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 .
×

A very specific question about dynamic lighting and advanced fog of war

Hello friends, I have a rather specific problem and I've determined that the solution I want is to make it so that dynamic lighting on player tokens does not reveal fog of war in unexplored areas, only in previously explored areas. I want to be in full control of which areas go from blacked out to explored, but leave the computer in control of which areas are lit up and visible to player tokens. I don't seem to be able to do this. Am I missing how?
1555779248
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
A couple of things you can do. Normally, Advanced Fog of war could automatically preserve places the characters have seen, but this won't work for you for two reasons: 1 Advanced Fog of War is automatic, and you want manual control. 2 Advanced Fog of War is currently broken, especially in combination with Dynamic Lighting Also normally, you could just use plain Fog of War to reveal sections of the map as they play, but you want to use the Dynamic Lighting tools to control vision and movement in the encounter areas. My suggestion for you is to use light crumbs . These are tokens which provide vision for all characters. You can drop these in areas previously explored. The method to make them is thus: Drop a token you want to use for a light crumb. It doesn't need to represent a character. Assign control of that token to "All Players" Give it appropriate vision and light to cover what would be seen in the area you want to reveal. I'd suggest light to 100 feet, dim starting at -5. This keeps the revealed area dim, but visible. Put it in an explored area. Copy and paste new ones as needed as they go along. All players will be able to see the dim vision provided by the light crumb. If you want to make sure no player grabs a light crumb and drags it around the map, you can use regular Fog of War to conceal unexplored areas. Here is an example from a recent game I ran. The players are in the Lower Right, where the bright light is. I have dropped light crumbs in each previously explored room. (They look like little eyeballs)
I'm disappointed I have to resort to a work-around like that, but yup, that'll do it. Thanks Keith! The issue I'm having is that I'm running Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and even after drawing my own dynamic lighting blockers to replace the very poor ones that are in the module, my players keep accidentally revealing secret areas of the map with their tokens; the lighting blockers just don't block sometimes. I imagine the root issue is to do with the lighting grid, and I could resolve it by drilling down into that for a look, but that's more effort than I'm willing to go to for every map in Undermountain.