Initiative tracking question

I have been struggling with this since I started using Roll20 and I am wondering what other community members do. I run a few 5e games and it is quite frequent I may have a horde of orcs or kobolds that I want to all have the same initiative. The problem I have is if I select one icon and click my initiative macro, as soon as that mook dies I lose my entry in the initiative tracker. I don't want all 20 kobolds with their own initiative entries. I just want one entry that represents all the kobolds. I have resorted to manually entering something then typing in what the creature rolled for initiative, but it is clunky and slow. Is there a better way?

Are you deleting the token when dead? If so, don't delete it. Just X it out using the status markers. It will stay on the initiative tracker, and provide a dead body for the players to have to move around.

You could copy one "mook/mob" token that represents the group to the GM layer. Players won't see it on the tracker and you can't accidentally remove it when dead.

My GM has a token that represents monster (looks like that throwing start thing from Krull!). He gives it initiative, and it never gets deleted.

Thanks, these are all great suggestions.

If the concern with regards to tracking 20 initiative involves actually adding them to the turn order, two scripts of The Aaron makes it very easy (Group-Initiative and TokenNameNumber). Until these scripts it was simply too tedious to manage that many, but my players would frequently air concerns regarding all creatures acting at once, because all creatures acting on one initiative turn could very drastically change the scope of a fight without the ability for anyone to react. The above scripts allowed me to manage this better and making the change to individual initiatives, while causing a slight slowdown in the overall pace of combat (very slight once you are used to using them and get proficient with managing combat), it made combats so much smoother and organic feeling, there was much less potential for the encounter to go "sideways".

The group initiative doesn't play well with some other scripts, I dream of having enough time to go through it and see where it clashes, but that will probably never happen. If you don't use doors script or token status script it works very well though.

Oh?? Next time you have an issue, let me know so I can track it down. I hate bugs in my scripts!!! Can you point me to the doors script and the token status script you're using so I can test?

Kevin said: If the concern with regards to tracking 20 initiative involves actually adding them to the turn order, two scripts of The Aaron makes it very easy (Group-Initiative and TokenNameNumber). Until these scripts it was simply too tedious to manage that many, but my players would frequently air concerns regarding all creatures acting at once, because all creatures acting on one initiative turn could very drastically change the scope of a fight without the ability for anyone to react. The above scripts allowed me to manage this better and making the change to individual initiatives, while causing a slight slowdown in the overall pace of combat (very slight once you are used to using them and get proficient with managing combat), it made combats so much smoother and organic feeling, there was much less potential for the encounter to go "sideways". Oh yes. I use both scripts copiously. I wish more scripts would use a similar "grouping" function when manipulating multiple tokens and or attributes. I haven't had any issues with GroupInitiative conflicting with other scripts AFAIK.

Aaron, I think it is the other scripts that cause the problem. I don't know which order I added them, but something clashed. Over the weekend I will try to gather them up and send to you.

Good deal. Even if it is a problem with another script, I'll try to get you a fix for it. :)