Limit on number of macros?

I'm embarking on a project that will end up calling for thousands of macros (global kind, not attached to a sheet). The macros themselves are very short, but there will be a bunch. How will roll20 deal with this?  Is there a practical upper limit?

That's a great question.  It handles thousands of attributes pretty well, and the same for abilities.  Those aren't always shown in the interface like macros are though.  Certainly, getting to decks and rollable tables will be challenging. You could build them as abilities on characters instead.  That would keep them out of the side panel, and would let you organize them.  If you need a macro entry point to them for the global token action aspect, you could have a few macros that kick off the right character ability.  That has the added benefit of being able to move them about with transmogrifier.  You could also organize them into folders or even archive them.

Great suggestion, I'll see what that can do for me. Thanks Aaron.

I had never messed with abilities before, seems to work well. Looks like I access them with %{character|ability}, and can embed them in powercard output, etc. Nice!

Yeah.  Also, where macros will eat HTML Entities, Abilities will preserve them.   Just for point of clarity, be sure you are saying Abilities when you mean Abilities, and Attributes when you mean Attributes.  They're quite different, just don't want people to get confused. =D

Fixed it.  Hit a snag though. I would like to use a powercard template, and pass an ability as a command button to the template.  Something like: !power --tempate|mytemplate|[button]|(~character|ability) this was working from global macros, with slightly different syntax for passing a macro instead of an ability. With an ability, I get: some text [button](~-MBFK0pyfRzS_2ROs4yC and no button. Does this not work from abilities?

Hmm... That's probably a Power Cards question....  It's likely the | is being eaten by powecards and needs to be encoded differently.

well, since it kinda looks like the ability call translated to some sort of internal hash code, and I changed the | to an entity reference (since | is used by powercard), I thought I was close. I'll see if I can't find a hack workaround.

I'm not sure if there is a limit on character abilities.  I do have a "character" with a macro for every wizard spell of a certain game system.  Counting the 3 chat menus that reference the entire list, there are 158 character abilities on that sheet.  If there is a limit, it is higher than that!

kgsodie said: well, since it kinda looks like the ability call translated to some sort of internal hash code, and I changed the | to an entity reference (since | is used by powercard), I thought I was close. I'll see if I can't find a hack workaround. There's a Powercards API thread - someone in there is bound to know how to do this.

A 4 year game I ran I ended up with ~1000 macros in the collections tab with no issue... character sheet bloat was my biggest problem, that and the general slow down large, old games seem to get.

Yeah, I posted on the latest powercard thread. Kurt said it won't do that, but he'd look to see if it was possible. In the interim, I found a work around, but it's not pretty. Instead of putting all the logic in the powercards, whose conditionals are a bit limited when it comes to complex, compound statements, I split the powercard into multiple versions, one version to support each number of buttons I require. I decided on a limit of 2 choices/buttons per card, for each a positive and a negative outcome, and then the card calculates the outcome and, knowing how many buttons it needs, makes another powercard call to display the buttons, passing it the text for the button and the name of the ability to call (in my case the character sheet is static so the called card hard-codes that part), as well some flavor text. That card then displays the flavor text on the card and constructs the button using the arguments, something like --name|~0! !a *1|~1! !a *2|[~2!](~character name|~3!) where ~0! is the title, ~1! is the flavor text, ~2! is the text for the button, and ~3! is the name of the ability to invoke. It works, but it ain't pretty.