Feature request: Additional map icons

[Kelwyn]

Here’s my pitch: sub-tools under fill and edge to let us mark the map. OR a separate “marking” set of tools.

Fill tool alternates:

• Stairs up/down (triangle lines, apply repeatedly to rotate?)
• DM only visible icon (trap, notes)
• Difficult terrain
• Item of interest (Generic) - pedestal, gears, control panel, etc.

Wall tool alternates:

• Door (open/closed)

I realise most of these you can sort of do with the current toolset, but it’d be nicer to expand the options a bit.I think they’re pretty aligned with the dry-erase mat model of shmeppy. Doors would be a huge one, usually reserve a colour (gold, bright pink) as the ‘door’ colour.

blueprint style - note stairs, doors, item of interest in room 41

[johncs]

I think this will change Shmeppy’s feel in a pretty dramatic way. I’d need to create a gallery of icons that the user would be expected to interact with continuously while creating their map.

I think that’d slow down map creation far too much. The Painted Duck effect would cause Shmeppy to feel much slower.

[Kelwyn]

I’d be happy with just the door, to be honest. That is probably the hardest thing for me doing maps and explaining them to my players. “The orange wall is actually a door” etc. and then I can’t use orange as a colour…

[johncs]

Interesting, I haven’t had trouble with doors personally, so this might be a blind spot for me. I don’t think I usually draw them at all honestly.

Could other folks weigh in on their experience showing doors in Shmeppy? You’re not the first person to mention doors @Kelwyn, but it’s been a very long time since anyone’s talked about doors in Shmeppy with me.

[Blake]

I use different colored edges for doors. It is easy to show open/closed by redrawing the orientation.

I use tokens for anything of interest, with fog to hide them when needed. I usually make a map key that is color coded for stairs, terrain, etc. I do worry about color selection to be inclusive of color blind players. (The games I play are usually open to the public)

Having a set of icons sounds tricky. You would sometimes have objects that are not in the icon set, which means having to use the tokens and labels anyway.

[Kelwyn]

Someone else commented re: doors at the end of their show and tell post Tales of the Yawning Portal: Forge of Fury

[Adam_Freeman]

Regarding making doors (and windows):

I recently built a small settlement (Phandalin) for a couple of my thieving rouges to explore.

I used a very simple scheme: house walls are one color, and then a different color for windows, and then a third color for doors.

To my eye, everything is very clear. But of course, 1: I built it, and 2: I don’t have any color blindness issues.

I’ve not yet run my PC’s through the map, so I might have some feedback to share from them in the future.

[robotneedsbeer]

I’m the forge of fury guy. My issue with using differently coloured edge segments was largely self-inflicted. I’d been using a darker brown next to medium grey which offered little visual contrast. My players had trouble distinguishing wall from door. If I use more sharply contrasting colours, they have fewer issues. From my view, this can be solved with less “realistic” but higher utility colour choices.

[Adam_Freeman]

Yep, in my case, I opted to focus on clarity with high contrast colors and no fill on the interior. Less pretty, more functional.

[Jader7777]

I try to simply use the basic tools to improvise what I need players to see when they are playing.

This is a dilapidated house with one door, four windows, two rooms and a fireplace, you can see it once I tell you in the Theatre Of The Mind, after which there isn’t a need for special symbols.

I could see text on screen or GM-only visible tokens etc being useful for some GMs who want to put reminders of the session directly on the table while they run the game, but really you should have your own copy of the map fully annotated (or just memorized) if you want to achieve that outcome.

The maps themselves are pretty open for interpretation, like for example the stand out colours on this map are black, light blue and yellow. You can imagine what these things might be and as a player you may even ask what you’re looking at, but once I tell you it’s a bubbling tar pit you know exactly which colour I am talking about on this map and what it implies.