Dynamic Lighting Question

Hey I love using Dynamic lighting but sometimes I want my players to know the layout of the building ahead of time, like if its a place they have been before or they would know, without knowing what NPCs or what not is inside. I can't seem to reveal the map when dynamic lighting is on. How do I do this?

I would keep all the npcs on the GM layer and just turn dynamic lighting off.  They could then see the whole thing for planning.  Once you have dynamic lighting turned back on, you can just group select the npcs and send them to the token layer.

Not exactly what I'm looking for. Is there no way to do what I'm asking?

Well, you could duplicate tokens (or a group vision token) and place them so that they can see all areas. But that would reveal all other tokens that are on the token layer.

lol ok I'm basically hearing there's no way to make it so they can see the map without revealing everything I'll figure something out thanks

You could take the map image and save it into a handout that you provide to players, so they could reference it anytime they want in the sidebar. You could copy the page and remove all the NPCs and dynamic lighting lines, and move the players to that first, then move them to the map with NPCs when they encounter them. But Kraynic's suggestion is what most GMs will do.  If you have advanced keyboard shortcuts turned on, then it's a simple matter of a few keystrokes to switch to the GM layer, select the relevant NPC tokens, and move them back to the Object layer. (k, mouse select, l o) But if you're looking for a way to give a token vision of only the Map layer but not the Object layer, then no, that is not possible.

Mikey said: Hey I love using Dynamic lighting but sometimes I want my players to know the layout of the building ahead of time, like if its a place they have been before or they would know, without knowing what NPCs or what not is inside. I can't seem to reveal the map when dynamic lighting is on. How do I do this? Switch to the back ground layer, select the map and shift Z it.  Alternatively, turn on fog of war and block out the rooms individually, then turn off dynamic lighting and it lets them see all the shape of the outside of the building without seeing individual rooms.  then toggle dynamic lighting ON and "reveal areas" the entire map in fog of war.  

I thought you could drag their tokens around the map with them not on the page, in order to reveal areas? And then move them to the page later and the areas will be pre-revealed? Not in a great spot to test now, but you should be able to experiment/verify using a  Dummy Account .

keithcurtis said: I thought you could drag their tokens around the map with them not on the page, in order to reveal areas? And then move them to the page later and the areas will be pre-revealed? Not in a great spot to test now, but you should be able to experiment/verify using a  Dummy Account . That is a direct feature of either Explorer mode in UDL or LDL+AFOW.  I honestly think in the OP's scenario its just better to use straight up free to play fog of war on that map.  

DM Eddie's shift-z option seems the easiest to me, assuming the map is a discrete image and not assembled with token assets in the VTT. If they need to refer back to it more than once it's probably best to make a handout as Jarren suggested.