I know I can turn off 'ID' to hide an NPC's description, but if the token image shows an oni, vampire, doppelganger, etc image from the MM then the gig's up and my players start meta-gaming.
Printable View
I know I can turn off 'ID' to hide an NPC's description, but if the token image shows an oni, vampire, doppelganger, etc image from the MM then the gig's up and my players start meta-gaming.
There's no mechanism for that in the system as the players can technically "see" the creature.
If you really want to hide the visuals; you would either have to leave the token hidden in the combat tracker, so they don't even see it; or replace the token with something else (like a generic letter token).
Regards,
JPG
Usually I just make a copy of the NPC (drag its link back into the NPC window to create a duplicate that can be edited) and swap out the token. All the other stuff (abilities, spells, traits, etc) stays the same and you can even edit the name then too.
To expand on JPG's idea, here's what I did with a minor vampiric type monster in a 10th level game I'm running where I didn't think the vampiric type was going to be immediately obvious. Like a lot of these type of monsters the base type can be any humanoid. Some background is at 1st, 2nd levels they fought a lot of kobolds and they fought a major boss dragon with a small horde of kobolds a few levels ago.
First when I built the encounters that had the vampiric type critter I changed the name to Clawed Kobold and dropped a basic kobold token on them. Then when they were first encountered I described them as have long claws but no obvious weapons. They first thought they might just be Kobolds (no wait I hit it for 10 and it's only lightly wounded), the maybe Kobold monks (they had encountered hobgoblin monks before). Wait, it just grabbed our Dragonborn fighter by the ankle and ran up the wall to the ceiling with him. That dragonborn's 7' tall, 300 lbs, wearing full plate, and carrying a bunch of gear and weighs about 500ish pounds total - they must be strong! Wait says the wizard flying up by the hallway ceiling - they walk on walls? Why yes there is one running right up to you, wizard! You are in hand to hand! And so it goes. I believe it was the 3rd encounter with them that the cleric / sorcerer tried to turn them, but mostly because they were with some other stuff they knew was undead.
So that's a long winded way of saying you can get a ton of mileage out of changing the name of the monster and the token.
The other thing that works is instead of using a name like Acolyte, Cult Cleric or Adult Black Dragon give them a name "Elan", "Sternwind", "Kievrog".
Note, you can change names and tokens in the encounter, you don't need to make NPC duplicates to change those two things.
Thanks for the insights everyone! Seems to me like this is a feature FG ought consider adding for disguised or illusory creatures.
It's already included.... Just drag a new token to the instance on the encounter. If you are thinking of something else, you can always add the idea to the wish list so everyone can vote on the ones they value the most.
https://fgapp.idea.informer.com/
I think they are asking for some sort of token swapper, like several token images attached to some NPC and one can switch between the images by pressing just a button (without the need to go through the assets or NPC list to find the original token again; the copy of the NPC actually might be useful then) :) I think such things are on the wishlist somewhere, together with a random token table attached to an NPC to support different images for the same type of NPC :)Quote:
Originally Posted by LordEntrails
Agreed Kelrugem - you said it better than I said it myself.