Player’s Guide to Token UI and Movement in Foundry VTT
Player's Guide
Now that we’ve covered the basic user interface of Foundry VTT, we’re going to dig into your token’s UI, as well as how to move your token around maps. Be sure to check out the rest of the Player’s Guides for information on your character sheet, combat, rolling dice, reading and writing journals, and controlling your audio and video if you’re using Foundry’s built in video chat. But, before all that, we need to know how to use our tokens – so, let’s take a look!
Your token is like your virtual mini. Your character sheet is associated with it, and a lot of your interactions in game will happen through your token. Let’s take a look at the user interface of our token.
Right clicking on our token gives us this floating menu of options.
At the top left we can enter our elevation. This doesn’t actually do anything aside from display the number, but it can be useful for tracking how high up you are if you’ve had something like Fly cast on you and there are some modules that make use of it as well.
Below that is the ‘Target’ button which makes it so you can target yourself. You can also target other tokens by double right clicking. Targeting also doesn’t do anything by itself but there’s multiple combat automation modules that make use of it that your DM may utilize.
If your DM set your token to display its health bar at the bottom you’ll see a box that contains your current health. You can enter a negative number or a number with a + sign in this box and Foundry will decrease or increase your health by that number.
Continuing counter-clockwise, the next button toggles your combat state. If you click this you’ll be added to the combat tracker where you can then roll for initiative.
Just above that is the ‘Status Effect’ menu. If we click on this we’ll get access to a bunch of status effects we can apply to our token. While most of them don’t do anything mechanically, some modules do make use of these. The main exception would be the skull, which specifically toggles the “defeated” condition on your token and can make some differences for your DM in the combat tracker. Status effects applied here will appear in the combat tracker next to your name as reminders. Left clicking on a status effect makes it appear at the top left of your token’s box, and right clicking gives you a big version of the icon over your token. You can have as many clicked icons as you want, and whichever you left click on will display at the top, but only one large, right-clicked icon will be visible at once.
Right click on your token to access its UI.
Left click to assign a small status effect icon in the corner, or right click to assign a large icon.
Now that we know everything about our token’s UI, let’s find out how we can move it around the map!
MOVEMENT & VISION
Movement works a little differently in Foundry than it does in Roll20. You can drag your token to a new place and it will go there right away. You can also move around using the WASD keys or the arrow keys on your keyboard.
If you want to measure or plan out your movement, though, you’ll want to hold the CTRL key (CMD on a Mac) and drag away from your token. Then you can left click to place a waypoint, turn, and keep adding more movement. Whenever you’re satisfied with your planned movement just hit the spacebar and your token will move quickly along the path that you set.
The one thing that can get in your way are walls and doors. In Foundry if you try to move through a wall it won’t let you and you’ll get a small error message letting you know. Likewise, you can’t move through closed doors. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to open them. If there’s a door on the map you can move to it, left click on it, and if it’s not locked the door will open revealing what’s on the other side. If it is locked, you’ll hear a clicking sound and your DM will probably let you know that it’s locked or barred and give you an opportunity to break it down or roll a lockpicking check.
You’ll also notice that as you move there is a dynamic line of sight and you can’t see things that are blocked by walls and the lighting system means without dark vision you might not be able to see anything without lighting a torch if there’s not already light in the area.
If you want to rotate your token you can do that by holding shift and scrolling your mousewheel or press the arrow keys in the direction you want to face. If you use CTRL instead it will rotate more slowly. One last thing you can do with a token that you own is double left click on it to open its character sheet.
Doors and walls block your line of sight. Click on a door to open it.
Now that we’re familiar with our token, we’re going to take a look at the character it represents and what they can do. In the next guide, we’ll take a look at your character sheet in Foundry VTT, including how to use it for rolling skill checks and saving throws.