Managing NPCs: Specifically, managing the drop down list of NPCs...

Hey, I'm about to run a new game but I'm a bit worried about a problem I had before in an older campaign. Specifically, it was something that happened when I started putting in a lot of NPCs later on. I'm sure there's a specific name for it, but the drop down menu that allows you to choose which NPC you speak as got really cluttered towards the end of the campaign. This became a bit of nightmare when there were multiple NPCs in a room speaking to the party. Especially if their names started with letters that were on the opposite sides of the alphabet... In fact I ended up getting into the habit of making NPCs who would almost always be seen together have their names start with the same letter. My players realized that and started poking fun, which was funny but also a bit immersion breaking for them I imagine. The only way I could think to fix this would be if I Archived the sheets of NPCs that likely wouldn't show up to the session, clearing up space. The only problem with that is that it would mean the players can't look back at their sheets in-between games to jog their memory of them unless I went back and unarchived them, so I'd need to archive all the superfluous NPCs before game and then do it immediately after. Is there any way for me to have my cake and eat it too? Take superfluous NPCs out of the list when they aren't needed, but still let the players refer back to their sheets mid-game? Or am I gonna just have to suck it up one way or the other for now? Any help is appreciated even if it's just tips on how to manage NPCs better!

You can make a macro like this: /as "?{name}" ?{what would you like to say?} the /as and /emas commands let you speak and emote as whatever name you type in. If you have the NPCs as tokens, you could even do: /as "@{selected|token_name" ?{what would you like to say?}

If you archive unimportant characters or handouts, you can still link to them from other characters and handouts by putting their names in square brackets in the Description & Notes text. So you could create a handout that lists and links to all the characters you don't want in the chat list, and refer to this when you want to open the character, but only the unarchived characters would appear in the chat list.

As  David T. suggested, Archiving Characters and then  Linking to Journal Entries to access those archived Characters is probably your best bet.

Interesting, thanks!