My table has a big TV that I share my laptop screen with when we play. For combat, I've made/bought encounter maps and I have tokens on the map that I can click and drag around. I use photoshop as the program to do all this in. It may not be the most efficient thing, but it's what I'm used to.
The problem is when the party is fighting a group of enemies, a few of them will share tokens. I've been putting different color auras around enemies and keeping track of, say, Kobold (Blue) health in my paper notes.
Does anyone have a more efficient system or better way of doing this? The way I'm doing it isn't unworkable, it's just annoying for me to keep up with and make. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.
I use MapTool (http://rptools.net) for the same purpose (tactical map display on TV for in-person games). It will default to appending a number to the name of duplicate tokens (so if I add a bunch of bats, I get bat, bat 1, bat 2, etc).
MapTool is not known as the easiest VTT to set up if you're running a remote game, but for what you're doing it'd be quite straightforward. If you're creating maps in Photoshop, I'd just export a png or jpg and drag it on to the background in MapTool. Then switch to the token layer (box in the top right) and do the same for your token images. You can load them into MapTool's resource library if you want, but it will be perfectly happy to let you drag and drop things directly. Map grid can be adjusted to whatever size you want, and use squares, hexes, or no grid at all.
There's more there if you want to experiment (fog of war, vision blocking barriers, light sources, etc) but it should be pretty easy to run as Just A Map Display With Tokens, and then you'd get numbers on nameplates without having to think about it. There's also a Discord server with friendly helpful people on it if you do need help.
For your particular situation I recommend roll20. After making a battlefield in Photoshop (I use dungeon painter studio, which you can pick up on Steam) save it as a PNG and upload it to the background layer of your map. Now you can add tokens for each combatant to the map and the program lets you add healthbars to everyone in order to keep track that only the DM account can see.
I run a game very similar to yours, where my players are on the sectional with my laptop hooked up to the big screen. I have them logged in on roll20 as a player account, while I run the game through the DM account on my desktop in the same room. From the DM account I can control fog of war, access all my online notes, and move the players around to the appropriate Town/encounter/dungeon/countryside map (you can pre make pages for all these). Seems like a natural next step for your group.
For Maptools how do you display the "player" version of the map so that I can use fog of war?
In my case, I run a second copy of MapTool connected as a player and display that one on the TV using chromium and a chromecast.
The thing I like about maptool is that you can do a local server setup (easy to do with the maptool software) and if one of your players has a laptop have them control the map. I did the second copy myself for a while, then asked one of my players if they wanted to help out. We all like it, as the player(s) can control an "explore" token that reveals the fog as it moves. It also keeps them more engaged and talking to each other as they have control of the map and token movement/map reveals.
I looked at DungeonFog and for my purposes it is a lot more straightforward to use. However, from what I could tell you cannot import already existing maps for display.
My table has a big TV that I share my laptop screen with when we play. For combat, I've made/bought encounter maps and I have tokens on the map that I can click and drag around. I use photoshop as the program to do all this in. It may not be the most efficient thing, but it's what I'm used to.
The problem is when the party is fighting a group of enemies, a few of them will share tokens. I've been putting different color auras around enemies and keeping track of, say, Kobold (Blue) health in my paper notes.
Does anyone have a more efficient system or better way of doing this? The way I'm doing it isn't unworkable, it's just annoying for me to keep up with and make. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.
I use MapTool (http://rptools.net) for the same purpose (tactical map display on TV for in-person games). It will default to appending a number to the name of duplicate tokens (so if I add a bunch of bats, I get bat, bat 1, bat 2, etc).
MapTool is not known as the easiest VTT to set up if you're running a remote game, but for what you're doing it'd be quite straightforward. If you're creating maps in Photoshop, I'd just export a png or jpg and drag it on to the background in MapTool. Then switch to the token layer (box in the top right) and do the same for your token images. You can load them into MapTool's resource library if you want, but it will be perfectly happy to let you drag and drop things directly. Map grid can be adjusted to whatever size you want, and use squares, hexes, or no grid at all.
There's more there if you want to experiment (fog of war, vision blocking barriers, light sources, etc) but it should be pretty easy to run as Just A Map Display With Tokens, and then you'd get numbers on nameplates without having to think about it. There's also a Discord server with friendly helpful people on it if you do need help.
For your particular situation I recommend roll20. After making a battlefield in Photoshop (I use dungeon painter studio, which you can pick up on Steam) save it as a PNG and upload it to the background layer of your map. Now you can add tokens for each combatant to the map and the program lets you add healthbars to everyone in order to keep track that only the DM account can see.
I run a game very similar to yours, where my players are on the sectional with my laptop hooked up to the big screen. I have them logged in on roll20 as a player account, while I run the game through the DM account on my desktop in the same room. From the DM account I can control fog of war, access all my online notes, and move the players around to the appropriate Town/encounter/dungeon/countryside map (you can pre make pages for all these). Seems like a natural next step for your group.
For Maptools how do you display the "player" version of the map so that I can use fog of war?
In my case, I run a second copy of MapTool connected as a player and display that one on the TV using chromium and a chromecast.
The thing I like about maptool is that you can do a local server setup (easy to do with the maptool software) and if one of your players has a laptop have them control the map. I did the second copy myself for a while, then asked one of my players if they wanted to help out. We all like it, as the player(s) can control an "explore" token that reveals the fog as it moves. It also keeps them more engaged and talking to each other as they have control of the map and token movement/map reveals.
I use DungeonFog to create/recreate maps where I need fog of war. I also support Dynamic Dungeons on Patreon for his insane maps.
I looked at DungeonFog and for my purposes it is a lot more straightforward to use. However, from what I could tell you cannot import already existing maps for display.
Check out Encounter+ if you have an iPad or iPhone - I use this and it's by far one of the best tools for in person play.
Alternatively, check out InfinitasDM, also a really amazing tool that focuses on in-person play.