Automatic Room or Token Description?

Hey everyone, I am looking for an easy way to keep my players on track in the my upcoming Star Wars game by giving them a way to easily get a description of the room they are in. Is there some way to have a room description displayed on a player's text box every time they enter an area? Something simple like "An ornate office with a secretary sitting behind her desk. She looks up from her computer and smiles at you." Another thing I was trying is Description Tokens. Using a 'googly eyes' token, I placed this token somewhere in the room or area and when the players click on it, they can read a brief description of the area they are in, or the thing they are looking at. Problem is, the only text box I see is the GM Notes which they obviously can't see. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Not really. You could probably adapt the speech bubbles or trap/teleport scripts to work that way.

As a mentor you could probably easily find/adapt a script that would print out the gmnotes of a token to chat. In fact i have adapted Stephen's trap script to send the gmnotes to chat which could work for you in this scenario... basically setting it as a hidden token at the entrance to each area would then automatically trigger your description to the chat when a token enters.

I have placed images of descriptive text (as tokens or is drawing) on the map, resized so as to be unobtrusive and given players control of the token so they can use the zoom feature, "Z" to expand and read/view more detail.

Anthony B. said: Hey everyone, I am looking for an easy way to keep my players on track in the my upcoming Star Wars game by giving them a way to easily get a description of the room they are in. Is there some way to have a room description displayed on a player's text box every time they enter an area? Something simple like "An ornate office with a secretary sitting behind her desk. She looks up from her computer and smiles at you." Another thing I was trying is Description Tokens. Using a 'googly eyes' token, I placed this token somewhere in the room or area and when the players click on it, they can read a brief description of the area they are in, or the thing they are looking at. Problem is, the only text box I see is the GM Notes which they obviously can't see. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I do this by putting notes on the GM layer and bringing them to the map layer while I want players to read them. If you wanted to be able to automate this without your participation, you could make an object on the token layer, that when affected displays it's linked text for a few seconds before returning to the gm layer.

Sweet; I really need to learn more API :/

NON-API Solution/Workaround Create a token to mark the room and place it on the GM layer. No need to associate it with a journal entry/character. Change the name of the token to the room description and save it. Go to your Gear/Settings section, create a new macro. Name it whatever you want. Set it to be a token macro. Your macro will be: /w gm @{selected|token_name} Save the macro. You can also set the macro to format the text for you, or to place it into a roll template. I've included screenshots with the macros used. Normal Macro /w gm ***@{selected|token_name}*** Basic Formatting /w gm @{selected|token_name} 5e Template -- I had problems seeing it as an emote descriptor, so I just used the token_name in the base description and left everything else empty. /w gm &{template:5eDefault} {{title=@{selected|token_name}}} I'll be using this last one since I'm getting old as are my eyes. If you want it for your players to view, just change the whole macro from a gm whisper to /em or /desc and it should work. Enjoy! Edit: I'm not used to posting and forgot that you can only see thumbnails of the original: Normal Basic Formatting (bold+italic) 5e Default as Title

^^^ that is brilliant, So using this now. I already use transparent tokens with a small aura (visible only to me of course, and color coded for easy reference - blue-room description, red=trap, green = dynamic change; ie trap that the party disarmed and now have control over) with all the info in GMNotes, and just click open to read my notes for that room/location, but that is an absolutely brilliant and far easier solution, with exactly the same setup time only quicker implementation. edit: oh yea, transparent token on the token layer with only the gm able to see its aura and click on it. works better than a gmlayer token, if you don't mind remembering to avoid it when you select a bunch of tokens at once with your mouse. edit2: if you DO have the API, then playign around with this and the bump script might work quite well.

I like the elegant tutorial by Jon S. That is one way. But I wanted to answer a slight addition to the original post. Anthony B. said: Another thing I was trying is Description Tokens. Using a 'googly eyes' token, I placed this token somewhere in the room or area and when the players click on it, they can read a brief description of the area they are in, or the thing they are looking at. Problem is, the only text box I see is the GM Notes which they obviously can't see. Any help would be greatly appreciated. It's true the TOKEN only has a "GM Notes" box, and a Name. The Name can be shown to the players (click SEE NAME under the Token's Advanced tab, and Show Nameplate on the Basic tab). Additionally, if you link the Token to a "Character" in the Journal, and make the Character viewable by All Players, then the Players can Shift-Doubleclick on the token and see the BIO & INFO tab of that "Character". If you make each room a "Character" that All Players can see, then they can click the googly-eyes token to see the BIO & INFO tab where you can put 1 picture and unlimited text with formatting. That should do what you asked, except it won't print the text into the chat, but they Players can read this text at-will by clicking that token.

Gold said: I like the elegant tutorial by Jon S. That is one way... Michael H. said: ^^^ that is brilliant,.. Thanks everyone! Since I can't program (I just don't have the knack) I think I was so excited that I was finally able to contribute something useful that I forgot about all the other applications for the original question.