Hi! I have been using Shmeppy for a few months and I have loved it. It’s exactly the whiteboard map manager I have been looking for as a remote DM.
There is one feature that I am craving above all. I have many encounters with tokens I want to keep hidden on the map, but I don’t want there to be a blank black tile there to give the surprise away to my players. Is it possible to have a Fog of War that affects tokens only, and not fill?
Thank you for your hard work!
I think it’d be useful too. But I think it’d increase the complexity of the fog of war tool from the user’s perspective significantly.
Fog of war is already a bit tricky at the moment despite its apparent simplicity. The “see map as player” feature was heavily requested by users partially because it’s not always super clear how the map interacts with fog (big tokens and edges in particular have interactions that aren’t obvious).
Making a whole other kind of fog of war, one that only hides tokens, seems like it’d complicate things a bit too much.
There’s been quite a lot of talk of some kind of “gm only notes”, and a possible implementation of that I’ve thought of is essentially a “gm only token”. It’d be visually distinct (maybe it’d be a triangle or have a weird border or something) from user visible tokens, but could be used to mark traps or other secret spatial notations.
This “gm only notes” implementation could be used to mark the position of tokens you want on the map and then you could just move the actual tokens into position whenever you want them to become visible.
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Hi John, hope you’ve been well.
Wanted to bring this idea up again- I am a big fan of your suggestion of “GM only notes”, being able to mark X’s on the ground to mark traps or token positions without relying on fog of war, which removes the tile color/image.
It’s been almost a year, any plan on adding this feature?
Thank you for your hard work.
Still no immediate plans to add that feature. I don’t think the problems around tracking GM-only things on the map are terrible currently and a clearly good solution hasn’t come to mind yet.
What would definitely be great is if there could be a space to have predefined tokens. I would like to be able to add my player their tokens to some sort of board so that I can easily add them to the current map, It is a hassle to have to do the same thing over and over (pick a colour, click on the map, set a name).
Tokens can now be hidden separately from other elements.