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jkthomsen9
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Beaverton, OR
Posts: 267

Old July 20th, 2014, 11:47 AM
I have found a major limitation to using realmworks as my player view. I use a projector and in the past have used GIMP to run it. As I see it, If we are going to use RW as our fog of world, smart images have to be able to handle layers. As it is now you have two choices that I can see.

Choice one is to use the DM map. As the party explores use the fog of world to reveal the room with the pit trap in the middle of the room and a secret door on the back wall. As soon as you reveal it the players see both the pit and door. Roleplay to see if the characters do.

Choice two is to use the PLAYER map. Reveal as before but the traps/secret doors are not printed on the player maps. When the characters discover them you pull out your trusty wet erase markers and go back to your battlemat days, and in my case, prove you can not draw. This gets especially tedious if the secret door has several rooms behind it as they are usually not on the player map.

I would like to add a third choice. With the ability to have layers you could add each trap, secret door, or anything hidden as separate layer and reveal them as they are found. I prefer this method for meta game purposes as well. Paizo has done an amazing job with their player maps. When there is a secret door I can reveal the wall just like any other wall, Paizo has place the background graphic there and you can not meta game that something is amiss. When you reveal the secret door and the three rooms behind it, the mountain rock seamlessly changes to the wizards secret lab.

This same layer system could be used to implement other requests. You could have a layer be a grid to add to city maps, it could be the legend, or anything else you can think of. I saw someone that was MUCH better at gimp than I am make an animation of seven images of the campfire. When it was playing as a layer on top of the campfire it looked like it was burning. He also did it to water.
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