Card decks

Hi all, I have recently been creating a deck for status effects, as it seems that sometimes there are so many I can't keep track, a problem I have found is that there just aren't enough markers on roll20 for everything all the time, and wanted to create a better looking graphical way of tracking status effects. So I create my deck and I am all excited when I ask a couple of my players to hop on so we can test it out, when I start running into problems. My players cannot drag cards back to the deck to place them back.. Maybe this isn't an option, but it was one I was looking for, is this not implemented? Secondly, there is no way for me to look at the deck to pull out a single card, I have to keep drawing until the card I want is finally found. So I come up with a solution, I draw all the cards into my hand as the DM, and then just trade cards to players as they gain statuses, and steal them back when the status ends. It is a work around, but it requires me to draw tons of cards into my hand, and when I do, they are all randomized, not in order by alphabet. So I have 3 questions which I haven't found the answer to. 1. Can players place cards directly back into the deck? 2. Can I look for a card in the deck and draw it out instead of having to flip through cards until I find the one I want? 3. Is there a way I can set the cards in my hand to show alphabetically and sort themselves? Thank you to anyone who answers!

1. I cannot find a way to do so 2. I dont think so 3. Again, I dont think so, but you can make multiple decks and have each deck be the same card. Example: Deck 1 is haste, deck 2 is aid, etc. Activate the deck required at the time. Other ideas: You could drop all of the cards of a certain type into areas for players to get them from. Like token grab bags (areas) the players have access to but card grab bags. Example: has a couple piles of cards, one pile is haste, another is aid, still another is bless. Etc. - Gauss

I just decided to create a deck for each effect, which I could just toggle on and off as needed, and then just have players discard cards to the table and I return the cards to their respective deck. Thanks yet again Gauss.

NP - Gauss

So Bryant and Gauss - do you make a deck for each effect and then make it infinite? Also does it show what it is to everyone when the player holds it? What happens to cards from different decks, do they stack together or how do you make different hands in front of the player? Ehudsdagger

Yes, you can make a deck for each different effects. Yes, you can make the deck infinite. But you can only deal a number of cards as the deck has. Example: a 2card infinite deck can only deal 2 cards at a time. So, make each deck with as many cards as you want dealt at once. There are options to show the number of cards in the hand and what the cards are. I suggest not checkmarking these options if you want secret deployment of cards. Example of secret cards: I make 3 decks. Deck A is Rock. Deck B is Paper. Deck C is Scissors. All 3 decks have the same back. I take many cards from each deck. You see I have 3 sets of cards (Deck A, B and C). However, due to the options NOT being checkmarked you cannot see how many I hold from each deck. I lay a card face down on the table (hold down shift when moving it from hand to table). Nobody knows which card I laid down. When it comes time to reveal the card, I flip it. This is how you can do secret cards. Non-secret cards are easier to set up, just checkmark the boxes. :) - Gauss

I play Pathfinder and 3.5 I have 30 conditions written on cards in a new deck, which are color coded in groups so that I can better tell what they are (shaken,panicked,frighten are all yellow, for example). Before a game, I deal out all thirty to myself and just pick them out when my players get affected by trading that card to them. They can click on it to remind them what that condition does and trade it back to me when they're no longer under that condition. You can also steal it back (with their permission, though I don't think they'll have an issue with this :P). This is how I've managed to do it, but certainly more streamlined ways would be awesome. I was trying to figure out how to turn a deck of cards into item cards - stuff like healing potions, alchemist fire... things that get used up often. This proved to be a bit of a pain with the way things currently work in the deck system, so I just stuck with using conditions. So yeah, it's not optimized for such things by any means, but this is how i'm jury rigging it.

Ok this is how I have done it. I have created card deck for each status effect. If the status would cause whoever has it to grant combat advantage, it has a red title. Others have different colors based on the status. I have 5 cards in each deck (One for each player,) and I used the same image for the front and back of the card. now in my campaign it works like this. Lets say I have the Prone, Bloodied, and Dead Decks out. when the player becomes bloodied, they draw a card from the deck, or I just deal them a card from the deck. this card goes into a hand for that specific deck. I believe they did this in case we had multiple decks ( like a blue backing and red backing) therefore we can see how many cards a player is holding from each deck. This works by making 2 hands, in my case one for each status the player has drawn. Essentially, the roll20 system creates a different hand for each deck you draw from, but for use using cards to track this is actually a good thing. When a player has both the Bloodied and Prone card, drawn from 2 seperate decks, it places each card in it's own hand so to speak. But because we used the same image for both the front and back of the card, the card is displayed to all. I will give a few examples of how this works by posting a couple of screens of the system in action. (Actually, I believe one screen was sufficient, It's pretty simple when you get the hang of it. You can even create a deck for each player for things like ability cards and such if you wish, but the deck window will get cluttered. I find it best to just use this for statuses for the PCs, hey it gives us just that little bit less to track. Think of the decks as sticky notes for the PCs. They can rip a card off and attach it to their character)

The only thing I wish is that I could get rid of the giant 1 that covers up my cards on the bottom left, it's covering up my work!