I would love Roll20 if only...

I would only ever use Roll20 as my only tabletop application if there were two things that were changed. One would be the ability to move the chat now from the side of the screen to the bottom of the screen. It makes it easier for text based games to play. It is use easier to read that way. The second would be the ability to turn off the GM micromanaging ability. I can trust my players enough to allow them access to all of the miniatures and not have to go in and assign each one to each player individually. It takes a out of time to change a lot of miniatures that I have for each player and it becomes annoying to me and frustrating for my players. If someone know about something being done about this then I would like to know. If not the I am merely venting my frustration here. Thank you.

Oh I'd love both of those options.

If you trust your players fully, you could always promote them all to GM status. Then not only would you not need to assign them their tokens, but they could pull in their own tokens as well.

I have thought about that option but if I did that then I could keep no secret tokens from them. Plus would dynamic lighting work with everyone being a GM? Do other GMs like the micromanaging? Everytime making a new map having to go into the tokens and saying who can touch what? I mean at a real tabletop game the players can touch everything, right? Why can't it be the same? I would just like the default mode to be all players and if you wanted you can make a few of them gm only.

I have made the switch to using Roll20 for my (primarily) live sessions, so having the text on the bottom doesn't actually make any difference for me - though with most screens tending towards wide in landscape, wouldn't you lose a lot of size from the map by switching the text location? As far as the Token issue, I can see the tediousness of having to individually make change after change; I usually give my players full control of all aspects of their character tokens, and then just use a single map page to store all tokens on, so I'm not hunting for them time after time. If you looking to up that to control of NPC and monster/enemy tokens, yeah - that would become grindingly irritating to make multiple revisions to each token (players that can add status effects, or move tokens due to powers or abilities), so the GM status might work, in lieu of doing the same as I've mentioned above for NPCs. I would be curious to see how it works though; You should be able to get all players to simply "relaunch as player" under the game VTT settings once logged in; their dynamic lighting should work properly, as should the other features, but I don't know that it would save you a great deal of work in the long run, as far as setting permissions. A quick and easy would be to simply have an "ALL" tag for permissions, so that you could just set it when the tokens were generated, though it would still require you to set that field for each token :/ I haven't found this to be a problem in my campaigns (personally), but I do hear where you're coming from.

Master_GM, are you using the "default token" option on character sheets? Alternately, as Shortland mentioned, you can create a token page and just copy/paste the tokens from that as a group. Once you set up the player's tokens you shouldn't have to set them up for every map. Just copy/paste or grab the character sheet(s) and drop them on the board. - Gauss

Master_GM said: I have thought about that option but if I did that then I could keep no secret tokens from them. Plus would dynamic lighting work with everyone being a GM? If you're trusting your players, why can't that trust extend to not metagaming about hidden tokens? Or as others have said, a separate page full of tokens, and trust them not to go hunting around on other pages (of course, without context, a pile of tokens doesn't mean much to them). Or similarly, characters with default tokens set, with which you can drag characters from the journal to the map to generate a token. Dynamic Lightning works for GMs, although obviously they can see through the blackness if it isn't set to 100% opacity. You can set the page to 100% GM opacity (and the DL will look the same for GM as it would for a player), although obviously this will make things difficult for you to work ahead of the other players, as you'd be unable to see through it, either.

If they are all GMs wont they be able to see ALL GM hidden features? Like dice? Fog of War? GM layer? Etc? Seems like it could be a settings feature maybe...

I think an option to change the default settings of new tokens would be great. Even if they just started with a 1/0 switch on the check boxes that would be a massive improvement to play/creation speed.

I'd like to insert my own suggestion within this as it pertains to the player token problem. If all tokens read as "player" were automatically created on the next map upon moving the banner, this would be a lot more streamlined and user-friendly rather than copying over. Having them spawn is as easy as giving the DM a new feature to place on the GM layer known as "Starting Location" under drawing tools - this will inform where to place the tokens on the next map. -Edit- Then the mentors and stuff can have fancy features like group formations, auto-music switching, etc. With location based tools, you can extend this to auto play sound effects for mentors as well.