So I've got a question that seems a little beyond the support available for the Maps and Encounters features - really the Maps feature I guess? Let me explain.
I'm running a campaign where there are going to be naval battles - I've got lots of artwork I've either purchased or made that depicts backgrounds where the ship the players will be on is being approached by anywhere between 1 and 4 other ships. The ships have ballista and mangonels on them and everything, with spots that need to be occupied in order for them to be fired and/or reloaded, etc.
However, I don't want to just play out the entire battle without the ships moving at all. The idea is that the players may be able to sink one or more, if not all, of the approaching ships before they get into boarding range. Now, we can just do it in our heads, and I can try to explain the concept, but I'd really rather use the visual aids - I've gone through the trouble of making maps with ships at different distances from the player's ship, and I want to use them.
My question is therefore this: is it possible to swap out the background maps of an ongoing battle without having to quit the battle and setup a new one? Because I don't know how you'd be able to transfer an encounter with everyone's present injuries and buffs/debuffs over to a brand new one anyway. Ideally, it'd be great if that can be done every round, so the approaching ships can be shown to be getting closer and closer. If it's difficult to do, I'd at least like to have like 4 different stages of nearness to the player ships that the enemy ships are at. The only way I've been able to make it work with this sites resources has been to make a homebrew 'creature' that is a gigantic sized construct, which is their boat, then sort of sticking its occupants around its edges, but it looks terrible and doesn't really work well. Firstly, it's always just a big circle, it doesn't allow for creatures shaped like boats. And it doesn't seem to allow for creatures being placed on top of other creatures - they just disappear behind each other. It does allow you to group them together and move them as a group however, but I'd really rather just have the ships be part of the background, and I'll keep my own tab of their HP.
I'd appreciate any ideas on resources to use to make that possible, if it's not possible with the maps feature on this site. I really don't know shit about virtual tabletop stuff, so explain it to me like I just walked in from a time machine that came in from the mid 90s, because that's basically the last time I was a really active DM lol. It's also crucial that it doesn't require the players to have to pay for anything to be able to take part in - I don't mind paying something though.
I don't believe this is currently possible with the D&D Beyond Maps tool. It is very much possible with Roll20, which is a tried-and-true VTT tool that a lot of people use.
Roll20 allows throwing any random image onto the battlefield, and the GM can move these things around as they choose. So, you could put your ocean map down as the background and put separate images for the ships down on top of it, then move the ships around independently of the background.
Roll20 may be more expensive for the DM than D&D Beyond, depending on what options you want, but the players can use free accounts.
Hmm indeed - thanks for the tip! I checked it out and looks like it could work :) Here's to hoping they implement something like that here, however (HINT HINT)
It's a little frustrating having to split my campaign over multiple sites and services, but I guess that's pretty typical these days. It'd be neat (HINT HINT) if our paid subscription here would cover for something like that though....... :)
EDIT: HECK NO - I just signed up there only to learn that you have to buy ALL OF THE MATERIAL again from them. So.. yeah , forget that. Good suggestion, but there's no way I'm paying for the same source material twice. I can't believe you can't use it there - isn't it the same authors, WotC that profit from the sales? RD20 can't possibly be profiting from the sale of IP that belongs to WotC - so why do they make you buy it AGAIN? Crazy. As much as I'd love to do little naval battles and have them play out with visual aids, screw it. We'll do it as it was always meant to be done - with our imaginations. It already hurts REALLY bad to have to spend what I had to spend to buy all the books from here, buying them AGAIN is just CRAZY. Adding up all the costs and subscription fees if I were to do that would be enough to buy a new computer ffs. I'd rather have a new computer, than two copies of the same source material, and several redundant subscriptions to services that more or less do the same thing only with enough variation to make one want to have them all.
No wonder there seems to be a growing number of 'paid for' DMs out there. When I first saw that, coming back to D&D after a long break, I was like "since when is DMing a job??" But now I'm starting to see why. Because it (potentially) costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year. But the players get to play for free...? Why all the hate for DMs? I'm spending hours and hours of my own time to provide an enjoyable experience for total strangers, and I've got to PAY to do so. This is how one starts on the path toward charging money for playing in a campaign they wrote, I can see lol.
So I've got a question that seems a little beyond the support available for the Maps and Encounters features - really the Maps feature I guess? Let me explain.
I'm running a campaign where there are going to be naval battles - I've got lots of artwork I've either purchased or made that depicts backgrounds where the ship the players will be on is being approached by anywhere between 1 and 4 other ships. The ships have ballista and mangonels on them and everything, with spots that need to be occupied in order for them to be fired and/or reloaded, etc.
However, I don't want to just play out the entire battle without the ships moving at all. The idea is that the players may be able to sink one or more, if not all, of the approaching ships before they get into boarding range. Now, we can just do it in our heads, and I can try to explain the concept, but I'd really rather use the visual aids - I've gone through the trouble of making maps with ships at different distances from the player's ship, and I want to use them.
My question is therefore this: is it possible to swap out the background maps of an ongoing battle without having to quit the battle and setup a new one? Because I don't know how you'd be able to transfer an encounter with everyone's present injuries and buffs/debuffs over to a brand new one anyway. Ideally, it'd be great if that can be done every round, so the approaching ships can be shown to be getting closer and closer. If it's difficult to do, I'd at least like to have like 4 different stages of nearness to the player ships that the enemy ships are at. The only way I've been able to make it work with this sites resources has been to make a homebrew 'creature' that is a gigantic sized construct, which is their boat, then sort of sticking its occupants around its edges, but it looks terrible and doesn't really work well. Firstly, it's always just a big circle, it doesn't allow for creatures shaped like boats. And it doesn't seem to allow for creatures being placed on top of other creatures - they just disappear behind each other. It does allow you to group them together and move them as a group however, but I'd really rather just have the ships be part of the background, and I'll keep my own tab of their HP.
I'd appreciate any ideas on resources to use to make that possible, if it's not possible with the maps feature on this site. I really don't know shit about virtual tabletop stuff, so explain it to me like I just walked in from a time machine that came in from the mid 90s, because that's basically the last time I was a really active DM lol. It's also crucial that it doesn't require the players to have to pay for anything to be able to take part in - I don't mind paying something though.
I don't believe this is currently possible with the D&D Beyond Maps tool. It is very much possible with Roll20, which is a tried-and-true VTT tool that a lot of people use.
Roll20 allows throwing any random image onto the battlefield, and the GM can move these things around as they choose. So, you could put your ocean map down as the background and put separate images for the ships down on top of it, then move the ships around independently of the background.
Roll20 may be more expensive for the DM than D&D Beyond, depending on what options you want, but the players can use free accounts.
pronouns: he/she/they
Hmm indeed - thanks for the tip! I checked it out and looks like it could work :) Here's to hoping they implement something like that here, however (HINT HINT)
It's a little frustrating having to split my campaign over multiple sites and services, but I guess that's pretty typical these days. It'd be neat (HINT HINT) if our paid subscription here would cover for something like that though....... :)
EDIT: HECK NO - I just signed up there only to learn that you have to buy ALL OF THE MATERIAL again from them. So.. yeah , forget that. Good suggestion, but there's no way I'm paying for the same source material twice. I can't believe you can't use it there - isn't it the same authors, WotC that profit from the sales? RD20 can't possibly be profiting from the sale of IP that belongs to WotC - so why do they make you buy it AGAIN? Crazy. As much as I'd love to do little naval battles and have them play out with visual aids, screw it. We'll do it as it was always meant to be done - with our imaginations. It already hurts REALLY bad to have to spend what I had to spend to buy all the books from here, buying them AGAIN is just CRAZY. Adding up all the costs and subscription fees if I were to do that would be enough to buy a new computer ffs. I'd rather have a new computer, than two copies of the same source material, and several redundant subscriptions to services that more or less do the same thing only with enough variation to make one want to have them all.
No wonder there seems to be a growing number of 'paid for' DMs out there. When I first saw that, coming back to D&D after a long break, I was like "since when is DMing a job??" But now I'm starting to see why. Because it (potentially) costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year. But the players get to play for free...? Why all the hate for DMs? I'm spending hours and hours of my own time to provide an enjoyable experience for total strangers, and I've got to PAY to do so. This is how one starts on the path toward charging money for playing in a campaign they wrote, I can see lol.