Suggestion: Visibility of NPCs on the Turn Order tool

Currently, NPCs on the Turn Order tool can be made invisible to players by putting the respective token on the GM layer - which is extraordinarily useful. For NPCs that haven't entered the fray yet, that tool works quite nicely. However, there are NPCs that will be part of the battle but that all players are not yet aware of - until they inevitably see the entry on the Turn Order tool, "Whoa, there's a total of six of them, eh? Interesting." A nice additional function, I would suggest, would be the ability to turn off/on the visibility for each Turn Order tool entry, irrespective of what layer their token is on. Two reasons - first , I think it's impossible for players to not examine the Turn Order tool entries for information about their foes...at the very least, how many there are. In the limited in-character visual environment that Roll20 enforces on PCs, it can be challenging to be sure just how many bad guys, as well as what type) they're up against - which seems realistic to the confusion of a real gunfight. However, the Turn Order tool can provide ALL players unwanted clarity in this combat confusion. Second , I would like to use to NPCs designation in the Turn Order to give me quick handy information about them - say what floor they're on in the building that the fight is taking place in...or perhaps "Mook1" versus "BigBad1". That's not currently possible because the players would see that meta-game info, as well, as soon as the token in question is removed from the GM layer. Enjoying your product R20, keep up the good work. Cheers Sean

I assume you are using names to set your "meta-game info". The players cannot see a token's name (meta-game info) unless you set them to be able to see it in the token settings.

Players actually don't see Tokens that are given a place in the turn order if they're on the GM layer. As far as I know, if the turn order is currently on a Token on the GM layer, players will see the turn as being on whoever is next in the order that's visible to them.

You should also set up the initiative roll for your npc's as a /gmroll macro, so the players don't see how many rolls you make or the results.

Sorry for the delayed response; I don't post questions often & I forgot that you don't get notified when following a topic (Is there a way to set it so I'm notified via email when I'm following a topic?). John R : Appreciate the suggestion - yup, currently doing that. Askren : Appreciate your response. Yup, tokens on the "GM Info Overlay" Level cannot be seen by players on the Turn Order. I'm interested in being able to control which tokens that players are able to see that are on the "Objects & Token" Level. Gauss : Interesting point that I didn't consider, that I am especially ignorant of since I've only used Roll20 as a GM. So in the Token Settings if I have it set so the players cannot see the token name, assuming that token is on the "Objects & Token" Level, how does that token appear to the players? An entry without a name? No entry at all, akin to the token being on the "GM Info Overlay" Level?

If the Nameplate is not set to be visible to players, they'll simply see a token with no name. While I wholly support some sort of toggle visibility for stealth and whatnot, the GM layer is all we have at the moment. So if you need to keep things hidden, it's that and GM rolls. You can always expedite the process by making a macro that rolls the initiative and adds the token to the turn order for you by using the @{selected}&tracker

Thanks for your reply Askren; good to know regarding what the players see on the Turn Order when the Nameplate isn't visible to them. Yup, I have a macro that gmrolls NPC initiatives and adds them to the Turn Order. Understood that the GM layer is what we currently have - the purpose of my original post was to request of R20 an additional future feature that allowed the GM to toggle on/off a Turn Order entry's player visibility irrespective of what Layer its token was on.

seanpp, Askren is correct. You can verify this by switching to player mode. Note: sometimes GMs assign control of a monster token to themselves, this is not necessary and will change what you will see in player mode. Ie: make sure you do not assign control of monsters to yourself unless you want to control them while in player mode.

Hi Gauss - yup, never doubted Askren's input. The players seeing a token entry with no name on the Turn Order is helpful from the aspect of being able to put metagame info in a token's name for GM tracking purposes. However, the players could still count these nameless token entries to gain metagame info about numbers of adversaries (even if they didn't want to...hard not to think to yourself, "boy there sure are a lot of nameless tokens on the Turn Order". So hence my Suggestion of a toggle that would enable a GM to make a Turn Order token entry completely invisible to players even if the token is on the Token Level. Cheers

The "toggle" already exists in the form of the GM Layer. As stated earlier, tokens on the GM Layer do not show up in the Turn Order. Basically, from what you are describing the players cannot see the tokens on the map (cannot count them) and thus should not be able to see them in the Turn Order (cannot count them). This is a perfect situation for the GM Layer. The players will not be able to see the tokens (cannot count them) and will not be able see them in the Turn Order (cannot count them).

Hi Gauss Appreciate your feedback. Understood that right now keeping tokens are on the GM layer keeps the Turn Order entries invisible to the players. It's a great feature that works really well for disguising the number of foes prior to when the players encounter them . That is certainly adequate with a fairly straightforward encounter involving: A modest number of foes A battle that occurs in basically one location where all characters can basically see each other Where lighting is good In these types of encounters when the PCs encounter the foes, the foes' tokens are moved to the Token Level and therefore their Turn Order entries become visible to the players as the foes are visible to the PCs. All good. However, for a more complex encounter with numerous foes and/or when the battle occurs in more than one location (say, two different floors of the same building) and/or when lighting conditions are not ideal - a great deal of the fog of war would typically remain, even though the foes are generally now involved in the skirmish and are therefore on the Token Level. For example, during the last session I ran, 15 foes ambushed the PCs who were sleeping in their own separate rooms in a mansion. Shortly after first contact - the powers been cut so there's little light, one PC is down, a couple of foes are down, the PCs are still spread out in different areas, more foes are appearing from different directions to different PCs...and there continued to be quite a bit of confusion, or fog of war, still amply evident in the skirmish. The players were vocally trying to get their arms around what was happening and, at that point, one of their best information tools was the Turn Order, "Well...looks like there's at least 8 of them". It's for these more complex encounters, where the fog of war persists well past contact with the enemy , that it would be really nice to be able to keep the Turn Order essentially "dark" to the players. So that's why I'm requesting a toggle feature for each Turn Order entry, that would offer the ability to keep them invisible irrespective of what Layer their token was on. Cheers

I'm confused. If the players can see the tokens, can't they count them? And if they can't (they're still in fog of war, for example), why not keep them in the GM layer? A thought (Not meant to say that your suggestion is invalid, but just a workaround): If the PCs are in different places, even if it's just different rooms in the same mansion, you could put them on different Pages to start with. This way, they can't count the turn order *or* the number of tokens on the page - only the ones in their immediate vicinity. Another thought (again, just a workaround): You can group enemies in the turn order. I always do this anyway just to cut down on the amount of book-keeping that needs doing. 15 enemies... or 1 captain, 2 lieutenants, 9 soldiers and 3 archers. Each group acts together, so on the Archer turn, 3 archers all take their shot. Anybody who's special enough to have their own initiative score can have their own group, but otherwise just put them all together. It helps move things along faster - and it would help keep things muddled in your scenario. The players see 4 blank spots on the turn order, but they have no idea how many enemies this entails. [[Especially if you always group enemies, they'd get used to not relying on it - and once they get used to that, you could occasionally intentionally have more spots than enemies, in situations where they might be expected to overestimate how many enemies there are (perhaps the enemies are coming from multiple directions and trying to make a lot of noise or something). Then when they think "9 groups - must be at least 9 enemies, probably more like 20 or more!" but there's actually only 5... it's exactly what the enemies wanted them to think, even if it worked for different reasons.]]

I think the problem he is having is that all his players are on the same map, but his characters are in different rooms, so they shouldn't know what is happening to the others. since none of the characters can see all the enemies, his players are looking at the turn tracker and "cheating" just a little to improve their situational awareness. One way to accomplish this right now would be to split the party, and have the same map on multiple pages. It would be kinda difficult to handle, but it would keep players in the dark about things they cant currently see...... I just use a group initiative for my bad guys though, and only have 1 turn on the tracker assigned for them.

Hi Rendelle Thanks for your input . This thread has made obvious I haven't explained the tool I'm requesting as well as I thought - your questions help me to know what still needs clarifying. Appreciate the workaround ideas . I have used the different Pages idea a bit, though in my situation the different combat locations are usually close - so tokens commonly will go back and forth between them. I think that idea might be particularly useful if you had combat going on in two locations where it wasn't possible for the characters to go back and forth between them - and therefore back and forth between the pages. Good thought on grouping some of the NPCs - it's not my practice or preference, which is one of the reasons I like a nice clear organized functional Turn Order tool so I can give each NPC their own spot on the list without slowing down the combat too much. However, I might consider it just to control the metagame leaks otherwise present from the phenomenon I'm describing. You make a good case for this workaround :-). Appreciate you laying out your thoughts on it. To address the confusion you mentioned , in straightforward encounters where the combat, say, occurs in one big room and all the PCs and NPCs can see each other , you are absolutely correct. In that situation, once the PCs run into the NPCs there really isn't much fog of war remaining and the phenomenon I describe, where the Turn Order is giving away a decent amount of metagame info, does not come into play. The combats I'm referring to are ones where the fight is happening, say, throughout a building and the PCs are not all together but in different rooms having gunfights or whatnot with different elements of their foes. Since these different foes are engaged with various PCs they have to be on the Token Layer and therefore their Turn Order entry is visible to all the players. But thanks to the R20 Dynamic Lighting and Line-of-Sight functions preventing any one player being able to see more than the foes in their room, it's typically difficult for any one PC (player) to easily piece together the magnitude of their opposition and leave them with trying to piece it together, "I'm fighting two bogies with auto-weapons in the library - where are you & what's your situation??" In that kind of combat the fog of war persists well past contact with the enemy - that contact necessitating the NPC tokens be on the Token Layer and therefore visible to all players on the Turn Order. So a player can only see the two tokens (foes) in his room but somewhat vaguely knows there's "a lot" more from the chatter from other players in different rooms. However, he sees that the Turn Order has 10 entries (all of which represent 10 foes currently engaged with at least one PC in one of the combat locations - and therefore must be on the Token Layer) that aren't PCs and says "Looks like there's ten foes total guys." That's what I'm trying to prevent. To keep things interesting, I tend to try to limit the simple one-big-room-where-everyone-can-see-everything encounters, so this phenomenon comes up quite a bit. Also important to note, is that this phenomenon of players noticing metagame info from the Turn Order occurs pretty organically, which is to say that the players aren't having to actively seek it out - "Why are your players looking for metagame info in the first place?" The players are, of course, looking at the Turn Order a fair amount during the combat - you can't help but notice if there's more like 3 entries that aren't PCs or more like 13 entries that aren't PCs. Thanks again for your ideas Rendelle. Request: So the tool I'm requesting is a simple toggle for every Turn Order entry that controls whether it's invisible to players irrespective of what layer that token is on.

I think a simple solution to this issue would be to add a feature to limit creature turn visibility to token sight. If player A cannot see creature token X, it does not show up in the turn tracker, regardless if it is on the token layer.

Just out of curiosity, how would you handle this at the kitchen table? The reason I ask is that this seems to be more of a players are metagaming issue than a user interface issue. If it is a metagaming issue perhaps that would be better dealt with by talking to your players.

Felts, interesting idea. Hadn't considered that but that could very well work. Gauss, by "the kitchen table" are you asking how would I handle this if we were playing in-person without Roll20? (Actually, my group plays in-person around a kitchen table with Roll20.) Assuming that's what you mean, I would probably keep the physical Turn Order list to myself, announcing who was up next. That versus having a public Turn Order list showing every player that there are 15 others on that list besides themselves. (Of course, if the battle happens in one big room where everyone can see each other, then the whole point is moot.) Actually, in my posts above, you'll see that I try to address your question in advance - no, this isn't a problem of players ill-advisedly researching something their characters wouldn't know. In an ongoing battle Pete's character is in a room with 1 foe and the other characters in various different rooms are shouting over comms about being engaged with foes. So Pete thinks to himself that there's 4 PCs so perhaps there's 4 foes, if everyone is engaged. Then he looks at the Turn Order to see if his turn is coming and notices there's a lot more than 4 non-PCs on the Turn Order. Pete may not be a rocket scientist but he's not dumb; without having to count he can see there's at least twice as many non-PCs as there are PCs. Wow, there's a lot of them! If I were to talk to players that I would be GM'ing, as you suggest, what would I tell or ask them? To never look at the Turn Order? Not a very good choice, because I'd like them to know when their turn is coming so they can have their action ready. (Though I guess I'd rather have the ability to make the entire Turn Order invisible to players rather than have it show metagame information to any player that looks at it.) I could ask the players to ignore that obvious metagame information unfortunately sitting there on their R20 screens & pretend they don't know it - but it'd be far preferable if I didn't have to.

You understood my question correctly. So, if I understand correctly, your solution "at the kitchen table" is to not show the turn order. You can mimic that by putting copies of each token on the GM layer and only adding those tokens to the turn order.

Ah - my confusion (now cleared up) was due to the fact that I have not played around with Line of Sight, and was neglecting to consider that one player cannot see a token just a few squares away if there's a wall there and Line of Sight is used. Thanks!

Really appreciate you brainstorming on this Gauss. I believe you're suggesting to give an NPC two tokens - one on the GM layer, which is the one you would add to the Turn Order so the players couldn't see it. Then give that same NPC another (identically named) token on the Token Level that would be used in the skirmish. It's a good thought, sir. What you lose, if I understand your suggestion correctly, is the NPC token on the Token Layer getting outlined when you hover the mouse over its entry on the Turn Order, to assist the GM in knowing which NPC's turn it is. That would no longer happen since the token that the Turn Order entry directly related to would be on the GM Layer. I can understand if you're thinking, "Well, you can't have everything." When you have a good number of NPCs in the skirmish I do use that outline feature quite a bit to help me identify just which NPC the Turn Order is indicating is next. You'd obviously have to be extra vigilant on the token naming, because that's all the GM would have to match Turn Order entry with Token Level token. Not an issue if dealing with a Big Bad, but more of a challenge if there's 15 similar mooks. It would still be nice to have a simple visibility on/off toggle for each Turn Order entry - but it's a good workaround idea Gauss.

seanpp, I believe there is a 'mirror move' type API script floating around somewhere. You move one token and another token moves with it. That may help with the yellow box problem you mentioned. I would ask the API forum for help on that. Of course, this is all a workaround but my purpose is to help users do what they need to with the current tools available. :)