Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account

GM advice needed - handling images

1413329598
vÍnce
Pro
Sheet Author
Just curious how other GM's handle displaying images to players in their roll20 campaigns. I usually try to collect images (photos, line art, digital art, etc) that may help convey different "scenes" during a gaming session. Sometimes I use them on a map layer like wallpaper or add them to a handout. I'm going to experiment with stacking images on the GM layer while using the back/front option to pick an image and send it to the map layer to change the "wallpaper" of the scene. Anyone have their own process they would like to share? Thanks
1413330031
Gen Kitty
Forum Champion
I use handouts for things I want players able to refer back to. I use URLs in chat for really big pictures. For smaller images, The Aaron gave me a picture script: give it a URL and and it puts a picture into chat.
1413330913

Edited 1413331466
Gold
Forum Champion
I do a version of the "wallpaper" method you mentioned. Not stacked, more of a storyboard hidden in Fog Of War. I make a big background page (180x250 or whatever), that starts blank (naturally) and I like a slate grey, dark grey background. I turn on the Fog Of War, that hides the entire page in blackness to the Players' eyes. Use reveal tool to carve out a see-able area at the Top Left. That's the normal place for your player to look. If your players keep a Token for tracking health or whatever, place their token in the "safe area" at the top left. Also if you have a homeland picture, origin picture, or character portraits that are already known, place those in the visible safe area at the top left also. I let my Players propose & send me pictures that they want up here, like a picture of their weapons, their symbol, a detail of their character's haircut, wanted poster for their worst enemy, whatever. Then I paste the DM's upcoming pictures like wallpaper all over the rest of the page, hidden in the Fog Of War. Make a hidden storyboard of illustrations. I keep a column on the right side for monster tokens and images that I might "pull in" to the top-left visible area on a moment's notice. More importantly, I make rows and rows of cinematic pictures, images, scenes as Vince described. These pictures are roughly in a storyboard sequence, however the Players might skip around the storyboard rather than proceeding in the order I've placed the pictures, and that's OK and works fine with my wallpaper approach. I just keep them in rows for sections, they might encounter 1 or more pictures from any given row, or they might move around the page. Example, all the Swamp scenes on a row. All the Town scenes on another row. Camping scenes on another row. So there might be 4-8 different camping scenes queued up, waiting to see which one gets used next. When it's time to move to that scene, reveal the picture from the Fog & shift-Ping to bring the player's focus to that part of the wallpaper . That's the key DM technique that I use for doing the wallpaper /storyboard /flashcards /illustrations on Roll20. Sometimes I will announce, like "Zoom yourself to 200% and then I will ping you to the spot". If I want them to see the picture fairly large and full screen, but I don't want to stretch the picture so big on my wallpaper. Of course they can still zoom in & out when they get there, but sometimes it is nice to tell the players to be zoomed-in before you do the reveal & ping. It leads to a patchwork. They can see "Ahhh we revealed several Swamp-scene pictures on that row... but there's still some hidden black spots, I guess we missed something..". It leaves some mystery. By reducing the Fog Of War opacity (around 70% dark works), GM can see what scenes are available, coming up, and decide what to reveal next. I use multiple Pages that are each this big. There is 1 page for each Player (so every Character has their own personal page with storyboard hidden and revealed). Then 1 page for whatever adventure we are on, collectively as a party, the current session or story line. Another page is a world map, with more pictures hidden around the borders.
1413332433
vÍnce
Pro
Sheet Author
I'm liking these ideas. I try to keep the wallpaper images fairly small 16x9 format which equates to 1120x630. Not too big unless you have a stack of them... I just made a change to my GM-layer idea and instead of stacking, I just resize them to make thumbnails and I can resize them and send them to the map at any time to change scene. I like the idea of a "storyboard" or possibly more like a quilt using fog of war. I need to try that.