GM Notes for Handouts

I would like to suggest adding GM Notes to handouts. The idea would be to have another text field section added to the handouts that only the GM can read. This would be used to keep secrets about the item on the Handout and make it easy to reference when it comes up in game again. Kind of like the GM notes on in the Character sheets below the “Bio and Info” field. This was first brought to my attention when I was hosting my Call of Cthulhu campaign. I was setting up various clues and items handouts that the player may come across. One of the items was an old creepy book. Now I was able to describe various parts of the book, like the date it was written, the author, the texture of the book, etc. but I wanted to keep the information in the book a secret until the player read it, has well has the hidden cost required to read the book. This is necessary because reading a book is always a risk. It could cause a player to learn spell and gain useful information, but usually at the cost of sanity and forbidden knowledge. Now this wasn’t a problem initially has I did keep this information on a separate campaign word document. However one of the characters attempted to read this book during his next story. I forgot the specific information about the book, and had to stop the flow of my game to navigate through my files to find the information about it. It would have been nice to just reference the sanity lost and to be able to copy and paste the information from a GM Note section. I have a few other similar stories but they are all pretty much the same: It would be nice if I could of referenced secret notes on a handout. I was discussing this with one of my players who GM other games and he agreed and said I should post this here. This isn’t a major problem and this website/roll20 app is by far the best system I have every used for online gaming. Even if this issue is ignored, I will still go about praising this website. It just a small annoyance and thought I would see if anyone else felt the same way. Thanks for reading. - Jay Off topic: I searched the forum for other post about this topic but couldn’t find any, sorry if it is a repost.

+1  I have wanted to have bits of the handout in the player section and bits in the GM section, then cut & paste as they learn more or decipher/translate the handout. 

Totally, when I was running my campaign I found I had to have one handout for MY notes and one handout for THEIR notes on the same thing (like Experience from pre-planned encounters and challenges and their information of what they've actually earned.) And then there were also handouts for lists of extremely minor NPCs that my PCs were making as contacts and I could use a GM Section for writing up more detailed information that they could slowly learn...

Get Realm Works by the guys who make Herolab.  THey just finished a kickstarter.  Its coming out in July.  It should be awesome for all this.  The only problem is we don't have enough screens and computers to run all these different programs! :)  I also use Herolab to manage all my bad guys and their buffs.

+1

+1