Creating Interactive Map Icons in Roll20 (Revised)

hi everyone i'm nick olivo and today we're going to look at creating interactive map icons in roll20 this will allow your players to view a quick blurb about a given location and then click a link to open a handout to learn more information now if you've been following my channel for a while you'll know i've actually already done this video once before but that was one of my earlier videos and i've learned a lot since then so this is a new and improved version of that video which has some enhancements and tweaks that i think are going to make it a lot more useful to you and your players and the great thing about this is we can do everything here without needing the api although there is one thing that i'll show you at the very end that can be made easier with the api you don't need to use the api in order to achieve what we're about to do today before we dive in i'd just like to thank roll20 for sponsoring this video now the key to this whole thing is a macro that allows the players to click on a token and then learn more about it but in the original version players could move the tokens around i had you giving them full control and then the information was being sent to the chat for everybody so it was filling up the chat if you had a lot of players who were trying to learn about the world so this new version is going to allow the players to just select an item without needing to have control over it so they won't move it by accident and it's going to have the output whispered to them so that it doesn't fill up the chat for everybody but before we get to the macro there are a couple of quick prerequisites we need to do in order to set those up so let's take a look at those now so the first prerequisite is to create a multi-sided token that you can use to mark locations on the map i've got one right here called map icons done you can see i've used these skyrim tokens in order to define different types of locations i've got a link down in the description to where you can download that token pack you just make these up and then what you can do is pop the icon onto the map hold down the alt key in order to resize it to the desired size and then right click on it and say advanced is drawing and that'll get rid of the bubbles that pop up around there and then once that's done you can right click on it say multi-sided choose side and pick whichever side you want to go with i'm going to use the ruins for this example here and then i'll double click on it and give the ruins a name i'm going to call this the ruins of arboglut and we'll have that show up now because i also want my players to see the name of the location i'm going to click on this little button right here and i want player permissions to be c and that will allow them to see the the nameplate and then we'll save changes so we've got our token now we also need a handout to go along with that token and i've already created my handouts here you can see i've got one for each location that i want my players to be able to click on so i can just see right here we've got the ruins of arba glut we've got the little description here there's a nice image to go with it and so this is what's going to be displayed to the player when they click on it now the last prerequisite is to create what's called a master handout and this is a handout that contains links to all of your other handouts so really all you need to do is click add handout and we'll call this the master handout and down here in the description and notes what you want to do is type in an open bracket and then the name of the handout that you want to link to and you need to type this exactly the same as the name you gave this other handout so to make this easy i'm just going to copy this right here so i don't mistype anything right so i've copied the name of this close this guy and i'm going to paste in so we have the ruins of arbor glut close bracket and then what i like to do is just put in a quick note for myself as the gm because this master handout can be a really handy resource for you so i'm just going to say that the harpers take note if the players are successful here and then save changes and you'll see now what that's done is given me a link to the ruins of arbor glut handout so if i click that it opens that handout up so what you're going to ultimately do is repeat that process for all the other handouts that you want to link with and so your master handout will ultimately look something like this where you've got all of the links to all the places that you're going and again i've got all of these little notes about things that are going on in my campaign for those locations that might be relevant for me as the dm okay so now let's tuck this guy away i'm just going to double click on the title bar to kind of hide him away and we're going to go back to our token i'm just going to double click on that to open it up and in the tokens bar 1 value field we're going to put in a quick one-line description of this location so i've already got that on my clipboard i'm just going to paste it in here and what this says is that this is a former human city that is now overrun by goblins and that's going to be displayed in our output when we run the macro the other thing we're going to do is get the link to the handout that goes along with this location so i'm going to scoot this guy down here open up my master handout again and i'm going to right click on the ruins of arba glut link and say copy link address tuck him away again and again we're just going to paste that in and then save settings so now we're ready to make the macro that's going to actually give us this output here so here's the code for the macro and you'll see right here we're starting out template default that means we're getting this purple box now when i clicked the button you saw that we got this prompt saying select a location and the player's cursor changes to this crosshairs when they hover over an icon that they can click on so you can see here we're doing that for the ruins of arbiglot and then also down here for the tomb of gartholor and if i move over to the right there that this town of sedathon is there as well so this target is coming from this right here target select a location and so we're saying target select location and then token underscore name that's what's populating the title bar here in the output so name equals the token name so that's the ruins of armageddon then down here we see target select a location bar one so that's reading the little blurb that we put in from bar one where it was a former human city now overrun by goblins and then here click here to learn more this syntax where we have an open bracket click here to learn more turns that text as you can see right here as i hover over it turns that text into a hyperlink and the location the hyperlink goes to is defined here in this set of parentheses and again we're saying target select location bar one max and that's going to the handout link that we put into the bar one max field now you may be looking at this and going well wait a minute nick i thought you said we were going to have this output whispered and yet we're still just putting everything into the regular chat that's going to clog things up you're absolutely right so now let's take care of the whispering now unfortunately without the api there isn't a whisper to me command or whisper to myself and while i will show you how that works with the api in a bit to get around it if you don't have access to the api you can put in a command that looks like this where you prompt the player whisper who are you and then put in a list of the players that are in your game and what that's going to do is give you a pop-up box that allows your players to select who they are and basically whisper to themselves so i'm going to modify my macro with this new bit of code so i'm just going to copy all this go into my macro i'm going to replace this okay and i also want to make sure that i make this visible to all my players that's going to allow all my players to use this macro we'll save changes and now let's take a look at this from our player's point of view so here we are i'm in as my player in this window and so i'm going to say click on the macro and click my location i am in as daisy submit and there we go we've got the output whispered to dayz you notice the gm me over here i did not get that whisper and now daisy can click on that link view the handout get all the information that she wants about the ruins of arba glut and the information is not clogging up everybody's chat window now one thing to mention about that if you do have players that are jokesters is it entirely possible that they could be spamming each other with whispers yes that's a risk that you're going to need to take if you use this hopefully your players are are better than that now i mentioned there was a way to do this a little bit cleaner if you have access to the api and in order to do that you're going to need a script from who else the aaron which is available at this link here i'll include a link to that in the video's description basically you're just going to copy this script right here you're going to paste it into your script library like i've just done right here called whisper to self if you're not super familiar with how this works i'll pop a card up in the top right there to show you how to load the script in but essentially once you've got that in there and you've saved the script and you're good to go what you want to do is go back into your macro and change this section here from slash w who are you to just exclamation point me and the exclamation point me command is going to whisper this to yourself effectively so we're going to copy that whole thing i'm going to go back into the macro i'm going to replace the code save it so i'm back in here as my player again click the macro click the location we get the whisper again and again no output to anyone other than the individual so that exclamation point me command will whisper to the desired individual without needing to prompt them a second time to select who they are so there you have it a new and improved interactive map in roll 20. i hope you found this video helpful if you did please give it a like and consider subscribing and until next time folks have a great day

Channel: Nick Olivo

Views: 449

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: et1UOfVE1LA

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021