Sometimes things can’t be drawn as a cell but also don’t work well as a token.
Things like stairs for example. There’s almost a standard in D&D map drawing to use a triangle made of lines to denote stairs, seen in this map or this map-drawing legend.
There’s also other things like traps, rubble piles, or trees that don’t quite work well as tokens since they don’t need to move and are often drawn below the player tokens as a detail of the terrain. It’d also be nice to denote cliff ledges (see bottom left of the above legend), which can’t be clearly shown using just cell colors or edges. It’d also be nice to have symbols for things like +30ft to show that the elevation changes like in this map.
I know it might be considered to be adding complexity, but it’s something easily done on a whiteboard that doesn’t really have even a work-around in Shmeppy.
Agreed, I’ve definitely had a few instances where I had to rely on image editors and a background rather than being able to quickly sketch something like elevation or “static” features. I could see a simple version of this being a “shapes” layer that effectively emulates tokens but either they can’t be moved (just placed and deleted like a solid color or wall) or can only be moved by the GM.
Triangles for stairs, circles for an area of effect, column, or tree, a jagged line to represent elevation changes, squares or a half circle on the edge of a square to denote doors, or something like that. Maybe just utilizing the “common map legend” images of D&D maps might even be an easier implementation. Almost like a mix of adding a background, but with some of the movement abilities of a token for DMs…?
Indeed! I think it would be really useful to be able to more easily represent basic stuff like treasure chests, doors, and maybe trees, traps, and stairs. Various pickups could be represented via common symbols like coins, potions, and so on. Or there could just be a generic loot bag symbol. Though it’d be even better if these things were still colourable somehow, like if they were simple vector designs that could be tinted, just for aesthetic variance. So red chests in a dungeon with lots of fire, golden doors in temples, etc. Another idea I can think of alongside this would be labels for these things visible only to the GM. On larger maps that might make it easier to remember that this door is trapped, or that chest has so and so item in it.
