As I’ve talked about in previous posts, I’ve been playing in and running games online for over a decade, and have been using VTTs like SyncRPG and MapTool for almost as long. When I’m running my sessions or making a tutorial video, I’m constantly using hotkeys, shortcuts, and helper macros, and I forget that not everyone else is as familiar with the tools as I am. I took some time after running one of this week’s playtest sessions to look at all the little things I do that might not be so obvious to new GMs using SyncRPG.

General Tips

Forcing the players to look at something. As I mentioned in the “How To Run Escape From Fort Nurovd” video, CTRL+E, CTRL+F will jump the players to your current map, and center them on your current view and zoom level. This is very useful when you want to take everyone from one map to another and make sure they start looking at the right spot, and not zoomed out too much, or zoomed into the middle of darkness where players can’t see yet. Additionally, sometimes it’s fun to throw open a door and jump the players to a zoomed-in shot on the BBEG, or to zoom everyone out when they’re flanked by goblins they failed to notice.

I try not to overuse this feature, and never use the “Continuous” centering option, because if you do it too often the players feel like they’re getting jerked around, and are denied the chance to look at the map the way they wanted to. Let them find what zoom level is comfortable for them, and only force a “jump” when you feel a need to.

Finding a token in a large group.

First, if the token is on initiative, you can just double click its name to jump to it on the map. Easy! If not, you can mash CTRL+T to quickly show or hide every token’s name. Sometimes the token will jump out at you with some quick flipping back and forth. As a last resort, I head over to the Map Explorer. If it’s not visible, go to Window > Map Explorer to bring it up. This is an exhaustive list of objects on the map, broken down by category and sorted alphabetically. It’s not something I have open all the time, but it’s helpful in a pinch!

Useful Macros

Toggles the visibility of selected tokens. When you have one or more tokens selected (be they tokens, objects, or background pieces), clicking this macro will toggle its visibility to the players. If it’s currently visible to them it will become invisible, and vice versa.

This affects more than just the visual representation of the token on the map: Hidden tokens will not show up on the initiative window, and are in all ways undetectable by the players’ VTTs.

I assign it the hotkey ALT+F1 by right clicking the macro and selecting Edit… Feel free to choose whatever key combination is most convenient for you, but I like to have easy access to this function, as I use it all the time in my games.

Generally when I’m setting up an encounter, I like to have the NPCs start hidden unless they’re plainly visible at the start. Initiative is rolled, and the players don’t know what they’re fighting or where the enemy is at in initiative until something happens. If the enemies don’t just jump out and attack, opposed Perception / Stealth checks can reveal hidden enemies.

Then I just mash ALT+F1 on anything that failed a stealth check!

Generates a self-only link to a PC or NPC profile on SyncRPG. Simply select the tokens you’d like to see more information about, mash the button, and click the links! They’ll all open in new tabs, and let you check out traditional statblocks for the characters.

Prompts for a keyword, and links everyone to an SRD search page for it in the chat. Useful for looking up a rule, spell, object, or term the group is unfamiliar with. Whenever a player asks “what’s that item do?” or “what spell is that?” I mash the macro and type in a keyword so everyone can be on the same page.

Removes the selected tokens token from initiative, marks them with the “dead” state, shrinks them down and moves them to the object layer to get them out of the way of playing. This is already in the “Dice/Misc” macro panel if you use our campaign files!

These two macros are useful to mash after the fight, especially in combination with the Kill Token macro above. Kill the tokens as they die during combat, and then afterwards switch to the object layer, select all the dead NPCs, and mash the Treasure and XP Totaler macros. If the N/PC has treasure/gear on their token, the first macro will print it out for everyone to see, and the second will sum up the XP for all of the selected tokens and output it as a total.

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