A Little Taste From A Mentor

I'm running Fate Core for a forgotten realms campaign. Mostly I thought Id be doing one shots luckily I got positive feedback from my first one shot using roll 20 they've agreed to reconvene at a time that worked well for mostly everyone. My problem $100 a year is a bit steep for me and I dont know if im allowed to use this medium to ask this but I have need for a single campaign that loads a simple list of attributes and abilities I assume API is the best way to accomplish this. From what Ive read a mentor can co-gm a campaign allowing API. I can write the script or if prefered I can give the list. If there's a better way I'm all ears. I should probably also clarify simple doesn't mean small there's roughly 27 skills and 3 attributes that are needed for all players. There are more but are player specific and thus designated to them. Also my schedule fluctuates so I fully expect to be abandoned by players wanting more consistency so I assume my game will have a revolving player list. Thanks for any feedback

Congrats on your game going well. Just so you know, it is Ok to ask your players for a contribution to the cost, if you want to do that. There is a "gift" ability on Roll20 where players can add money to your accounts, the button is found on your Roll20 Profile page (click a user's name and click Give Gift Subscription). By the way I understand about your schedule & group membership fluctuating --- that happens in my campaigns too. No one person needs to pay the whole amount, if you could just get 4 or 5 players to donate $10 each, one time payment, by Gift, that would really reduce your cost and gets you a few months of Supporter or Mentor and you can decide if you can afford to pay-out the difference to get a full year. Now, is there a reason you need the API for setting up the attributes and abilities you wanted? Normally attributes and abilities can be created manually, and honestly doesn't take that long to create 27 or so for a single campaign. From what you wrote, I was not able to understand where you are needing the API. You (as GM) can create a Character in the Journals section --- call it something like Default Character or Blank Character. Put in the attributes that you want, and/or assign a Character sheet to the campaign. From then on, you can click "Duplicate" on that character when a new player arrives, then just change the name of the duplicate to the new player-character's name, and assign permissions to that person. Then the player can put new values in the existing attributes. You don't need the API for quickly duplicating a default set of attributes for each new player, if that is what you were asking. Hope this helps & feel free to continue the questions, someone else will probably come along with answers for ya.

Duplicate will work great. Thanks for the tip. I like roll20 but the interface is a lot like dwarf fortress to me very in depth. Considering what roll20 does its understandable dwarf fortress less so. I had some other motivations but this was the biggest that needed to be addressed before game in case Im a player short and needing last minute drop in

You're right about the dwarf fortress. Some features of Roll20 are not obvious from the interface, but once you learn the places to click, there are a lot of features. I mean there are several things that people commonly ask to be added, but it's already there (like you can double-click on the top line of a character sheet or journal entry to Minimize it). Here's where it tells of Duplicate on the documentation, but it doesn't really say anything more, it says less than I told you, but in case you need a reference later, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Journal#Duplicate" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Journal#Duplicate</a>

Thank you very much for the in depth response. Ill be honest I didn't look long for a solution assumed it was left to api because of the on ("add:character", I forget the rest but it essentially added strength attribute to characters added. Duplicate seems far less messy than adding api for it but it may have been due to its evolution or just covered because available due to the sandbox. Either way Ill try to check documentation for things even if there's an Api for it. For me once I see a solution its difficult to think of an alternative. As soon as you said I could duplicate the light bulb came on. I do have some need of seeing a mentor campaign with custom api involved not necessarily as co dm but its not critical for my next game so I can be patient and not disturb community yet.

Send a message to The Aaron on this site. He's usually happy to help people see what the API can do. He writes a lot of API scripts for people, and I believe he would have a way to show you a demo. The "Duplicate" trick is easy. As a hint, the only times it's tripped me up is when I opened my Default/Template Character and started editing it for the new person and clicked "Save", forgetting to Duplicate my template character first & edit the duplicate. So that over-wrote my template character and I had to make it again.

Also, I believe you can sign up as a Mentor on a monthly basis so you could create a custom Character sheet that could be used in the campaign and that sheet could include all the necessary skills. For an example, you could look at the Savage Worlds (Tabbed) character sheet - on that I have all the skills hidden except for the ones the player wants/needs. The reason I mention the monthly subscription option, is because only Mentors can create custom Character Sheets (which is really necessary for building a character sheet to begin with), but once the sheet is created and working the way you want, you could close your Mentor subscription, put the character sheet on GitHub as part of the repo and it would eventually propogate to the servers so everyone could use it (even Non-Mentors). But, there is a FATE Core edition character sheet already available, so it may have everything you need already. In your Campaign, click on the View Details link, the scroll down and on the left hand site is a link for Campaign Settings, click that. Then you can scroll down and select a character sheet and save. Then, when you launch the campaign, the character sheets will have three tabs, the middle one being Character Sheet. Something else that may help.

You can subscribe for a month, and cancel at the end of the month.