection in the pin. (Subject to the height limitations of the pin preview). I suspect you might be running into an issue with some invisible HTML causing weird early truncation behavior. Try this: Do a clean paste into the notes area (completely clear it first, by deleting the content and backspacing a couple of ties for good measure to eliminate any hidden html). Copy the section from the notes area, and ctrl-shift-v to paste as plain text. Then format your headers. This will ensure as clean a format as possible. Here is an example: Hi Keith - that was the problem.&nbsp; Initially I couldn't get the full text without the double click and that refused to open without granting access to the handout, with all the problems that brings.&nbsp; I don't get why a handout with nothing in the notes area would need to be cleared, but I also don't get why some people like taramasalata, life is just full of mysteries... Following your instructions does the job. I removed permissions to the handout and then set the notes up as directed slight shame there is a size limit - being able to have a full set of GM notes for a room/area linked to a pin would be sooo nice

Simon G. said: slight shame there is a size limit - being able to have a full set of GM notes for a room/area linked to a pin would be sooo nice Here and now in this thread is the absolute best time to make your voice heard. While an item is in beta, feedback can be considered and/or acted upon very quickly. And yeah, that truncation was less about the map pins, and more about the archaic text editor that Roll20 uses. I don't think the editor is going to change any time soon. The chance for universal breakage across the site is probably pretty high. But it's entirely possible that the pin preview could wash the content more thoroughly before display.

The map pin link within the handout does not work if the section header is within a quote block. The buttons next to the section headings within the handout should be hidden/collapsed most of the time. I am guessing that most sections will only have a map pin made once, and I find the map pin and link buttons next to every header to be fairly distracting.

Me again.&nbsp; I think the cap of 300 characters (before tooltip text goes beyond the boundary of its box) is possibly not quite enough characters.&nbsp; If that box was bit bigger, it would help me to add more meaningful context to the tooltip information and give my players a bit more to go on.&nbsp; The other thing that seems to be bothering people (and it did bother me too) was having the anchor automatically appear next to each header.&nbsp; Seems like there are some style limitations here.&nbsp; One way to remedy this is to change them so that they are no longer headers - which is not ideal from a formatting perspective.&nbsp; Currently there is not a style option for larger font sizes of plain-text unless I am woefully misinformed.&nbsp; Apart from this, the feature is working well and its great!&nbsp;

I saw it mentioned above once, but want to second adding additional lighting options. Ideally I would love to see a four-state visibility selection between 'hidden', 'visible', 'above darkness', and 'above mask'. Similar to how Foreground Layer object rendering can be set for Dynamic Lighting. For example in the screenshot below, the Map Pin currently shown would appear as long as it's set at least to 'visible' (current behavior), the Map Pin in the blue circle would appear as long as it's set to at least 'above darkness', and finally the Map Pin in the green circle would appear if set 'above mask'.

Fran said: Looks like this works fine with the handout that was created for the Dragon Heist module I'm using....but isn't working for a handout that was created for Blue Alley. Oddly, it lets me drag a pin from the header section for a room, but then gives an error "anchor not found". Not really sure what's missing there. We have a known bug out there that throws an "anchor not found" error that the devs are working on, you probably found it! Send us your game page and handout from which you are trying via zendesk, please.&nbsp; I found it too. In my Alien RPG: Chariot of the Gods game, the handouts that had Header 2 formatted headers work fine (dragging the header to the map). But a handout that I had to edit so it had headers throws that error. Dragging handouts as map pins works great. I'm creating a helpdesk ticket on it. Not sure what zendesk is - I assume the help desk?

Doug E. said: I'm creating a helpdesk ticket on it. Not sure what zendesk is - I assume the help desk? Yep. Zendesk is the software package that manages the Help Center reports.

These are really useful for me. Nice job.&nbsp;

Mike E said: Currently there is not a style option for larger font sizes of plain-text unless I am woefully misinformed. Not really relevant to map pins, but you can change font size by editing the html directly. You have to make a change of some sort within the editor after to make the changes stick, though. Here is what I do for read-aloud text in my adventure products. &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt; &lt;span style="font-size: larger ; color: rgb( 132 , 99 , 0 ) ; font-style: italic"&gt; Text that is meant to be read aloud to the players appears like this. &lt;/span&gt; &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt;

This is one of Roll20's greatest features added in recent years.&nbsp; Here are some potential recommendations: Custom pin art, as previously recommended by others A scroll bar for longer handouts A GM summary feature, where GMs can summarize the handout in a smaller paragraph, and if the players want to see the whole handout, they just open it More for handouts in general, but allowing multiple images to be added to a handout so that when players view the pin, they can click arrows near the art and scroll through several art depictions (e.g. if I used a map pin of a city overview on a larger kingdom map) Pin visible to certain players, instead of all players or none

Hi, Could there be an option to send the tool tip text to chat in a nicely formatted style. In our game we use supernotes to send the room description to chat for the GM to read out and players to read along. Players can also scroll back up the chat to re read if necessary. I'd like to initially keep the map pin invisible to players and once the room description has been sent to chat make the pin visible so players can re check it anytime they want. Hope that makes sense

Sorry for spamming this thread!&nbsp; I'm loving these map pins!&nbsp; Anyhow - I've just been experimenting with the 'go to pin' functionality when you have a pin on an entirely different map. At the moment, when you press this button, it takes you on 'one way' journey to the other map.&nbsp; What would be really cool is if it could somehow link back the other way so you could easily navigate between maps by simply using the button or some kind of sub menu or something.&nbsp; I would like to be able to return to my starting location without having to manually change the map. Maybe having a 'go to pin' button on every anchor by default would work?