Sight, Light, and Fog

Chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space, and chapter 10, Doors and Lights, are the DM building the room. This chapter is the room seen from the other side of the table.

The model fits in one sentence: each player sees the map from their own token, out to as far as their light or their eyes reach, plus whatever ground they have already walked.

What a player sees

On a player's phone or tablet, the encounter map is mostly black until someone lights it. Four things cut through the dark, and they look different on purpose:

• Live sight. A bright pool around your own token, sized by the light you are carrying or your darkvision range, whichever reaches further. Whatever you can currently see is at full brightness.
• Lights you can see. A lit torch across the room glows for you if a wall-free line runs from your token to the flame. With a wall in the way, you see nothing of it.
• Remembered ground. Places you have already walked stay visible, noticeably dimmer. Bright means "I see this now", dim means "I remember this".
• A cautious ring. A very faint circle right around your own token, even in pitch dark. Enough to inch forward by, not enough to feel safe.

Darkvision reads differently from firelight: dimmer and drained of color, so you can tell at a glance what you are seeing by torchlight and what you are only seeing in the dark. Your darkvision range comes from what you entered when you joined the session (chapter 15, Joining as a Player). Carried light is set by the DM from the combatant panel.

Sight is per-character, not per-party. The dwarf may have found a door the torchless human has not.

Two rules sit on top of all that:

• Player and familiar tokens always render for everyone, even around a corner. The table always knows where the party is.
• Monsters and spell-effect tokens render only when your own character can see them. Far Table does not hand players clairvoyance.

A glimpse is not a memory

This is the rule that surprises people, and it is deliberate. Memory is made of ground the party has walked, not ground they have seen.

Stand in a corridor, look through an open door, and the room beyond lights up while you stand there. Walk away and it goes black again. You never set foot in it, so nothing remembers it. Walk in instead, and the floor you crossed stays dimly remembered.

Doors in play

Doors are DM business during a session. Players do not open or close them from the app; they say what their character does, and the DM makes it so by pressing and holding the door on the map and tapping Open or Close (chapter 10 covers the full sheet). An open door lets light and sight through; a closed one blocks both.

A door only appears on a player's screen once that player's own sight has reached one side of it. Until then they do not know it is there.

Secret doors are stricter. From the player side an undiscovered secret door is indistinguishable from solid wall: no bar, no gap, no light leaking through, and walking right past it changes nothing. The only way one becomes visible to players is the DM pressing and holding it and tapping Reveal, which turns it into an ordinary closed door. On the DM's own screen a secret door draws ghosted and faded the whole time, so the DM sees what the players cannot.

The DM's lighting menu

During play the DM gets a Lighting cell: in the map toolbar on a phone or tablet, in the top toolbar on a Mac or Windows machine. Tap it and pick one thing:

• Off. The plain, all-seeing DM view. No veil at all.
• Lights only. Draws the darkness and the light pools for atmosphere. The DM still sees everything.
• Darkvision. As above, plus the whole interior in darkvision gray. Still all-seeing.
• View as [character name]. The honest one. The map renders exactly as that player's device renders it, including hiding secret doors and monsters that character cannot see.

Only View as filters what the DM sees. The other three are cosmetic: they show how dark the room feels without ever blinding the DM. A View as lens still leaves every DM control live, so a light can be placed while looking through a player's eyes. If that light lands somewhere the character cannot see, the app says so in a message rather than letting the DM think nothing happened.

Entries that are not usable yet stay visible and explain themselves: "Set a scale first" until the map has a scale, and "Turn on Darkness first" for View as until darkness is on in the map settings sheet.