Dynamic Fog Of War

Maybe the ability for tokens to be edited to automatically reveal fog of war. Further be able to control how large the area, if the reveal bypasses Edges/fill tiles, and the ability to turn this feature on and off with a button or by clicking a token a certain way.
Examples/Ideas:
“Shift + W + Left Click” enable/disable fog of war reveal.
“Shift + 1 + Left Click” Selected token reveals 1 tile in each direction
“Shift + 2 + Left Click” Selected token reveals 2 tile in each direction
“Shift + 3 + Left Click” Selected token reveals 3 tile in each direction
Etc.
“Shift + E + Left click” Toggle if the reveal goes through Edge pieces
“Shift + F + Left click” Toggle if the reveal goes through Fill pieces
Much Love,
Jeff from Discord =)

I remember when I was initially showing off a Shmeppy prototype to folks a couple years ago, someone said “promise me you’ll never implement dynamic fog of war.” :sweat_smile: This is likely to be a contentious feature.

Rather than focus on the design here, I’d be interested to first hear from ya’ll about times when revealing parts of the map manually was painful in some way.

I think Dynamic Fog of War is one way to help the GM reveal parts of the map as play develops. So unless we have a good understanding of what problems exist with the current way GMs do that, it’ll be unnecessarily hard to design a feature to fix those problems (we’d be fumbling in the dark).

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(Mod note: the first part of this post was split off into Fun fact about Fog of War in Shmeppy)

With that said, I am not interested in a dynamic fog system at all (especially if there is no mechanism to lock player control to specific tokens, which I’m also opposed to). To really make the most of it I think you also would have to define token-specific vision types/ranges, vision-blocking walls and obstacles, etc… which are exactly what I was trying to escape when I came to Shmeppy from Maptool. Being able to control what the players can and cannot see on a tile-by-tile basis is my responsibility as a DM and the occasional shift+right-click-drag is easy enough for me.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Fun fact about Fog of War in Shmeppy

I totally derailed this thread with my comment about Fog of War’s history, sorry about that. Just spent some time splitting the two conversations so this thread can be focused on Dynamic Fog of War.

Suggestion for how to get input on this (that’s better than most other forms of input): See if some GMs might be willing to record their screen while using Shmeppy. I currently can’t (for work reasons), but I expect there are others that can.

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Sorry a bit confused. What would be gained from recording your screen? Like I have the means to do it and if it would be helpful I could I just don’t understand why?

I would have absolutely no use for Dynamic Fog of War™

I use Shmeppy as a visualization tool, not as a battlemap, so I don’tI track the action turn by turn. This means that the tokens often aren’t located where the corresponding player is located in my narration. Manually clearing fog of war fits this style a lot better than having to remember to move the tokens around.

Besides, I rely on fog of war to protect me from overeager players. There are players who just have to fiddle with whatever you put in front of them, and I don’t want them to accidentally remove fog of war while moving tokens around.