Layer Permissions for Players

I was watching the tutorial videos, and in video #2 at about 1:45, it is said that players only have access to the Objects & Tokens layer. I asked one of my friends who has more experience with Roll20 than I do if that is an absolute, or if the GM is able to manually grant players additional access to other layers, and he informed me that it was in fact an absolute. This set-up is great for more traditional games, in which the GM holds most(if not all) of the authority over the environment, NPCs, etc. but there are quite a few games out there that depart from this traditional structure -- some only a little bit, and some to the extent of dividing up GM responsibilities evenly among all players. And the number of games that do this is increasing quite rapidly. So my suggestion is to include the ability -- fully optional, and not enabled by default, of course -- for the designated GM(who in this case may simply be the person who initially set up the game table, and not a GM in the traditional sense) to grant additional permissions to the players. I'm not entirely familiar with what goes on on each layer, but I imagine the options could range from granting full access to a layer to only granting access to specific features of a layer. And in games with multiple pages, I could even see being able to create page-specific permission set-ups as being a good thing, too.

Out of curiosity, what would you use this for? The other layers are the map layer, GM layer, and dynamic lighting layer. Maps and dynamic lighting are typically set up ahead of time and rarely changed. Most "changeable" objects are placed on the object layer and if you wanted a player to have permission for it you can just assign it to them or all players during setup. Dynamic lighting is the same way...it's usually preset and (with small exceptions, like doors) does not change. There's no reason to give access to the GM layer...it's identical to the object layer other than the fact that it hides things from players. If you aren't planning on hiding something, why not just put it on the object layer? If you want your players to be able to mess with other layers you can just promote them to GMs themselves. I can't really come up with a scenario when I'd want my players to be able to change the map and lighting...but not something else. It would help if you had some specific examples of what you would do with this. For games that have multiple "GMs" it's easy to promote all players to GM. Other games have one GM. And you can already grant players access to anything on the object level, which is everything that is typically changed in all games I've played. Just curious, maybe there's a good reason for it. I'm just missing it =(.

Jacquesne J. said: I can't really come up with a scenario when I'd want my players to be able to change the map and lighting...but not something else. More specifically, I can't think of a reason to grant access to the map layer and not the DL layer, or to the DL layer and not the map layer (especially since DL walls tend to be set up based on the graphics of the map layer). And, as you say, the GM layer is identical to the objects layers except that its contents are hidden from the non-GMs. Further, I'm not aware of any system along the lines of the games Derek is talking about which are also tactical combat games, so the map, walls, and objects are more for visual flair while playing than anything else. (Of course, I'm far from being familiar with every system out there.)

Oh, okay. My friend and I were wanting to do more collaborative stuff. Mind maps were one thing(if you've seen the Cortex Plus Dramatic pathways character generation system, you'd know why we'd be stoked for that; the DramaSystem as presented in the Hillfolk RPG also uses a similar, though much simpler, map), where it would just be a lot more expedient for all the players to be able to put down stuff and add connections and whatnot without worrying about permissions. There is also the issue that only GMs can currently place tokens on the board, and they have to set the permissions for players to be able to interact with them. Again, there are times when everyone being able to upload their own pictures for things is just more expedient than relying on the GM to have to place and permit everything. My friend's example was character portraits and whatnot. I have to admit I'm a bit perplexed why the players aren't responsible for providing their own tokens by default -- that seems really weird. I asked him, and it turns out that he wasn't aware that you could set every player to GM in a single game. Is this standard, or is it a paid feature? Because now that I know about it, I think it would actually take care of everything that we can think of.

Derek C. said: I asked him, and it turns out that he wasn't aware that you could set every player to GM in a single game. Is this standard, or is it a paid feature? Because now that I know about it, I think it would actually take care of everything that we can think of. Standard feature. Just go on your campaign details page, and mouse-over the Player's portrait. It will give you the option to "Promote to GM" which makes them a co-GM along with the GM who started the campaign.

Derek C. said: Oh, okay. My friend and I were wanting to do more collaborative stuff. Mind maps were one thing(if you've seen the Cortex Plus Dramatic pathways character generation system, you'd know why we'd be stoked for that; the DramaSystem as presented in the Hillfolk RPG also uses a similar, though much simpler, map), where it would just be a lot more expedient for all the players to be able to put down stuff and add connections and whatnot without worrying about permissions. If by "connections" you mean drawings on the board all players can draw on the board already (there's actually a requested feature to allow GMs to disable this!). That being said, I wouldn't mind the ability to have players able to create their own tokens (maybe using the default token functionality?). This could be handy for board games or some card games. "Promote to GM" allows you to do most of that stuff but you may want to make sure people aren't messing with each other's stuff, like with a war game, or to have a standard game where a player can drag out a spell template. The reason why you don't need players to create their own tokens is because they only need the one usually, and as the GM you have to decide where they start on a given map anyway. I suppose if your players have a "duplicate" type ability it might be handy but I doubt that comes up often. I imagine they'll add more detailed permission granularity over time but for now I assume core features, like performance, card decks, video chat, character sheets, etc., are taking priority.