How do you guys resolve hex exploration on VTTs? Do you have zoomed-in maps generated for each hex when players land in it? Do you sketch stuff on the fly?

How about for towns? Similar approach, or different take?

You just mask the unexplored parts and reveal them as you go.

I do it theatre of the mind so the VTT is mostly for posting pictures. I might post an occasional map but mostly I'm describing stuff.

Once you get a collection of terrain chunks and other building blocks you can throw together a location pretty quick.
If you have a basic idea of the location just throw down stuff that matches and roll with it.

I have a wilderness hex map with a token representing the entire party. If a random encounter occurs, I move the players to a generic background image for that region and run it with tokens, but gridless.

When the PCs go to a town, I start with a map of the town, then I have background images for some of the larger/more important buildings. I don't use tokens unless combat occurs.

The only time I draw in the VTT is when the party gets lost in the wilderness and their actual path deviates from their intended path.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1129375How do you guys resolve hex exploration on VTTs? Do you have zoomed-in maps generated for each hex when players land in it? Do you sketch stuff on the fly?

How about for towns? Similar approach, or different take?

One of my recent games looked like this... This was at end of the session, all the Raiders were dead and the players were in control of junktown.

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Here is what the area map looked like...



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Quote from: S'mon;1129409I do it theatre of the mind so the VTT is mostly for posting pictures. I might post an occasional map but mostly I'm describing stuff.

Oh, I use the VTT free writer to draw squiggles! Dots for PCs & monsters, lines for rooms & tunnels, that sort of thing.

For Hexmaps on Roll20 you could have symbols in the GM layer and then move them to the map layer that the players can see, whenever they explore a new hex.

If you want to spend a little money and get a little more fancy you could use something like this to do the same thing.

On Roll20 you can also just change the default square grid to hex and then enable fog of war and use the polygon reveal tool to reveal a hex at a time.

You could also do something similar with dynamic lighting, although it would reveal a circular area rather than a hex grid.

Cool collection of tips and ideas, guys, thanks all! I'm noticing a trend that I like of the idea of a small library of template-y maps plus prefiltered libraries of assets to glue together. I've definitely done the S'mon squiggle approach too and it works. Doing the prep to have a couple toolboxes for likely area types (especially for hexes) seems like the right step for making it next level.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1129455
One of my recent games looked like this... This was at end of the session, all the Raiders were dead and the players were in control of junktown.

Damn, dude, that's seriously impressive. I'm not even close to that level of VTT + DMing skill but that just became my new goal.

Quote from: TJS;1129473For Hexmaps on Roll20 you could have symbols in the GM layer and then move them to the map layer that the players can see, whenever they explore a new hex.

If you want to spend a little money and get a little more fancy you could use something like this to do the same thing.

On Roll20 you can also just change the default square grid to hex and then enable fog of war and use the polygon reveal tool to reveal a hex at a time.

You could also do something similar with dynamic lighting, although it would reveal a circular area rather than a hex grid.

Here is the original Dungeons & Dragons game from GaryCon weekend I ran using roll20. In this case I scanned a hexmap in, then used the Roll20 draw tools, to draw on the map as the players were exploring hexes, so they knew where they were (unless they got lost, of course, then they only got verbal descriptions of the terrain until they found a landmark they knew... This is after the game.

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This is during the game, when the players were reviewing their land holdings...

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The images here are quite impressive, I'll admit. But I never do this sort of thing in my games.

On the other hand, my players in my L&D campaigns end up getting a very intimate knowledge of medieval English geography. And learn how to properly pronounce places like "Gloucester".

Quote from: RPGPundit;1130657And learn how to properly pronounce places like "Gloucester".

Turns out that it is GLAH-sta.

Yeah, I know, right.

I use D6 fantasy and pull heavily from the D6 star wars game that birthed it, I might have that hex pre-planned, I might wing it with what seems coolest given everything going on with the characters (that noble whose kidnapping of a young bride plot you foiled, he and a few armsmen are waiting for you there) or I might just randomly roll, and even then, I may adjust the result of the roll (I rolled a monster that you lack the knowledge or equipment to deal with, high chance of death for half the party, so swap it out for something thats still a challenge but not a near-sure death sentence).

The D6 system is perhaps the fastest and loosest I've ever seen, I can crap out any encounter on the spot w/o even having stats on hand or complicated rules regarding their powers, and later the same creatures may be encountered with differing stats or powers and it all still works smoothly without having a "skeleton" and "bloodfire skeleton" separate writeup. There is a wonderful engaging element to this that players learn to love the feel of, a single skeleton could be the d&d mook skeleton or it could have 15 dice in melee combat and a once per fate point eldritch blast ability.

Quote from: Slipshot762;1131016The D6 system is perhaps the fastest and loosest I've ever seen, I can crap out any encounter on the spot w/o even having stats on hand or complicated rules regarding their powers, and later the same creatures may be encountered with differing stats or powers and it all still works smoothly without having a "skeleton" and "bloodfire skeleton" separate writeup. There is a wonderful engaging element to this that players learn to love the feel of, a single skeleton could be the d&d mook skeleton or it could have 15 dice in melee combat and a once per fate point eldritch blast ability.

I concur, been loving my Mini Six (D6) Palace of the Silver Princess Primeval Thule campaign. :cool: I love how easy it is to do monster & NPC stats. Only issue is that compared to D&D, using the wounds system lone monsters can die extremely quickly. But I found a few tricks, eg the plant monster that attacks normally but where you have to cut through its 13 vines individually to kill it.

On the topic of VTTs, yesterday for the first time I ran a dungeon with Roll20's Dynamic Lighting turned on. Wow! I was impressed.

I had heard the prep for it was onerous, but it wasn't bad; only ~15 minutes per level to put the walls on the map.

I also had RL timers going for torches and the lights went out during the climactic battle of the session. Great moment!

It doesn't fundamentally change any gameplay elements, but it brings a WOW factor and the players like it.