Lighting question.

Greetings R20 folks,  What do you folks do to keep the players from seeing the entire map?  Example. Its day light outside. I have either a building with contents I do not want to show  and it does have windows to peek in, or its an 'open area' like a forest but i do not want players to see all of the map. Good case I have a map of a building but the players start outside the building and its high noon. So I placed them literally off the map so they can knock on the door but they can see 'in' the building and all the encounter areas.  Alas I cant see how to prevent the players from seeing the interior without turning on dynamic lighting and forcing them to use light sources which seems lame when its day time.  How do you all handle it? 

Fog of war, the old-fashioned kind. Just clear the entire map, then use 'hide areas' to cover up what you want covered-up.

I was thinking this. Is the clearance a  paint brush? Ill have to see how it works. Obviously we would not use dynamic lighting. 

When I use  regular fog of war and have it cover the whole map, when I put a token down and hit Ctl+L I still see the entire map. Is this normal? What is diff between fog of war and advanced fog of war and 'dim light reveals'?  I am fairly good with dynamic lighting. I love it. But for some out door areas I still want the players blind for the most part. For sight do you just use a lighting or sight macro?

Regular fog of war is not interactive with Ctrl/Cmd-L. There's not much reason for it to be since it is not character-dependent, but global. You can adjust the GM opacity of FoW in the page settings, making it more or less obvious to you what is covered, but for all players it will either be completely visible or completely obscured. Think of it as laying a piece of black paper over a traditional map. You can reveal areas with a rectangle-type tool, or a polygon type tool for doing irregular shapes. Fog of War adds almost nothing to the computational overhead of your game. With regular fog of war, you do not need dynamic lighting, and indeed it is the main tool for obscuring an area at the free level. I am a Pro user and I use this probably more often than I do Dynamic Lighting for quick hiding of an area. Advanced Fog of War is an entirely different animal, and is used in conjunction with Dynamic Lighting features. It basically allows an area, once seen, to remain seen by the players. It's a very immersive tool, but with many players or large maps it can slow down performance. "Dim Light Reveals" merely means that areas only glimpsed with dim light also remain persistent, rather than just bright light.

You actually can use dynamic lighting for this. I have a couple maps that are set up for just that kind of thing myself. You want the options for "Global Illumination" and "Enforce Line of Sight" enabled, and that does pretty much exactly what you want it to do I think. It might not be perfect if you don't want light inside the buildings, but it means they don't need a light source at all, and you can use the dynamic lighting features to keep them from seeing through walls. Enforce Line of Sight means they can only see what the tokens they control have line of sight to, so they also won't be able to see what their allies see if that matters to you. I'm assuming you would want that, but I can see reasons why you wouldn't.. That or just fill the building with fog, and clear out areas that they can see into.

To expand on what Christian said: If you use Dynamic Light and want it to be dark inside buildings but bright outside, you can leave Global Illumination off and instead put a (or more) token as lightsource on the lightlayer outside the building. Give them a bright radius of 100 (or whatever is a big number for your map and measurement). If you conbine 3 of them, put one in top left corner with bright light, the other 2 in top right and bottom left corner with dim light only, you have a bright sun which gives nice shadows behind buildings. ;) Edit: You could even put a dim light source into every room to make a difference between inside and outside. If a room has windows the brightness from outside will cast sunrays into the room.

That's very clever! Danii said: Edit: You could even put a dim light source into every room to make a difference between inside and outside. If a room has windows the brightness from outside will cast sunrays into the room.

Thanks! :) If you wanna get really fancy you can set up a macro which operates the torch script for tokens in a room to emulate lightswitches. And then you can have a "trap" setup to switch the light on when a player enters a room. But that's crazy stuff I haven't done - yet. ;) Edit: Combine that with the delay script to turn on a long line of lightsources one after the other, a looong hall and some creepy music.... *get's evil thoughts* (and slightly off-topic. Sorry!) :D

This is SUPER HELPFUL. I have an 'out door' 'desert map (like wide open) which if at day time there is no reason not to see the area. The issue is as down loaded map it lists the encounter areas..1, 2, ect. So in this case Ill probably use Fog of war and manually open it up. The external lights outside building are a great idea. I also like the manually fog it.  Question> If i manually use fog is there an opacity I have to use to make sure the players cant see anything? Will I as the dm still be able to see things? 

This may open a can of worms (which is good for fishing) but is there a section of you tube videos you reccomend? I have had 2 sessions with my two players so far. Things we noticed. Player sheets kinda obstruct the view of the map, no real way around this? Initiative for pathfinder 1E is super important. Is there a thing we need to do to expedite this? We though just rolling random numbers at the start of the page landing was good to have the 'initiative box' up to show how goes when The lighting issue with players seeing 'into' areas they shouldn't. This is resolved in this post. Question> can I turn on fog of war and manually cover areas and still keep dynamic lighting as well?  Bump seems to be a good macro, do you use it? Do you have any macros or things you do other than lay out npcs/mobs for the players? I must admit, roll20 makes roleplaying games FAR better because of dynamic lighting then you could ever get via table top and we have been playing since the 70's. 

Fog of War is always dark for players, no opacity. The opacitiy setting is just for the gm to see through where the players can't see. If you have a second monitor, you can put your charactersheets outside the tabletop on the second monitor. Fog of War and Dynamic Lighting go together quite well.  I use Bump. (If you mean the script.) Many. Most of them are custom made for characters or the system I play (Das Schwarze Auge). Like a random tavern generator, regeneration-calculation, fumbletables, ...  I also make heavy use of some scripts you can find in the one-click-script-install-thingy. You can find instructions to all of these somewhere in the forum.  To get back on topic: One of the scripts I use lets you draw circles for dynamic lighting and splits them into polygons. (Dynamic lighting doesn't like circles.)

As far as the character sheets go, I always open mine up in another window as a player.  I don't have a second monitor, but I don't need to be able to see the sheet unless making a roll, so I only have it focused when needed.  Token macros for common things help lower the need to see the character sheet.

Also, keep in mind that any sheet can be minimized with a double-click on the title bar. You can have several sheets tucked away in a convenient corner.