Add ability to put letters onto token marks, in addition to 1-9.

Hi there, I'm running a DnD 4th edition group for the past year with 8 of my buddies. Combat can get to be sort of ridiculously complicated! Especially since my players LOVE imposing negative status effects on my monsters. As it stands, the ability to put a 1 to 9 on the marks is AMAZING. If anyone's taking ongoing damage, I can really quickly and easily note how much. But then it gets into things like this: Dave hits Goblin E with a slow that lasts until the end of Dave's next turn. Alex makes a burst attack that slows all enemies in an area, save ends. So now Goblins B, C and D all have a slow marker. Chris hits the warg with an encounter ability that slows until the end of Chris' next turn, and knocks it prone. So now I have 5 monsters, all of which are slowed with identical "slow" marks. But some slows will last until the end of Dave's turn, some until the end of Chris' next turn, and some have to roll saving throws. After juggling a couple other things, I look back at my battlefield and have no clue which slow is which. If I could mark them with an S for "Save ends" or a "D" for Dave, it would make my life MUCH easier.

Ability to put letters there, in addition to numbers 1-9, would be nice. (Other threads have asked for ability to put a negative number there, and also double-digit numbers). Currently many people use the numbers 1-9 to solve what you are requesting, without letters. For example usually you can just use the number to tell the number of rounds remaining until the effect wears off (and you subtract 1 from the number, each time a round passes). I can see why it wouldn't be a complete solution for you, due to the complexity of notes you want (since you want to note whose-turn-within-a-round, not just which round it occurs), but surely you can form a workaround. Next is my idea for a way to workaround and make the notes using color markers. Each token can carry many markers. So you can use the matching color of each Player, instead of "D" for Dave, you can have Green for Dave, Blue for Sally, Yellow for Bob. So if you have the effect SLOW for 8 rounds ending on Dave's turn, then you will put the markers: SLOW (Snail marker) with an "8" and also put the Green marker, meaning Dave applied the Slow. Now you've got a Green-Snail-8, meaning Slow spell ending in 8 rounds on the green player's turn (and you know the green player means Dave's turn). Match the color of the marker effect, to the color that is shown next to the Player's Name at the bottom of the screen. This is just 1 idea of an approach using the tools that we have now.

I like your ideas! Although, unfortunately, we already have a lot of allotted uses for most of the colors. Almost every one is already slotted to represent a different kind of mark. (My players are really into playing controllers.) But yeah, maybe just applying a number to each player (Dave = 6, etc.) would work until a better solution came along. Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

Another way to help in the tracking of expiring or recurring effects is to add a timer to roll20 effects markers. When you drop the snail on a token for slow, it gives you a variable style pop up for either time or rounds. When the timer expires it pops a dialog box or a chat print. If you had a poison effect that lasted x rounds and every round it caused damage, the timer could include a macro targeting the tokens Hp.