How to Prep Large Map with Multiple Encounters More Easily

[thelagermeister]

Hello, this is less of a PF2e question and more of a procedural thing with FGU, but specifically looking at the PF2e AP Abomination Vaults. Anyway, I'm wondering how best to handle tokens on a large map for potential encounters. I haven't ran any other APs, but with PFS games it was pretty easy as there wasn't as much combat and I could preload stuff into the combat tracker and have on the map, since you likely only had one combat on each map. However, when looking at the Abomination Vaults AP, the first level of the Gauntlight (and every level), there are so many more encounters for hazards and enemies and as far as I'm aware, if you want the tokens to update properly and allow drag/drop attacking and such, they need to be on the combat tracker first, then dropped onto the map. But of course I don't want to have enemies from say, A19 in my tracker when I'm in A5.

I know I'm not the only one that has struggled with this and thought I would ask people that have most likely dealt with this before. I would like to prep more and be able to see on my map very easily what they might be stumbling upon, without relying on pins. But if that's what I need to do, that's ok too. Just takes a bit more time to open the pin, find the encounter, open that up, drag and drop enemies to combat tracker, then onto map. And seeing as this specific AP is very dungeon crawly, I wanted to try and make it as smooth as possible for stuff like this. Thanks.

[Trenloe]

Just takes a bit more time to open the pin, find the encounter, open that up, drag and drop enemies to combat tracker, then onto map.

For Abomination Vaults most encounters are available within the location specific story entry (accessible via a location shortcut pin on the map) and the majority of the encounters have pre-placement of tokens (shown by check marks in the encounter token entries), so you don't need to "drag and drop enemies to combat tracker, then onto map", just click the down arrow button at the bottom of the encounter window - this places all the creatures for the encounter in the combat tracker and pre-places the tokens on the map.

[Zacchaeus]

You don't place all the encounters on the CT/Map right away. You only need to place the encounter that the PCs are actually facing and then once they are dead and the PCs move into the next room you place that encounter onto the CT/Map and so on. If this is an FG module then that's how the AP should be set up; that is each room will have a story entry which is pinned to the room and that story should have a link to the encounter and opening the encounter will allow you to place the NPCs on the CT and map at the same time using the little down arrow at the bottom left of the encounter window.

Edit: And Trenloe beat me to it with all sorts of graphics and everything

[Trenloe]

Shortcut pins are the primary way to link information on a map. It's recommended you only have creatures the PCs are directly interacting with in the combat tracker and on the map at any time. It should be fairly quick for you top open a location pin and check what is in different locations (see the animated GIF in the previous post). If you want to add some quick reminders to the map, you can add tokens that aren't attached to a creature, hide them from the players (via the right-click visibility menu) and if you want to add a text tooltip to the token (allowing you to hover over the token for more info) type the text in the chat window and then drag the text and drop it on the token.

[HywelPhillips]

There are some extensions that handle this for 5E. I don't know whether they will work in PF2 or not.

My preferred one is Combat Groups:
https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/154/view

Which lets you add a bunch of stuff to the tracker, then set them up into groups, and make the group invisible on the tracker but leaving the tokens visible on the map.

I find this very useful for dungeon crawls when I want to be able to tell at a glance what creatures are around if someone makes a loud noise or combat breaks out - and lets me move them around to react, for example getting ready near the door to their rooms, without cluttering the tracker.

Celestian's Situational Awareness does something similar:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...onal+awareness

Again 5E only (I think 2E does this in-built).

I don't see why these should particularly be 5E only, so maybe they will work or can be made to work for PF2.

I certainly find them very useful for dungeon crawls.

Cheers, Hywel

[thelagermeister]

Ok, so I kind of feel like an idiot now. I've opened the Encounter before and been confused why the icons already showed they were placed and so I would uncheck them and place them where I think they should go. It literally never has occurred to me to hover over the down arrow to read what it says. Actually, I probably knew this long ago, but have forgotten it.

So that being said, thank you very much for helping me with this silly question and the (should have been) obvious answers. When I know the party is going somewhere, just click on the pin and open the encounter and it will remind me what is there. Then just a quick click of the arrow to add everything for when things actually pop off.

[celestian]

Celestian's Situational Awareness does something similar:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...onal+awareness

Again 5E only (I think 2E does this in-built).

I don't see why these should particularly be 5E only, so maybe they will work or can be made to work for PF2.

The issue comes from effects. Basically the way I do it is replace the CoreRPG call that grabs the list of combattants and also replace the effects function that triggers when a round is incremented. When a round increases all things in the CT need to have all their effects checked and you don't want to have npcs not in there burning there effects when they are not actually in the CT.

So, for those reasons it's specific to the ruleset. It wasn't something CoreRPG could deal with (at the time, that might change) so it was specific to the 2e/5e ruleset.

That said, FG still had issues dealing with all of the npcs on the board (hidden). I am not sure if it was the map trying to cope with all the tokens or what. My end goal was to have ALL npcs loaded on the map but I just couldn't come up with a way that FG could cope with and not bog down systems. So, the extension works but I wouldn't recommend loading up 100 npcs

I'll probably revisit the project down the road and see if I can come up with a better way to do it.

[ShadeRaven]

I'll add to this as the one who converted up the Abomination Vaults for FG.

Even with some of the improvements and updates to make line of sight and lighting efficient in Unity, you still don't want to stress the system with a lot of creatures at once... and, boy, does the Abomination Vault series have a lot of creatures. Depending on how people are connecting, the speed of those connections, and the robustness of the host computer, having dozens and dozens of creatures in the CT is going to tax it pretty severely.

So as it's been said, add encounters to the trackers as players come across them. It's always a good idea, though, to read through the material you are expecting to use for that session and quickly scanning the encounter room and any adjacent rooms to see whether or not action within one encounter location could bleed over into others or draw additional attention - when that happens, it's at least good to have those encounter boxes ready to populate the tracker (or have them in ahead of time if you're pretty sure they'll be involved), but other than that, it's just easier on you as a GM and on the system to take advantage of the down arrow you pointed out when you need to put creatures on the map and in the CT.

Not to mention, we actually try to read the room details and place the creatures as directed or appropriately to make your job easier!

[thelagermeister]

Thanks for all the work ShadeRaven. I've read up on a lot of the other threads regarding this AP and seems like you did quite a bit of work to make this easy for us. Plenty of bug fixes, walls/LOS, and then the lighting upgrade. It's been fun to use all the new features that Unity provided and still continues to provide.

So yeah, again, thanks for the help guys. I didn't want to have all the encounters and tokens in the combat tracker for obvious reasons and definitely aware on the resource taxation that brings. I guess my biggest issue was how slow adding the tokens was, but of course with the revelation that the down arrow does it all for you, it's slick. I ran a session Tuesday night and it worked like a charm. Hardly any hiccup between accessing the rooms and combat. I did prep to know of course what they might stumble into and fully aware of all the stuff that level 1 has in it. But being able to dump everything into the tracker and map before they opened the door was super easy.

[ShadeRaven]

Glad to hear it's all working out! And as always, if you run into any hiccups or even suggestions that would make GMing any of the products, feel free to come back and make inquires and suggestions