#think I might just try streaming myself using krita for my players

[corbinite]

A VTT platform implementing photoshop-style layer masking would be a game-changer. It'd allow for so much more dynamic maps.

In the simplest version of this, you could have three layers of map:

Top layer would be just a solid color fog of war, middle layer would be the dark unlit version of the map, and the bottom layer would be the bright fully lit version

Fog of war could be erased as players explore revealing the map. This is nothing too revolutionary, lots of VTTs have this, but you could always add some fun patterns this way which most VTTs don't allow

The dark layer of the map would have a transparency mask modifier, which you could use to dynamically erase the darkness from where the players are (simulating the players' light sources or darkvision) and then fill back in as they move around without losing the detail

There's some VTTs that have something similar to this but it's always just a solid transparent color which doesn't really achieve the same effect as just an edited map with different lighting, and in my experience they also get extremely laggy because they usually automatically follow the players and do so by just constantly adding shapes to the map that don't get deleted

And also you could use it to do other cool stuff, like making a map that has a bunch of glowing runes on it, and those runes light up in a radius around a spell being cast. Or having a room on fire that the players can put out spot by spot

It can even be fully manual (in fact I'd prefer it to be manual) and that'd still be so much more useful to some tables than any of the mechanical tools like dice rollers and encounter trackers. Cause that can all be handled outside of the VTT