Chat links to handouts

I have a lot of trouble remembering specific bits of rules, especially spells.  It'd be great if I could make an ability include a link to a handout where I've copied down all the spell or ability information, ESPECIALLY if I could whisper that link to myself through the ability.  I'm sure my players would find it useful as well to be able to quickly look up that very specific spell. IRL, I use notecards for this sort of thing.  Unusual items, spells, abilities, anything of that ilk got a notecard for easy reference. For example, one could type: /me casts Magic Missile. {handout:Magic Missile} And the resulting chat message would include a clickable link that would bring up the handout Magic Missile, with the complete spell description and maybe a picture of a wizard casting it. This could be useful particularly for players to show each other stuff without giving them permission to force stuff on other people's screens.  A player could link to {handout:World Map} if he wants to point something out on the world map to everyone else, or he could "dig a key out of his pocket" and show it to everyone even if they don't have view permission.  They could link to their own character sheets or the character sheets of known NPC's. External links to websites would be useful for a myraid of obvious reasons, but if there is some way to post such a link in the chat it's not immediately obvious to me or my players.  Something as simple as automatically parsing URL's would be a great convenience.

I use the journals for stuff like that so that it is for me and the group to use. i make specific journals with the needed info in them and title them to reflect what they contain. Since tagging is the only option we have for origanizing stuff, I tag it also but I usually forget what tags I use so I have to look through all my journals till I spot it.

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking just being able to link to it in an ability or macro would make things so much easier.  Every time someone casts Magic Missile, there's a little link to the handout explaining what it does.  No digging around, it's just there.  It'd also be useful to link to handouts in the chat so you're not forcing everyone to look at it right away, they can open it if they're curious or leave it alone.

I could take or leave it. I sometimes require my players to copy the spell descriptions to their sheets so there is reference there. This allows them to have their spellbook handy to look over prior to their casting their spells.

I'm sort of confused as to whether you would find the suggestion useful or not.  Yeah, that's one way to do it, but as roll20 has pretty poor character sheet support it's not very helpful to have the spell that's referenced by players, NPC's, and monsters alike buried in several different GM notes or bio pages.  It'd just be nice in general to be able to link to other parts of roll20, to bring up music, character sheets, macros, abilities, handouts, whatever.  It's faster to simply provide someone a link than to give them instructions on where to find it.  As interconnected as many of the other features are, it seems like an odd omission. External links to websites, for that matter, would be incredibly useful during games.  Allowing a player to link to an image he wants to share, linking to rules or classes, anything that you'd normally expect to be able to share without having to give instructions to copy and paste.  Basically, the equivalant of holding up a book and showing the page to everyone.

Joshua, you can use external links in character sheets and handouts. The infinity symbol turned on its side is the link button. In all of my spellcasters character sheets I have the spells linked to the Paizo PRD copy of that spell.  - Gauss

Yes, in the handouts.  Not in the chat itself though, which is what I'm requesting.  I'll edit the OP in the morning to make it clearer. To give an example, it'd be nice to be able to type this as a character ability: /me casts Magic Missile. {handout:Magic Missile} So that when the player uses that ability, their character casts Magic Missile and a handy-dandy link pops up underneath that can bring up a handout detailing what the spell actually does, without having to copy it over for every spellcaster in the campaign or spam up the macro list or the chat.  That's just one use of course, there's plenty of other uses for in-chat links.

I was not commenting on the rest of your post, only your statement regarding External links to websites being useful. You can also post links in the chat.  - Gauss

Joshua H. said: Yes, in the handouts.  Not in the chat itself though, which is what I'm requesting.  I'll edit the OP in the morning to make it clearer. To give an example, it'd be nice to be able to type this as a character ability: /me casts Magic Missile. {handout:Magic Missile} So that when the player uses that ability, their character casts Magic Missile and a handy-dandy link pops up underneath that can bring up a handout detailing what the spell actually does, without having to copy it over for every spellcaster in the campaign or spam up the macro list or the chat.  That's just one use of course, there's plenty of other uses for in-chat links. Ok now I understand but to my style of play, that is just extra in my game text that is not needed. I'm guess you are in voice chat games while I run Text based games. Thats two different flavors of the same. For your game the link and / or descriptive text would work while in my game that same thing would be more annoying then helpful. Not saying it wouldn't be helpful

Gauss said: I was not commenting on the rest of your post, only your statement regarding External links to websites being useful. You can also post links in the chat.  - Gauss I understand you're talking about external links, but they're only available where there's a WYSIWYG editor, which makes it a royal pain to communicate something to your players during a session. How do you post links in the chat?  As far as I know, the WYSIWYG editor isn't available for regular chat, and there doesn't seem to be any BBcode support for URL's either.  Copying linked text from another part of the program won't make the text a link in the chat, and the chat doesn't automatically turn URL's into links.  Is there a way to change the link text, like this? Metroknight said: Joshua H. said: Yes, in the handouts.  Not in the chat itself though, which is what I'm requesting.  I'll edit the OP in the morning to make it clearer. To give an example, it'd be nice to be able to type this as a character ability: /me casts Magic Missile. {handout:Magic Missile} So that when the player uses that ability, their character casts Magic Missile and a handy-dandy link pops up underneath that can bring up a handout detailing what the spell actually does, without having to copy it over for every spellcaster in the campaign or spam up the macro list or the chat.  That's just one use of course, there's plenty of other uses for in-chat links. Ok now I understand but to my style of play, that is just extra in my game text that is not needed. I'm guess you are in voice chat games while I run Text based games. Thats two different flavors of the same. For your game the link and / or descriptive text would work while in my game that same thing would be more annoying then helpful. Not saying it wouldn't be helpful Actually, my group uses a mix of voice chat and text.  Since the macro itself doesn't contain any rolls unless the spell itself has rolls, it's pretty compact.  It'd be nice if you could use that in-line as well so you can just tack a link on the end or highlight a phrase in regular text. I've edited the OP a bit to make the suggestion a bit clearer.

Yes, you can paste a url into the chat box. Just click on it to follow it. The downside is it takes a lot of space but it works.&nbsp; - Gauss Edit: You could try goo.gl to shorten your link. The link in my image turns into&nbsp;<a href="http://goo.gl/d2c2l" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/d2c2l</a> when put through goo.gl

Yeah, I figured out what's wrong with it.&nbsp; Roll20 finds http:// or https://, then captures all characters until it runs into whitespace or the end of the line, so it won't capture anything people are likely to type out.&nbsp; It actually tried to do that just now in this post.&nbsp; Guess that goes under bugfixes, it's just a matter of using any of the freely available regexes meant to pull URL's out of text. Thanks, that helps a lot.

Glad you figured it out. :) - Gauss