So just last week I brought a friend of mine into a 9 hour Marathon Session of HomeBrew RPG's. She had never played the games before, but has expressed interest in it but she has also been working with me on some creative projects. She is a project manager type person, so i was intrested in her perspective in streamlining the rules I run to make them more accessible to newer users. Anyways, we spent some time talking over the various issues that came up, and her biggest complaint was the interface. Now she has NOT done tabletop, so roll20 was her first experience and she was not aware of what the tabletop was simulating, or what it was meant to do, but i found the perspective refreshing. Anyways, long story short after reading this and some of the other suggestions with regard to roll20, I was curious if some kind of docking was possible. Basically think of it like this .. 1) On the left hand side, there is box that you can see through with relative ease, that has these slots (maybe an inch wide) that are also as tall as the charactersheet and popup icons when you shrink them. 2) When you drag a charactersheet over one of these boxes, the sheet auto minimizes, clings to the box. 3) When you hover over the sheet, a Jquery style popup shows up, along with an ability name, and to the right of it, a button, indicating all the buttons set up on the character sheet when relevant 4) imagine a PC who is fairly new to the game, having a character sheet that is basically 'locked' in that spot, so even if they close the sheet by accident (a common issue), they can just open it and it shows, it's always in the same place. And since it's a docking mechanicism, you can actually place them anywhere ... just have a setting on the settings pane, like a radio button, that controls where the docking panel exists. 5) Finally, for GM's this would be hugely helpful. Before a campaign you could dock like 20 character sheets on the left hand side, and then just hover over what you need. 6) It could also be possible to dock standard macro's this way as well, giving Gm's some real control over their interface. So on the left side i have buttons that are generic, on the right side i have my charcters, that when i hover over, a huge thing of their specific buttons pops out of them, with very short descriptions (maybe like a tag on the sheet that says 'hey this is my button, if my button is shown, show the name in this field as well'). This would put the onus on the sheet designers to accommodate this feature haha. Not sure how difficult or worth it, it would be to implement something like this. The character sheets are amazing, but i do think an easier way to get to the data (especially roll buttons) would be enormously helpful. Like you have a sheet, hover over it, and 20 macro's fly out of it, making it much easier for a DM to automate and set up his combat. Anyways, just a suggestion. Keep up the great work. Roll20 Rocks my world!
