The Road Ahead: Join Our Journey to Improve the Maps VTT

Quote from Ddg32202 >>

I would love it if D&D Beyond allowed players to make Bastion maps connected to character sheets.

 I think I would just like the ability to do bastions on the character sheet before they introduce something like that 

Honestly, and this has been mentioned before, but i'd love to see some support for play by post. Async access would be the most beneficial. Having the map open and running for others to access it is annoying. Currently i use owlbear.io, but would love to use dndbeyond maps for this to make use of the prebuilt modules.

Hi Zac, thanks for asking and giving us the oportunity to be read.

After playing other VTT, the thingthat I miss the most at Maps is not how it looks, is about the functionality.
Ín my case I use Maps on two ways, when playing online from my cozy table, and when playing with friend physically that I connect a portable screen with my laptop, and use it as a board. In my opinion there are 4 aspects that are a pain when playing:
- Line of sight, needing to manually unhide what the players can see is very slow. and sometimes gets frustrating. Of course, to make this work we would need to start by having walls blocking light and sight in a map, and new modules should have these walls already build.
- Combat tracker, we should have a combat tracker so that we can tag an objective when attacking or dealing damage... imagine the wizzard selecting all kobolds in the area for his firewall, and the VTT automatically rolling the DEX save and removing their corresponding damage.
In addition, despite of having colour rings to show status of mobs, it would be good if we can have status icons... I may use orange to show that somebody is Charmed, but my players play with other DM who may use orange for Bless, and then it isn´t visual for them to understand what colour makes what. This information can also be shown at the combat tracker.
- Combat/out of combat mode selector, I would highly like the opportunity to have a switch to let my players control directly movement from their characters freely, and then switch to combat mode when they can´t move free, instead they would need to propose movement and I would approve. Why? Because when they are just moving on a farm it doesn´t matter where you are, but if you are inside a dungeon with traps and hidden mobs, sometimes everybody is just moving arround like will-o-wisps when I need to tell them to stop and go turn-by-turn so I can control if they go over a trap or something. It would be good also if they can propose movement path square-by-square, so the VTT calculates total distance and I can check if this movement is OK before approving.
- Square restriction, I´m tired of players placing their character in between two squares and needing to tell them to correct it.

Edit: It also be great if we can share a picture on our games. For example, my characters face a manticore for the first time, instead of telling them "it´s a standard manticore", I like describing them the monster first and sharing the drawing from MM to them afterwards.

Thanks for your time.

This is awesome! Looking forward to the new things coming and surveying DMs who use the tool is going to help understand how we are actually using the tool versus how it was intended lol

If we are talking about maps exclusively, 4 things come to mind

• Allow token size change (even bigger than the "gargantuan" size)  preferably manual upsizing (yeah I want my dragons to be as big as the nolzur's miniature one, so a young dragon doesnt feel small)
• View conditions over the tokens (basic conditions, prone, bloodied, paralyzed, poisoned, rage, etc.)
• Allow personal tokens to be uploaded (sometimes you dont want your dwarf cultist to show up as a woman with horns, or your archmage to show always as a wizard of thay)
• Show ruler to everyone, so you can show distances in a map easier for everyone, sometimes players dont know how to use the ruler, and it's quicker when you let them see by yourself.

This are MAJOR changes that are ESSENCIAL for any VTT, dynamic lighting, darkvision, music, map layers are also extra features. But just the ones I mentioned above would improve quality of life SO MUCH. 

Few bits that would be good others have mentioned is the ability to enlarge or reduce tokens to match the spell use on them or abilities like the Duergar have

Layering of tokens and overlays to help ease of selection of tokens or movement of AoE spells like moonbeam

Naming of multiple tokens to make tracking easier and no knowledge of the creatures they are fighting 

Finally it would be great to get better responsiveness on tablets as I tend to use that to set the maps up and my players are using a screen at the table so I find it much easier to use that way and keeping a DM view Vs players views

Our character sheets should tie to our DDB VTT tokens:

• if we put a condition on our character sheet, our VTT token should then show an indicator that says we're prone, or frightened, or paralyzed, etc.
  • If we give ourselves the invisible condition because we're hiding or we've become invisible through a spell or ability, our VTT token should reflect transparency so we can still see the token, but there's now a visual indicator of the condition.
  • "Concentration Condition"
    • If we cast a concentration spell on our character sheet, our character sheet should indicate that concentration is active, it's corresponding spell, and when we take damage, it should prompt for a concentration check with the corresponding DC of half the damage taken.
    • VTT should then also indicate we're concentrating by representing that diamond with a "c" on our token.
• If we're bloodied, then our VTT token should reflect that by adding a red transparent overlay over the token.
• Provide more colors and pattern options for overlay shapes.
• We each have our own kind of digital dice (either as a perk or through purchase), so when dice rolling gets incorporated into VTT, I'd like it to reflect the specific dice we're using on our character sheet.

I'd like to see the Beyond20 extension work with DDB VTT. There are so many ad-hoc rolls that DDB can't or won't support (even as simple as different die because of add-on damage) that Beyond20 already does. Further, the dice roll history should have the same coding as our character sheet as Beyond20 works to show complex dice on the character sheet's dice roll history, but that isn't properly reflected in DDB VTT's dice roll history. 

Also, my DM complains that you can't adjust initiative on the fly, especially when VTT doesn't recognize the PC's digital initiative dice roll.

I love this whole idea. I am looking forward to all the progress you are making! It is a nice way to be able to play with my adult kids even though they don't live near me anymore. I like the idea of being able to share pictures of monsters or NPC and even player handouts to my players. I think it would be nice for the PCs to be able to pick their own player portraits that they can upload easily and use on the map. Forgive me if this is already possible. It would be nice if some of the old maps that are black and white could be recreated to be color with a bit more art to make them more special. Thanks for the attention to communication with us.

I know AI is the cool new thing, but honestly I wouldn't spend your development cycles building out an AI rules bot. If you want to do AI, make it do something new, cool, and useful. Gemini and GPT can answer most rules questions already. I would move that to future state. Create a new AI bot that can build encounters based upon a DM user's library of monsters, taking into consideration party level, composition, and other things that the DM might want like theme, environment, challenge. Have it build or modify existing monsters for homebrew based on iterations of Wizards' monsters. Something like, "I'm running an underwater campaign but I really like the Phoenix over the Leviathan. Can you modify the Phoenix to suit an underwater combat instead?" Even better - have it be able to simulate a combat to help tune the difficulty. Lots of us have been playing for a long time and as a DM, sometimes it's hard to surprise players with the same old monster. 

Table stakes and what would bring more people into the DDB ecosystem rather than using Roll20, Foundry, Owlbear, etc.

1. Access and run the adventure from the Maps VTT like you can in Roll20. Give me folders with the adventure broken out into sections that make sense.
2. Populate the maps with the monsters already for the DM. 
3. Put an in-game Chat that keeps rolls, and allows player side-conversations while the DM or other players are talking
4. Status condition markers for tokens. Highlight if someone is concentrating on something.
5. Give me the ability to add the modifiers I need from game buffs into my rolls. Why do I still need to manually add a d4 to my rolls when I have Bless? Or a +3 to my saves when I'm in the Paladin aura? Why can I not have exhaustion or bane deduct from my rolls? 
6. If you know I'm concentrating on Spirit Shroud or Hex, have it add in the extra damage dice on my roll, or give me the ability to manually toggle it on.
7. It would be really cool to have the tokens auto-deduct HP and stuff when they are targeted and hit on the VTT. 

Then, if you want to get really fancy, add in things like dynamic lighting (which is cool but only marginally useful), and the neat spell effects that you get on Foundry. Everyone is excited to use a new ability on Foundry because of the neat sound and animations that play when you do. 

Thanks for all of the hard work, I'm really exited about the potential for Maps. It runs much smoother in the browser than Roll20, I prefer the DDB character sheet, but we really need some more of that baseline functionality for me to be in love with it. 

Quote from Voltaire87 >>

My least favorite part of Maps is dealing with fog of war. Can we please get an area select tool instead of MSPaint erase to remove fog of war?

 This!! Our group moved VTTs from Roll 20, and this feature was the toughest thing to adjust to. Having a janky erasing of the fog of war is a lot less fun than the fog clearing with character movement. That "oh shoot!" moment when a player moved around a corner to clear the fog off a hidden monster is definitely missed.

Would also love status rings, we sometimes forget what we decided each color was supposed to indicate.

Firstly, the tool is amazing over all and I play with friends who 100% could not all play at the same table but for a good VTT.

Things to add to the roadmap:

More stickers for more things. We all need a canoe .. a raft .. a rowboat ...  I want Additional boulders, trees, farm animals.

Easy Custom Tokens for NPCs. Let us pick an image / headshot .. let us just populate a quick AC/HP and a small note to ourselves. I want to be able to easily add unique tokens for the staff at their bastion that they are getting to know.

Labels for the coloured rings we put around tokens so we name them "Poisoned" / "Exhausted" or any other status condition and have it be clearly displayed to the party who has what condition. Ditto for around bad guy tokens so it will actually say "PC Name Hunter's Mark".

Those three things alone would be a huge quality of life improvement in my campaign.

Keep up the good work.

Why do I still use Foundry, and not Maps, most of the time?

Walls and line of sight and fog of war.....that's the biggest issue.

Token images are not great and can't be swapped, I think?

Condition tracking. 

The combat tracker is not ideal. 

Need more information in the tracker, hover, etc. 

It's so easy to homebrew monsters in Foundry by dragging and dropping features, or just changing numbers.

Maps is getting better! But, the first line in my post is the biggie.

We need WAY more tokens.  Also be able to hide the name of a creature.  Need music/sound effects.  

I use Maps VTT with a digital screen for in-person play (like a TV or projector). It would be nice to be able to rotate the map to landscape mode so that the majority of the map displays on the screen.

I see a lot of talk about "the next new thing", but the books that already exist haven’t gotten fully integrated into DnD Beyond.

I'm not talking about third party (that’s another issue), but things like the ability to add Dark Gifts or custom eldritch invocations, or even the ability to use invocations from earlier books (including the aforementioned third party) is sorely lacking.

Is there any intention at all to finish integrating those elements that are stated in the books, but only actually accessible if players reinvent the wheel?

Custom. Tokens. It makes me crazy when I have this really great NPC all fleshed out and then have to plop in the token for Noble or Commoner for them; I know that I can make a stat block for them in home-brew and add a picture there (I've done that for really important NPCs) but it's a lot of time to invest for one-offs; if there could be a kind of 'blank' token that's not tied to any stats and which I can customize that would be great.

One potential feature that I think would set this VTT apart that I haven't seen in other VTTs is a line of sight or personal fog of war for players.  This would put more on the DM and may not be used by everyone but in my experience each player opens the map from their character sheet and is looking at their own version.  This would be an interesting addition that would make exploring more immersive.  Obviously easier said than done but a neat concept in my opinion.

Ooh, yes, this!

Quote from Gronk_Jeremy >>

I use Maps VTT with a digital screen for in-person play (like a TV or projector). It would be nice to be able to rotate the map to landscape mode so that the majority of the map displays on the screen.

 This. Being able to rotate maps would be immense. My usual setup involves aligning the digital table in portrait format from my perspective as a DM, so being able to rotate the maps without manually uploading a version would be handy