Is there a macro or script to change the visibility of a handout?

I've tried the forum search and Google to see if this already exists:  What I'm looking for is a way to change the visibility of a handout (or handouts) for players by changing the handout's "In players journal" setting. In my specific case, the players have a set of handouts representing books, documents, etc. that they've collected during play and have stored many of these items in their home base. They are currently away from their home base, so should not have access to them, but there they are in the journal. I would like a way to turn off their ability to open these handouts without manually opening each one and changing the setting (they've collected a LOT of material).

You can't control handout visibility with a macro, but you can have abilities that print out text blocks and images in chat tied to tokens that can be locked onto a map and that the character sheet those link to isn't visible to the players. That'd, of course, necessitate converting all those handouts to templates, which by the sound of it, might get tedious by the amount of them. But either way, the way to do this would be to have a base character sheet, with all the documents contained in abilities under the document name, a prefix attribute %{, and a token ability @{prefix}@{character_name}|@{selected|token_name}} - and then just tokens representing these documents, named the same as the abilities containing said documents, with players having control over them but the sheet not being in their journal. This way, the players can select these tokens and call the linked document into chat while on that map, but without a direct way to access them outside that map. If you're afraid the players might cheat and call those abilities without the tokens, you could use password instead of token_name, saved in a token bar hidden from the players,. called with bar1, bar2 or bar3 attribute. And if you're still worried the players might cheat and copy that password... well, they might as well screenshot and save the handouts outside the game if they're going that far.

Interesting, and I might use that method in the future. Many of the existing handouts aren't really amenable to being posted in chat because of their length, and in some cases they contain links to other handouts. I do trust my players not to use resources that their characters currently can't access. This is more of a way to prevent "accidental" access, for example where a player honestly forgets that they're not supposed to have that material handy. (Although if their character hasa high Intelligence score, I will allow them to roll a skill check to see if they "remember" something that the character had read.)

Rick A. said: Interesting, and I might use that method in the future. Many of the existing handouts aren't really amenable to being posted in chat because of their length, and in some cases they contain links to other handouts. I do trust my players not to use resources that their characters currently can't access. This is more of a way to prevent "accidental" access, for example where a player honestly forgets that they're not supposed to have that material handy. (Although if their character hasa high Intelligence score, I will allow them to roll a skill check to see if they "remember" something that the character had read.) If you do wind up using the token notes method in the future, you can still get handout efficiency by using Supernotes. Create a token for each book. You can control the permissions on these with token-mod, probably using a preset  Chat Menu . Paste the contents of each handout into the GMnotes of each token. Make this a universal token action macro: Notes !pcnote ---handout|Book Reader| This will create a handout called "Book Reader", or "Library" or whatever you want to call it. Whenever a player selects a book token and runs the macro, it will live update the contents of the Book reader to that book. I'd suggest setting this up with Reporter, which would give you a menu in the handout for all books on the page, but filtering by permissions would be a little more complicated.

Thanks Keith!