Basic Fog of War

[Tinalles]

I'm having trouble setting up basic Fog of War. I'm using this map image. It's a large area map. I configured it to use a hex grid (size 17 px, 2nd size 19.63 px, offsets zero). Fog of War is enabled; Vision is Off. We're on 1.4.0.4, NERPS if that makes a difference.

What I want to happen is for the player to be able to see the hex that her token is in, plus all the adjacent hexes. When she moves her token, it should show her the new hex, and any adjacent hexes. The basic FoW options are set up to assume that you're in a encounter-scale map, with standard vision rules (60 ft darkvision, for example). When I initially set it up, any token with "Normal" vision would automatically reveal the entire map as soon as it moved a single hex.

I tried to fix that by defining a new vision type in the campaign properties, thus:

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Limited: circle distance=2.5 r3

This limits it to the hex the player is in, but not the adjacent ones. Having spent most of my GM prep time on stat blocks, tokens, creating the map image, and backstory, I ran out of time before the session began to work on technical setup. So instead of auto-revealing things, we wound up handling FoW manually. The player would move her token, and then I would "cut out" the FoW for the area she should be able to see.

At least, that was the idea. What actually happened is that the player slowly lost the ability to control her token over the course of the session. Snap to Grid is turned on, and it kept snapping to undesired hexes. Initially she would just wind up going too far or not as far as she meant to go; but by the end of the session, her token was showing a strong bias towards snapping back to its hex of origin every time she tried to move it. Eventually she would just tell me where to move her token for her, which I would do, then switch to the fog tools to reveal the map, then back to the token tools to move her token again, then back to FoW tools ... and so on.

At one point, I dropped an unrelated token on the map -- the big-bad needed to make a will save vs a scrying spell -- and then moved it, whereupon the map was fully revealed because the big-bad had Normal sight rather than Limited. My player had to look away from her screen while I reset the fog and manually redid her path to that point.

Finally, at the end of the session, something weird happened, and the Fog of War almost entirely reset itself. Most of the areas she'd explored reverted to unexplored, leaving only a few isolated islands revealed.

I just don't know how to make this work, and I'm pretty sure I'm making all kinds of ridiculous newbie errors because I've never really used FoW in the last four years of play. It was never needed before -- but I wanted my player to have to do some exploration on this particular map rather than instantly noticing the points of interest and bee-lining straight for them.

What do I need to do to make this work?

I attached a campaign file, then noticed the thing saying not to do that. But I couldn't find any way to delete the attachment before posting. Sorry. I did go through and delete all of the other maps first, though -- it's only got the one in question.

[aliasmask]

Auto reveal for FOW is really only good for Night and when vision is on. As a preference, I set the default map vision distance to 240 rather than leaving the default 1000. But you can change this per map as well. Assuming each hex is 5ft, your vision should be set to:

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Limited: circle distance=7.5 r7.5

This sets the max token vision to an extra hex around it with it's own light source. You get the spotting FOW reveals when you use the tool to reveal. You can export and import the map and have it cleared that way. I'm not sure, but I think ctrl (select area) will fill it back in. Maybe using shift, I forget. So, the above with vision set to Night, FOW on, server setting set to reveal FOW on move (when you start server) should all do the trick.

[wolph42]

Let me start with the the fact that you're not the only one!
Maptool allows for MANY options for light and sight and with many options comes a certain difficulty to set it up.

First off it seems you are mixing up two things:
1. sight
2. light

you're using:
Limited: circle distance=2.5 r3

which means that the token can SEE 2.5 far (note that the distance per cell on the map is set to 5, which means that she can only EVER see her own cell)
it also means that she is carrying an 'invisible torch that only she can see' with range 3. As far as it matters, it could have range 1000 and it would not make ANY difference as
1. she's the only one who can see its light and
2. she can't see beyond 2.5

The other way round is much more interesting:
Limited: circle distance=3 r2.5
Because that means that she can ALWAYS see her own cell and IF there's an external lightsource (e.g. torch, lantern or the moon) THEN she can see 3 (but no further!!).

Hence there are a couple of things you need to check:
1. how far can she normally see on that map if say, the sun is shining that range is 'x' in
distance=x
2. how far can she ALWAYS see on the map even if its totally dark. That range is 'y' in
distance=x ry

say its
distance=100 r7.5 that would mean she can ALWAYS see one cell and the surrounding cells. She can also see a torch at e.g. 90 units away and if she is carrying a lightsource of say 25 then she can see 25 units away.

The other important stuff:
- make sure the token is set to PC (npc's cant reveal light)
- make sure that you start a server with 'auto reveal on movement' turned on, that way the fow clears when she moves it'
- make sure that vision is either set to night ('off' means there is no 'soft fog', that means that if the map is cleared 500 units away and you place a token there, then the player will see it. 'night' will add 'soft fog' which means that she CAN see the map, but NOT the NPC's)
- make sure that your NPC's are set to NPC's so they DON'T clear the FoW!! (the issue you had)

i think that covers it.

o and check out the first link in my sig, specifically this: http://www.lmwcs.com/rptools/wiki/Intro ... and_Sights