roll20 darkness / line of sight opinions

[da newt]

Has anyone else messed with the roll20 feature to show only what is in your line of sight / extent of your dark vision?

I find it extremely interesting - it's both realistic / immersive (although also very fake as you can't peek around stuff or hear things), and hugely frustrating.

When everything is blacked out except what your PC can see, it really limits your situational awareness. Your PC steps into a room and now you can't tell where the rest of your party is. That fat column in the middle of the room creates a huge blind spot that might contain monsters. Just walking through a house, you are effectively blind to everything outside your immediate field of view, and it's very hard to keep track of your party members.

It reminds me how much I hate first person shooter games where your field of vision is like 45 degrees ...

Thoughts?

[Warder]

After moving to playing online cause of the rona, we've used line of sight/darkness since day one and I have only good things to say about it. This is how I feel the game is meant to be played but it's often impossible to do so at a physical table. Darkness is such a powerful evocative danger and thanks to the LoS feature it really conveys those feelings into the game, maybe for the first time since I started playing. It forces me to think about light sources and darkvision which makes 5e's simplistic combat far more exciting. For comparison I've guest played in another campaign over the past couple weeks where we don't use those features, and I keep feeling like I'm cheating. It's far less exciting to me, and one of those things I'll miss when we go back to playing IRL.

[Protolisk]

I personally love line of sight rules, but even in a virtual setting there are still drawbacks. Something often mentioned here on this forum is the fact that even when a character is invisible, for example, you may not see them, but you can hear them.

This is the part of situational awareness that does get lost in translation. Sure, you may not see anything behind the column, but there may be something there making noise. Is it a loud an angry demon, or is it a quiet assassin? The DM should be giving sound cues for such events. In the case of the assassin, the silence is a choice to make it appear as if everything is fine, where as the demon, making noise should make it obvious that something is there but you may still not know what it is. Perhaps a dragon, or an ogre, or something.

This does require more DM description, but making such descriptions makes for a more immersive game, whether on a virtual table or a physical one.

After playing with Roll20 as well as Foundry, I much preferred Foundry more specifically for its fine tuned darkness settings as well as sound options where needed, but that's just the difference between programs. In either program, I always enjoyed the line of sight, if automated. I think the free version of Roll20 had just black rooms that the DM had to reveal as fog of war, which was a lot of hassle. Unless that's changed, I wouldn't use that version as much except the obvious room by room use. But the typical line of sight was amazing for me. It could act as a guide for if characters have cover or not based on if you could see half the token's square, so it has more uses the more I used it.

[Aett_Thorn]

When we had to start playing remotely, we moved to an online system (FantasyGrounds) that didn't have line-of-sight option, and we were playing just fine, even though we wished we had it. When FG Ultimate came online, we switched over, and one of the drivers was the lighting/line of sight options it had. We played with it for a few sessions, but ultimately turned it off. What we gained in a little bit of fidelity ease of knowledge (No more need to constantly ask "well DM, can I see enemy X behind the pillar there?") we felt we more than offset in frustration with exploration lighting, keeping track of the team, and difficulty with some of the maps. Now, some of this was just learning the system and some of this was player/DM personalities not connecting well with the new system. But as a group who likes the exploration facet of the game, having a lot of frustration there while only gaining a bit of helpfulness in combat just led us to believe that we should abandon it.

So Roll20 might have better implementation, I don't know. But this is just my experience with a similar system.

[ScoutTrooper]

On white paper, It's awesome. IF and WHEN everything is properly configured, it's a great experience for your players to see what their characters see.

In Practice, it takes a bit to learn, it takes a bit of time to configure and have ready. God Forbid you have PCs without Darkvision, and suddenly someone is casting Light OR lighing a torch, and throws it into rooms. So you need to have a 'torch' token with the light configured to place down in rooms.

As long as you have patient players, and not on any real time crunch. It's decent. You do need the prep time in advance. Roll20 allows you to enter your own games as a player, it eats a minute here and there, so if you can enlist help OR have a second browser and Roll20 account to do it yourself. I always find it killing pace when I think things are ready, and right before the encounter a player goes "All I see is black", and then you gotta troubleshoot what options you missed.

After all that, I have successfully turned the Pac-Man maze into a frightening experience for my players utilizing Roll20's dynamic lighting.

[Dork_Forge]

As a player it's certainly very immersive feature and as a DM running a module it's pretty neat and cool.

Primarily though I'm a DM that runs homebrew and setting up Dynamic lighting on a bunch of differently sourced maps/whiteboarded maps is just a bit too much to do regularly for me. Online DMing is fantastic and imo the way forwards (or at least hybrid play), there's just so much work already on the DM.

[Joe the Rat]

I've been using it for quite a while, and LoS is definitely fun and immersive if you are exploring buildings and dungeons. I learned quickly that even though there are visual obstructions in, say, outdoor environments, it is more troubling than not to use tree trunk shadows - particularly if light limits affect movement, and you find yourself stuck to a tree.

If you are drawing as you go, you're probably better off going global, or using the hide/reveal, since you are literally drawing all your walls twice.

The one issue I have (and if someone knows how to do this, I'd love to hear) is dynamic maps - if you wanted to make a mobile maze or warp things around for a good minotaur labyrinth, you have to make the wall segments mobile, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to rotate dynamic lighting barriers.

The Advanced Fog of War (which I think is how the new dynamic vision works) cuts down on the harsh "invisible black" sight lines, by leaving a greyscaled version of the map where you have been but no longer can see. So as you move you still have a picture of the terrain, but you don't know exactly what's happening there. If you prefer heavy fog (to disorient, or put mapping and wayfinding on the players), you can have that feature off. The new dynamic lighting also lets you tint darkvision, so players (and the DM) can better see when they are looking in the dark, and when there is light.

[Segev]

Roll20 really, really needs a feature to let the DM see each player's field of view, either clicking through them to see literally what they can see, or setting up a sort of colored overlay showing their visible map space, or both. It can be incredibly frustrating trying to figure out what players can and cannot see.

[Dork_Forge]

Roll20 really, really needs a feature to let the DM see each player's field of view, either clicking through them to see literally what they can see, or setting up a sort of colored overlay showing their visible map space, or both. It can be incredibly frustrating trying to figure out what players can and cannot see.

You can colour code each person's vision to see it live if you want.

Personally it just made looking at the map and tokens harder for me as the DM (I only use Dynamic Lighting when I run modules that already has it configured), especially since some colours intereact in weird ways like a painters pallete.

[Segev]

You can colour code each person's vision to see it live if you want.

Personally it just made looking at the map and tokens harder for me as the DM (I only use Dynamic Lighting when I run modules that already has it configured), especially since some colours intereact in weird ways like a painters pallete.

You can? I never found that feature. It seems like something to use when setting markers down on the map. Then turn off.

[Avonar]

You can? I never found that feature. It seems like something to use when setting markers down on the map. Then turn off.

It's part of the Dynamic Lighting settings for a particular player. I only noticed it very recently too. I have mixed feelings on it overall.

Being able to differentiate is definitely nice, but having blue, red, orange, green hues can get annoying, and if you're using a fully illustrated map, such as from a module, it can be tricky to make some parts out.

[Cass]

I mainly DM and what I did was giving every player control over every character so they could all share the same party vision while still having line of sight and stuff.
I then played in a game and the DM gave each player line of sight only for their own character. It sucked hard. For half an hour I was staring at a black screen because my character wasn't in the room.

I think line of sight is great as long as it's shared among the party. The only time I think a player's vision should be taken is when they are blinded, like with Darkness spell, not when there's a tree between them and the enemy that the others see.

This is a video that goes into more detail to the merits of shared vision even tho it's for another platform. https://youtu.be/wZithBnef38

Roll20 really, really needs a feature to let the DM see each player's field of view, either clicking through them to see literally what they can see, or setting up a sort of colored overlay showing their visible map space, or both. It can be incredibly frustrating trying to figure out what players can and cannot see.

You can select their token and press CTRL + L

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

I've been running my game on Roll20 and I love the limited visibility features. Published adventures have all the maps already built with visibility-blocking walls drawn on, and it's pretty easy to make your own. You can also put light sources in the rooms and they can see those from a distance if they have line of sight.

I even did a puzzle room where it's two identical but mirrored rooms, with a mirror in between as though the other room is just a reflection, but with slight differences. To give them vision of the reflected room without being able to move their character through, I made the mirror a character token with vision and gave them shared control of it. The puzzle was that when they try to go through the mirror they push against their reflection, they needed to be invisible to get through. On the other side was a chest of gold and a coffin containing a vampire who could pass through the mirror whenever he wanted. The doors in the reflected room were in different spots and they were able to make their way around to get into the room that way as well.

[LudicSavant]

Roll20 really, really needs a feature to let the DM see each player's field of view

It already has that feature.

You just highlight their token and press CTRL+L.

This is a video that goes into more detail to the merits of shared vision even tho it's for another platform. https://youtu.be/wZithBnef38

Guy raises some interesting points!

[Segev]

It already has that feature.

You just highlight their token and press CTRL+L.

Good to know! Thanks.

[gooch]

Possibly worth pointing out that the ctrl-L feature has been horribly broken in the Updated lightning system for ages, though it always worked in Legacy lighting.
This may have been fixed recently though, I've jumped ship for Foundry so not 100% sure.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've generally found it too fiddly to be worth it. It's usually easier to just reveal the map as we go. I find it most useful for situations when players are/can get separated-- it lets you have separate battle maps without constantly switching back and forth.

[thoroughlyS]

I haven't personally used a line-of-sight feature when I've played online, but it sounds like it actually plays very differently than the expectations in 5E. For example, the column that blocks line-of-sight wouldn't hide anything on its own by the rules presented in 5e. If a zombie was behind that column for whatever reason, your character is explicitly aware of it unless it has hidden itself using the rules for hiding. This represents the idea that you could in some way sense its presence (e.g. the creaking of floorboards beneath it, or the smell of its rot).

Situations like this indicate to me that a line-of-sight mechanic would create just as many immersion breaking experiences as immersive ones. For that reason, I would probably forgo using it if given the option.

[MrStabby]

I've been running my game on Roll20 and I love the limited visibility features. Published adventures have all the maps already built with visibility-blocking walls drawn on, and it's pretty easy to make your own. You can also put light sources in the rooms and they can see those from a distance if they have line of sight.

I even did a puzzle room where it's two identical but mirrored rooms, with a mirror in between as though the other room is just a reflection, but with slight differences. To give them vision of the reflected room without being able to move their character through, I made the mirror a character token with vision and gave them shared control of it. The puzzle was that when they try to go through the mirror they push against their reflection, they needed to be invisible to get through. On the other side was a chest of gold and a coffin containing a vampire who could pass through the mirror whenever he wanted. The doors in the reflected room were in different spots and they were able to make their way around to get into the room that way as well.

Hmm. I think that is the best, most interesting and innovative puzzle I have seen on the forum. I nice interaction of logic, lore and mechanical challenge - just ignoring the dynamic lighting for a minute. Kudos.




My experience of roll20 is that it is a good feature. As a DM you have to worry less about working out who can see what and describing it and pay more attention to what they can see.

As a player, it really adds to the feeling of claustrophobia as the walls cut in - limiting your vision, and it dials up the sense of threat.

From a rules standpoint it also acts as a reminder to players to not get too liberal with the rules for targeting spells where you can see them and helps manage any ambiguity there.


Functionally I think the tool is a bit unreliable. I have had some players need to refresh the browser to make things show correctly sometimes.

[Xervous]

Possibly worth pointing out that the ctrl-L feature has been horribly broken in the Updated lightning system for ages, though it always worked in Legacy lighting.
This may have been fixed recently though, I've jumped ship for Foundry so not 100% sure.

Echoing support of foundry. While it lacks a few specific things that work nicer in roll20 it feels like the obvious choice if you’re going to spend $$ on your VTT for lighting.

[Dork_Forge]

Echoing support of foundry. While it lacks a few specific things that work nicer in roll20 it feels like the obvious choice if you’re going to spend $$ on your VTT for lighting.

Have to argue against the obvious choice thing, it's a large upfront cost for something under active development by a single person (last I saw). The business model isn't sustainable and it still requires you to either stump up additional costs for hosting or go through the hassle of hosting yourself.

Then there's the lack of support for official modules and I've seen multiple people say that the 5e support isn't up to par (but it's good for PF2?).

I get customisability, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the VTT messiah that all the hype is dressing it up to be.