Fog of War

Good Afternoon, I am looking into how best to implement the types of fog-of-war appropriate for wargaming: Player #1 should not be able to see the tokens of Player #2 unless scouting/detecting them, and vice versa for Player #2 detecting Player #1's tokens. I briefly floated the idea of using an independent layer for each player, i.e. Player #1 places her tokens on Layer #1, Player #2 does the same with Layer #2 and each player is limited to only being able to see things on their own layer. The GM of course has their own layer. After looking through some settings, however, this does not appear to be possible. Is there another method that might allow me to achieve this effect? Thanks, ~Schwieger

I believe there is an API that allows for mirroring token movement across pages, but that's a pro perk. Dynamic Lighting (Plus/Pro) should be able to achieve what you are looking for. It can prevent characters from seeing tokens they do not have line of sight on, though if they have other methods of detection, it might require GM intervention to highlight a position that is not in the field of view. At the free level, this becomes a lot harder. Fog of War is all-inclusive for players, not conditional. You could make duplicate pages with identical maps for each player, and use the Split the Party function to put each on their own layer. As GM, you would likely be hopping around quite a bit, and it could get confusing. (You could keep a separate  Dummy Account  log in to cover each player, and keep all the Dummy Account views open in separate private browsing windows arranged across your monitor(s), but again, confusing and difficult to manage.  Without more info on the exact needs, that's the best answer I have.

You can use transparent tokens that aren't attached to or represent sheets, give the tokens an aura of 0 (which fills their grid unit), and then control who sees them by who has edit/control permissions for each token.  You would likely use a particular color of aura for each involved player. You could also use a rollable table token with one of the images being transparent, use the same aura as the previous options, and then swap to the regular token image when that token gets detected.  This would work with the token set to represent a sheet, but would make it visible to all players when you swap to the regular token.  If you will only have 2 players, this would work well, but with more than 2, you would need to use the previous method to totally control who can see what.

Hah! I forgot the transparent token trick, and I'm the one that wrote that up for the Tips n Trick thread. There's a sample transparent token for download in the first link: Invisible Tokens And a wealth of how to use them in the wiki: Invisible Tokens

Ooh - that's pretty neat. I'll go ahead and look into using the transparent token trick. Thanks for the recommendations guys. ~Schwieger