Brainstorming a Map Solution for a Nation Leader System – March 18, 2023 at 10:22AM

Hey all, so I have a game I’m running where there’s “two levels” of play. There’s a party of PCs, and there’s a part of Nation Leaders (NL). The players play like… players (we use VTT and are moving from D&D5e to P2e).

The Nation Leader system is a homebrew. I made it to include a lot of people who were interested in playing, or having some relationship to the game, but can’t/won’t play in 2-5 hour sessions. A Nation Leader manages a nation of the world and takes point on determining its culture, affairs, politics, etc. The NLs take turns. Nation A -> Nation B -> Nation C and… loop. NLs get money, action points, and turn-over-turn the world takes on a vibrance I simply could never have made myself. Personally, I love this sort of collab storytelling. I’m on the 3rd edition of the NL system, and maybe one day I’ll try to publish it.

Anyway. The actual problem I’m facing is showing the NLs the world from their point of view. Here is a link of something I made for 1 NL (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pm4mH-urzYvKVMPWFs8c7VhTNosYkw9i/view?usp=sharing).

To get this, I created 1 map, all the NLs assets, and then I update it with each turn. Then, for each NLs turn, I go back and reconfigure all the vision manually (this was back when I was trying to do this in Roll20). Doing all the vision stuff was a massive pain.

So yeah, what I think I’m looking for is….

• Create 1 world map and update it each turn,
• Can change my vision from DM to NL so I can screenshot or screenshare it
• When looking at the world as a DM, I see everything.
• When looking at the world as a NL, I see just my nation’s and public/non-hidden stuff.

Maybe I could just create it as a separate game in Foundry and invite Nation Leaders? I’d tried this approach in Roll20 but I could never get it to work quite right.

Sorry for the long post – Let me know what you think!