My Roll20 game has gotten better since I started using the website to run my Ravnica-based D&D campaign. I've gone from crudely drawing my maps with the simple lines and shapes the website provides and moved on instead to using another site, Inkarnate, to generate much better-looking maps.
My roommate has started running D&D professionally, and as such he's learned a lot about the Roll20 systems.
One of the systems I got acquainted with pretty early on was Fog of War - this is a simple way to block off part of a dungeon map until the party actually gets there, at which point you can reveal an area, potentially with bad guys within.
But there's a system that they implemented after lengthy experimentation, and I'm finally jumping into the fray with it - Dynamic Lighting. The idea is that a character can see what their character can see, and map will change as the character moves to reflect their perspective.
I'm certainly still just figuring out the basics of it, but here's my level of expertise:
The first thing you need to do is turn on dynamic lighting for a map in your campaign (I've got so, so many maps, but this will just be on new maps moving forward). Next, you need to make sure that the characters have the right vision settings.
Drag a character token to the map and click on it with the cursor to get the various buttons around it to pop up, and then click the gear symbol. Here, you can go to the tab marked "Dynamic Lighting" along the top of the options, and first things first, you need to toggle on Vision. If the character is a human, halfling, or other race without darkvision, you're basically done, but if the race does have darkvision, you can turn it on with the "nightvision" option, and even set the range (so your Twilight Cleric will have their crazy 300 foot darkvision that means anything on the map will be visible to them... for now.)
Now, these adjustments only count for the token on the map - you then want to go to the character in your Journal and click edit, then "use selected token." (This is also a great thing if you want to be able to pop out Large creatures or objects that have a token, as you can set the size and then make that token size the default.)
Now, your characters are set up to actually use the dynamic lighting.
Actually, one last note: if you have a character that lights a torch or casts the Light spell (or Dancing Lights, or what have you) you can actually edit the token in the same way and have that token radiate light in a set radius.
Ok, with characters figured out, we now can play with light sources.
If you have a pitch-dark dungeon map, then congratulations - you're done with this step. But if you have, say, a city street with street lamps, you can make those lamps radiate light. What you'll want to do is go to the new Dynamic Lighting layer and then use the little torch icon that is below the ruler. You can then stamp it on each location where you want there to be a source of light - essentially it's a token that doesn't present itself as a token and lives on its own layer of the map, but (unless my experiments have led me astray,) it should create a source of light in the location, illuminating any tokens that are caught by the light and making them visible to everyone.
At this point, every character, regardless of their ability to see in darkness, should be able to see every light source and any tokens representing creatures or objects that are within that light at any distance - even if you've got a night-blind warforged character across the entire map, if there's a lantern or something in the distance, they can see the light and anything within its radius of illumination. But that's not totally ideal, is it?
After all, if you have some urban space with alleys and buildings, these large objects would obscure things. How do we deal with that?
Once again, we want to be on the dynamic lighting layer. Now, we can use the same rudimentary drawing tools that we once used to make our maps (before we got fancy with Inkarnate or some other similar service) and draw lines where we want the light to be blocked.
Some of this is a little unintuitive. If you outline a building with light-blocking lines, the building itself will be hidden in perpetual darkness (and your players might wonder what this big block of black is). Instead, my friend recommended drawing a line along the building's primary gable (aka the bend in the roof along the top). That way, the half of the building that the characters are standing next to is still visible, but anything the building is blocking is obscured.
The result is very cool. That said, there will be edge cases in which this doesn't work quite so well - if, for example, your Monk runs up the side of the building and gets on the roof, they should be able to see past that obstruction, but in practice, whichever side Roll20 decides the token isn't on will be obscured (it's not a 3D map, after all). Also, sometimes certain building shapes can be a little harder to work with - a circular building like a tower or dome is a bit trickier. My best effort has been to use the circle tool and just figure out how much of the dome or turret at the top to obscure. Then, you'll have an obstruction regardless of what angle the player token is at, at the cost of losing the top of the building. The other option is drawing an X on the top, but this will mean there are sort of "threshold angles" at which the visibility suddenly shifts, which might not be quite what you're looking for with a circular building.
What I imagine this really excels at is the classic dungeon crawl. Now, you can just outline each room with light-obstruction (and possibly mark stationary objects that way as well - I haven't figure out if you can do this with a token, though, which could be awesome (like having the massive dragon obscuring the path out of the room).
Because the light-obstruction lines are invisible to players, I recommend using bright colors that are easy to see on your map - I tend to go for highlighter green and bright red. I also recommend color-coding. For me, the green marks are permanent things like walls and buildings, while I use red marks to denote things like doors or rubble that can be cleared away. This way, when the party opens a door into the next room, you can just quickly step into the dynamic lighting layer, delete the red mark over the door they opened, and they'll be able to see inside.
I'm prepping for a combat encounter in which an urban district is about to become overrun with infectious zombies - some Zombie Plague Spreaders from Van Richtens, only I'm letting them recharge their infection ability and turning their victims into Husk Zombies from Wildemount. The combat itself is a bit unconventional, as it's going to be less about a single central set-piece and more about trying to wipe out the husk zombies before they can turn more of the many, many Commoners I have walking around the neighborhood.
It could be a disaster, but I think the image of a desperate midnight scramble to contain the outbreak with just a hint of Zombies Ate My Neighbors (which I actually never played) could make for a cool encounter. And the obscuring nature of the special lighting will play into the search - the party won't initially know where the plague-spreaders are, so they'll be searching mid-fight.
It's a proof of concept in a couple different ways, but I'm really eager to see how the lighting enhances the gameplay.
The next thing I think I need to experiment with is "explorable" versus "permanent" darkness. In our Curse of Strahd game, which we haven't played in months, sadly, we've been exploring the Amber Temple, but it's slightly frustrating that the way that the dynamic lighting is set up has left every room behind us totally obscured and pitch-black, as opposed to, what I think this can now do, which is to leave it desaturated and keep any creature tokens obscured, but still let us keep the "map progress" we've made.
I believe Roll20 had changed the Dynamic Lighting system since then, and certainly our DM (the aforementioned friend) knows a lot more about using the system now.
EDIT:
I've been playing around a bit with explorable darkness. This one can be a bit tricky, but can be great for a dungeon crawl. Essentially, anything on the map that the players see will be permanently revealed. However, if it's not currently in their line of sight, it is shown in black and white (or at least very desaturated) and any tokens in that area are not visible.
The idea here is that the players will essentially be building a map as they explore, but they don't have up-to-date knowledge of what's currently happening there. For example, the party might walk through some big cavern and then go into a chamber holding a dragon's hoard. While they're in the hoard room, they trip an Alarm spell, which alerts the dragon to their presence. Knowing that the party has to come back out through that cavern, the dragon and its minions lie in wait. So the players obviously know that the cavern is there, but they don't know that there's a big dragon and a bunch of other monsters that have now taken up position within that room.
On a more human accessibility side of things, this is also nice because it lets the party build out the map, but by dimming the explored space to black and white, players can very quickly figure out where their character is on the map.
While I'm certainly anxious that something could go wrong, I'm also very eager to try this out during my Monday game.
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