Lucian said: Hi Daniel, Final reply as I really don't have too much more time to spend on this, but I will say a few things: The script can build token actions for you. Read the Roll20 documentation about what a Token Action is for more details. It can build e.g. a token action for each "Action" that an NPC can take. These display at the top left of your screen whenever a token that represents a particular character is selected, and allow you to launch those actions without opening the character sheet. A monster with a bite attack and a claw attack and a multiattack will get 3 buttons, for example, one for bite, one for claw, one for multiattack. Clicking the multiattack button will display the text "The Dragon makes 3 attacks, two with claws and one bite", for example, but won't actually make those attacks. But making the multiattack is as simple as clicking the claw button twice and the bite button once - none of which requires the character sheet to be open. The script can help you set up your tokens properly. It will copy the appropriate HP values across, or roll them if you want random HP for each monster, allowing you to have separate HP totals for each monster. You can also (e.g.) bind passive perception to one of the token bubbles so that this information is readily available to you on the tabletop without opening the character sheet The sheet has a bunch of options for controlling visibility of rolls, but it doesn't provide per-skill granularity. What I do is to have a macro that allows me to toggle rolls to hidden, and then I make the ability check via the sheet's ability checks chat macro (bound to a token action). But if you're doing lots of hidden perception checks for your players this may be too much extra faffing for you, so you may have to use a custom macro. Be aware that the heavier you make your customisation the more likely you are to end up with something that doesn't work quite right, or short-circuits other features that the sheet provides. I roll almost everything out in the open so this has never been an issue for me. It would be great if there was a companion script video, but there isn't right now. There may be something a little way down the line, people are talking about making some stuff. For the moment, by the far the best way of understanding it is to try it. You can buy a Pro-level subscription to Roll20 for a month for $5 (no ongoing commitment). The script itself is free (you need Pro to use API scripts). Spend some time playing around with it, following the documentation that Keith linked to. I share your dislike of ongoing subscriptions but in this case once I tried it I never went back (there are many other useful scripts as well as the Shaped Companion Script) You've said you're a new DM and it seems that you are also new to Roll20. You need to be realistic about what you are undertaking here. You're starting out running one of the most complicated games in the world, and you're trying to be a perfectionist about automating it using a sheet that is very powerful but has a steep learning curve, on a platform that you've only just come to, without enough time to really get to grips with it. You're also quite sure of yourself - to the point that you're telling people who are experienced DMs who run games on Roll20 regularly and who built some of the tools that you are using, that you have a better way of doing things than what they're advising. You want your first game to be perfect, and you've spent ages reading up and working out exactly how you're going to run it; you've probably compiled a bunch of houserules from lots of places (maybe including some of your own tweaks). Now you want to get the game going before your game group loses momentum, but there's just so much to sort out before your first session. Is that about right? Here's the thing: within the first 10 minutes of your first session it's all going to fall apart anyway, because it always does. For everyone. And that's ok. I'd seriously advise you to think about running your first session as "tools-light" as possible. Use roll20 to show your players maps and roll dice and run chat (if you're not using an external VOIP tool). Make the character sheets in PDF and then print the damned things. Roll hidden rolls with actual dice next to your keyboard. Roll20 + Shaped (especially + the Companion) is an amazingly powerful tool for running slick games, but it has a learning curve, and for a new DM, I'd say it's more work and harder than running a F2F game. It took me months to get to grips with it and (1) I was an experienced DM (2) I'm a programmer and I understood a lot of the technical implications of how things fitted together. And guess what? My first game still had loads of technical problems. You've got enough on your plate just running DnD without building a complex framework of tools and macros to automate it. Start with something as simple as possible and then bring the tools in as you find your play style and as you see first hand how things go down in actual play. You'll save yourself a huge amount of heartache and wasted effort. Hell, I wrote the Shaped Companion Script and am heavily involved in all things Shaped, and I'd have no problem saying that if you're a new DM just starting out on Roll20, you might want to consider running your first game using a bought one-shot module and the OGL sheet! Once you and your players have played a session or two and got a feel for how things work, you might come back and look at what's possible with Shaped etc - which is a bit more powerful and let's you streamline things a bit more. I'll leave you with a software development story. A couple of old grognards at a XYZ Corp were objecting fiercely to the introduction of some new user-friendly "point-and-click" software. They said that the old text-based system was way more powerful, and let you do things much more quickly with fewer keypresses and without all this faffy mouse-and-windows crap. So the developers of the new software issued a challenge. They'd train some staff on the new system for a day, and then the newly trained staff would do a time challenge against the grognards. They'd have a sequence of tasks to do based on real-world use-cases that the software systems were supposed to handle. The grognards chuckled to themselves as they accepted with glee. They'd seen how slow the new system was, they'd wipe the floor with the other team. Challenge day rolls around, and, sure enough, after 15 minutes, things are looking pretty bad for the GUI team. They're plodding through their tasks well enough, but everything involves a bunch of extra clicks to get to, whereas the old grognards are chewing through things based on 5 years of muscle memory of key sequences. The old software was designed to be fast once you knew how to use it. But that's where the problem lay. You see, 3 tasks from the end of the challenge, the grognards hit something that they didn't know how to do. They had to dig out the 300 page manual, and start leafing through it. But it was all written in highly technical language and organised by key command, not by use case. As they flipped back and forth, looking for the correct incantation to deal with this specific situation, the plodding GUI team slowly caught them up. You can see where this ends, right? By your own admission, you're not a grognard. You will hit that "task that you don't know how to do" really early on in your first game. If you're using a simple, albeit slow system, then it won't be hard to work round. You'll /roll 1d20 and add what you believe are the appropriate modifiers to it manually and move on. If you've built a tower of custom macros on top of an already complex sheet, you'll spend 20 minutes saying "bear with me" while you try and figure out WTF went wrong. The fact that the rest of the combat went slightly faster will be irrelevant as your players check out and start browsing Reddit. Well written reply. Your pretty spot on here I think, with the exception of the house rules. We are co-GMing and critiquing each other between sessions. Our rotating GM game is actually focused on all 3 of use learning and improving our GM capabilities in part to become better more understanding players as well. We actually had our first session and it was the character creation process that caused problems. This post is actually a direct result of the technical issue, you said would happen as the NPCs I setup worked, the story worked, but players were turning to MorePurpleMoreBetter for characters. I had two issues with my "all saves" macro and "initiative macro" both I was able to fix while they were trying to resolve character discrepancies between MPMB and the Shaped 5e. Some of the problem was one player using MPMB wrong and some was player patience to resolve character sheets as I was able to fix all my problems but it took time. They were their to play this time and didn't want to deal with it but also didn't bother to check things our prior... I am the type to check my character over 3 times before showing up to a pen and paper game in person. As a GM roll20, worked and the players were pleased with the session and my automation... I was personally disappointed with my holdups of "referring to the manual" not about roll20 but because I had spent a lot of time preparing roll20 but had my game notes all over the place. So I am turning to a OneNote organization method to consolidate notes to one location and reduce document/map/notes hunting. … Basically your right. Maybe not 100% on the nose but at least 90%. So thank you for answering my comments so well. I will try and scale back a bit and perhaps focus more on my notes outside of roll20 before I look at attempting then companion script. I do want some of those features and am excited to head that way.. but priorities. I do wish the character creation was a bit smoother but I noted "Character sheet enhancements", "New Characters", and "Token default" bar, aruas, and adding action macros will go along way to working those out. It doesn't really show anything about the drag and drop options and/or inventory issues but you addressed that and things like the perception macro I made could be handled by " Roll 2 : Roll two dice, display both results" With all that in mind I may use this thread as a reminder of direction and pacing. I do still have one question if anyone has a moment to answer. If I get a pro-subscription and the companion script, then promote a player to co-GM to run their session in our rotating group, do they get to use all the functions of my pro-subscription and companion script?