Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I figured I would check out how maps has been coming along since I saw the announcement about the D&D Beyond Drops. Is there still no option to add a grid? If this still has not been considered as part of the Maps VTT roadmap, I hope it gets added soon. I'm not sure I'll be able to even give maps a fair shot until it has some of the basic options that other VTTs offer.
"Grids are not RAW" is probably the answer you're going to get.
Same reason they don't add hexagons as an option.
I'm frustrated with their refusal to provide grids and/or hexagons, but I figured out what the line is going to be.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
I wouldnt consider it a basic feature, there are quite a few people who like it as it is, its also close to actual table this way. I wouldnt mind an option I dont have to use, but it might also not be that easy to provide that option. Since Maps mostly uses the regular Maps from the published books and all those have a drawn in grid, aligning the drawn grid with the VTT grid would be fiddley, I have spent hours trying to get that right on Roll20. I thought the way maps lets you scale the map by just resizing a medium token to fit the drawn grid and then the map just knowing how much 5ft are and scaling everything to that so smart. I prefer that a lot to how other VTTs do it.
To me adding a grid is a must.
I think we just disagree, and I believe D&D Beyond should be providing the option for people who do prefer it. If you're not a fan, you don't have to utilize that option. But for those of us who prefer it, it's just simply not available. With regard to the "fiddley" nature, I'm just not sure that's an impediment. Other VTTs seem to provide the option with little to no problems. These maps are designed and integrated by Wizards of the Coast themselves, I refuse to believe that they lack the ability to incorporate this successfully.
Every other VTT has the option to add a grid. So it makes complete sense that dndbeyond doesn't. Why would you want to make your player base happy?
This has to be one of the simplest requests to satisfy - literally the option to just overlay and scale a grid or hex pattern over the map. You can already drop all sorts of stickers, drawings, etc, so this is just one more type of overlay.
I would agree, this should be a hot priority to implement, and should be an easy one to knock out quickly.
It's more complicated than just an overlay, because when a grid like that exists, people are probably going to expect there to at least be an option to have movable tokens be forced to "snap" to the squares on the grid. That's probably a lot more work than just putting an overlay on top of an image. This is just me speculating, but it may be that they do not want to implement the grid feature without also having that ready.
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But the technology *already* exists in the VTT to snap to grid. When you load in a map that already is gridded, you have to adjust the scale to match. And then players can use the arrow keys on their keyboards to move a square at a time.
The only difference now would be on the map import, when you scale, you also add a grid overlay. The snapping movement feature would remain identical to what is already implemented.