Yeah, squares are pretty important AOEs. But presumably you could allow toggling a token between a circle or a square at creation time?
What about just adding a draw tool? As in something like the laser pointer, but it leaves the mark behind and creates an object that can later be deleted. People could just throw the outline of something down like you do on a whiteboard with a pen. I know this would immediately disappoint some who want the auto measuring stuff in place, but think of it as a general tool instead of a specific one. It has uses outside of AOE, and weāre already using general tools to fake AOEs, this would just become a consistent option.
I donāt really like the idea of allowing tokens of different shapes. Thereās still an idea of a named region object that would be a better fit to what youāre describing. I havenāt given up on that idea and I think it would be useful. But it seems somewhat risky and might make things feel a bit too complicated.
Free drawing might be appropriate instead/as-well. For folks with tablets and styluses Iām sure itāll be especially good, since tablet support will be landing soon. And itās sort-of simple to understand (though actually making a simple-feeling drawing interface may be challenging).
Spitball idea: Having two ālayersā might be a way to solve this.
One a base layer the DM/Ref sets up and a game layer Players and DMs can annotate/erase/etc without changing the game layer.
Have all drawing elements on the game layer be 33% to 50% transparent, always showing the base layer features. Areas of Effect are easy to mark out with the āgame layerā fill tool. A DM can say āthis square is on fireā or āthe smoke clouds are here and hereā, āthis one floods this roundā and not worry about messing up their map.
Iād want the fill and edge tools, and possibly the select tool on the game layer.
Reviving this thread again just to pitch my idea. What about extending the measure tool in order to add this functionality? D&D has 5 spell shapes when doing AOE spells: lines, cones, cubes, spheres, and cylinders. From a 2D perspective spheres and cylinders are the same so there is only 4 that matter, and they can be simplified to their 2D counterparts: lines, triangles, squares, and circles.
The measure tool already does lines and circles. The triangle just needs to be as wide on its base as it is tall. The square is the hardest one probably since the spell point of origin is on a side of the square, but maybe you just ignore that fact and make the squares draw from a corner. Iād have to look through spells to see if there are ones where it would really matter, or you could just make it work. This also turns into a lot of hot keys, so maybe a similar tool like select has, where you select which type of measurement. Or similar to things like photoshop where multiple tools are nested in one button.
The second added feature would be do something like Ctrl+Drag makes the measurement appear on the board visible by everyone, and stays there. It doesnāt need to be interactable or anything. If you need to change it you just draw a new one. Drawing a new one (visible or not) delete the old one.
Iām sure there are all kinds of problems with this, so Iād be interested to hear comments from everyone. My thinking is that this solves the issues without changes to tokens, and builds on an already existing tool instead of trying to add a new one.
I was looking at a TTRPG review where the idea came up of using physical string to connect images laying on a physical game space to note connections, and I thought back on this forum thread.
Maybe there could be a feature that basically draws a persistent line between two tokens (an analogue to this would be having 2 tokens on a physical map, and using a length of string, tying one end to one token and tying the other end around the other token). So the connection (line) persists even when one of the tokens is moved. And multiple tokens could be connected, allowing for essentially any shape by āconnecting the dots.ā
Some potential pros: not having a gallery of shapes to choose from, might be other use cases like if Shmeppy is being used for some kind of flow chart or drawing connections
Some potential cons: not an elegant solution for spheres/cylinders (likely a group would still use the measure tool), may be clunky for players to select multiple tokens at once (then again, maybe there could be a selection tool for players that is only for selecting tokens), might be that this wouldnāt be as heavily utilized as other features