Chapter 10

Doors and Lights

Once the app knows where your walls are (chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space), two more things make a room behave like a room: doors that can be shut, and light that has to get past them. This is DM work. Players never place a door or a light; they only live with the results, which chapter 28, Sight, Light, and Fog, covers.

Set the scale first

Nothing here works until the map has a scale. A door is five or ten feet wide and a torch reaches twenty, and the app cannot draw that in pixels it has no ruler for.

On the Map Prep Workbench, the scale lives behind the Map… pill on the Floor bench, and behind the Set scale chip in the map's top-left corner.
The number you enter is the map's width in feet, not the size of a square. Tokens size themselves from it, so a width set too small produces giant tokens.
Until it is set, the Doors and Lights benches show "Set the map scale first" instead of their tools.

Doors

Doors go on the Doors bench of the workbench (chapter 13, The Map Prep Workbench). Pick your settings in the strip, then tap the map.

Pick a width first: Single · 5 ft or Double · 10 ft.
Tap a wall. The door snaps onto the nearest wall run near your tap. A door too wide for that wall previews in red and will not drop; the strip counts them as "won't drop".
Tap a pending door again to take it back off.
Turn on the Secret chip before tapping to place a hidden door.
Your doors land when you leave the bench. There is no Done button and no Cancel.

The Doors bench needs walls as well as a scale, so define the floor first. During a live session, where there are no benches, press and hold open floor on the map instead and pick "Place a door" or "Place a light source" from the chooser.

Door states

Every door is in one of three states, and each means something different to light and sight:

Open. Both pass through. Everyone sees the swinging leaf.
Closed. Blocks both. Players see the closed bar once they have discovered the door.
Secret. Blocks exactly like a closed door and is invisible to players until you reveal it. On your own screen it draws ghosted and faded, so you see what your players cannot. Revealing one turns it into an ordinary closed door, not an open one.

Changing a door

Press and hold an existing door on the map. The sheet offers, depending on the door:

Open or Close. This toggle is deliberately hidden on secret doors so a stray tap can never give one away.
Mark secret, or Reveal on one that is already secret.
Resize between the two widths.
Move along the wall, available while staging.
Remove, labeled as sealing the doorway. Removing a door does not leave a gap; the wall closes back up.

Lights

Lights work the same way on the Lights bench: pick a radius chip, tap the map to drop each one, tap a light again to take it back off, and the batch lands when you leave the bench. The four radii are the 5e light sources, so pick by what is actually in the room:

5 ft for a candle.
20 ft for a torch. This is the default.
30 ft for a hooded lantern.
60 ft for a bullseye lantern.

Press and hold an existing light to change its radius or choose Remove light source. During a live session that sheet also gets Douse and Relight, which turn a light off and on without deleting it; a doused light is simply not there as far as your players are concerned. The staging sheet does not offer them.

Light a character carries, and darkvision

A torch in someone's hand is not a placed light. It belongs to the token and moves with them.

Select the combatant, then tap the Light chip in the combatant panel (chapter 23, Managing Combatants).
Choose None, 15 ft, 30 ft, or 60 ft of carried light.
The same sheet shows that character's darkvision range as a read-only line. You cannot edit it here; for a player it comes from the darkvision they entered when they joined (chapter 15, Joining as a Player).

Carried light and party token placements are session-only. Placed lights and doors are part of the map and are saved with it.

To check your work before anyone else sees it, tap the floating eye button on any bench. It cycles through a plain view, a full lighting view, a darkvision view, and a draggable eye showing what one spot on the map can actually see. Chapter 13 covers all four.