After yesterday’s post, I had a short call with Graham to test that I’d set up all the dynamic lighting correctly from a player’s perspective, and once I’d enabled vision for the token and assigned it to him, everything worked fine, which was really nice to see. We checked out lighting, whether the doors (secret or otherwise) worked, and whether the GM text was invisible. All good, which was a relief as it’s taken nearly two years and three Christmas breaks to get this far.
The OSE character sheet worked fine, which means that so long as I had my copy of Castle Xyntillan to hand, it’s good to go.
However, then I noticed the new map pin feature that’s in beta on Roll20. This allows you to drag a handout to a location and have it appear as a pin as shown above. You can choose whether it is completely hidden or visible to the players. The example above is completely hidden (given away by the dotted line around the tool tip) but a simple click would reveal the text that isn’t blue-grey to the players. The blue-grey text is the GM hidden information on the handout.
This is fantastically useful; as you can see above, I have the put a short description(*) there so I can immediately set the scene for the players, and I can see some of what may happen in the room below. I say some, because presently, the tool tip doesn’t scroll, but there’s enough to get me away.
(*) By short description, I mean the whole description as this is an OSR module and there’s not any fluff in the text.
This will make running the game so much slicker, I think that I need to add it in. It shouldn’t take too long, as I have the PDF, but it does need me to do this for every location!
I do think that Roll20 have really picked up the pace of their development. There’s lots of useful things (like the dynamic lighting for a page being in the main menu now, and the GM being able to change lighting settings with a simple right click on a token, and players being able to open their character sheets with a right click on their token, and auto-measurement of distance being live when moving tokens…) starting to appear and the VTT as a whole feels fresher and faster. Now, if only they could get AV properly stable…
24 December 2025
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