Tips on campaign organization in Roll20

Hey, everyone! What's up? Hope you're all safe. I'm having some trouble with my campaign notes in Roll20. I actually use OneNote and a discord server to keep track of some notes and other handouts, but me and my players enjoy using the roll20 journal to see info about the NPCs, the places they went, etc. The problem is, I'm finishing a run of The Lost Mines of Phandelver and they'll be traveling soon to one of the big cities on the coast, and we can expect a lot more NPCs and places to keep track. So, what you people suggest on organizing the notes? By the way, I'm using various tabs like this: .Party    - The player's sheets .Places    - The Sword Coast    - Phandalin           > a list with all the places and stores in Phandalin<    - Thundertree .NPCs    -Phandalin          > a list with all the NPCs they met in Phandalin<    -Thundertree          > a list with all the NPCs they met in Thundertree< .Info .Quests .Creatures .Useful Tokens .GM Notes

I'd start a wiki or something.  The less stuff (handouts/character sheets/tokens) you have in a Roll20 campaign the better it seems to perform. -Adam

Instead of having a folder with all your npcs of certain areas, have a single handout with categorized links to the npc handouts (or maybe a handout for each area if you feel the need for more than one).  Then you can archive the actual npc handouts to minimize journal clutter. As long as the players have the permission to view the handout, they can open archived handouts from the index link just fine.

These are very good ideas, thanks! I never thought about the performance impact of the campaign journal in general, just about the maps. I usually link the places to the NPCs in their handouts with some pretty basic info known to the players, but it really seems to be getting out of hand as we move on to other places.

I run a campaign set in a single village, with about 80 named NPCs. Most of them run off of the Commoner character sheet, but with different name plates and token images. Any specific notes go into the token notes section or into an unused bar (I don't need to know their movement or AC, really). Since you are a Pro user, you can use the Supernotes API to all up info on any selected token. I also use the Reporter script to manage them all. I need to make a video on that.

In my experience, handouts don't impact performance much.  What I think will impact performance is if you have a lot of large (data size) images for npc portraits.  My Palladium Fantasy games have well over 1k handouts (most of them archived and only accessible through links) so that all spells, psionic abilities, races, equipment, etc. are all available in game.  So far it seems like that game loads a little faster than a game with a lot less stuff in it running the Pathfinder by Roll20 sheet. Like anything else though, you will have to experiment and see what works for you.

AFAIK, character sheets load into RAM, since they are referenced constantly. I don't think this is true of handouts, but even if it were, there are several categories of magnitude fewer data points on a handout. I keep my entire campaign bible (about 50k words) and much more, all html styled and cross-linked with no appreciably overhead.

keithcurtis said: I run a campaign set in a single village, with about 80 named NPCs. Most of them run off of the Commoner character sheet, but with different name plates and token images. Any specific notes go into the token notes section or into an unused bar (I don't need to know their movement or AC, really). Since you are a Pro user, you can use the Supernotes API to all up info on any selected token. I also use the Reporter script to manage them all. I need to make a video on that. I'll be sure to check out the Supernotes API and I'll be looking forward to watching the video haha! Thank you! I like to keep the notes in roll20 because my players like them that way, so these scrips must help me a lot! We play once every two weeks and during the downtime, when it's possible, they like to go shopping, talk to some NPCs, read some books, etc. So I have to keep track very often about the shops' prices, the info they gathered, things like that, so they can read and remember during the downtime.

Kraynic said: In my experience, handouts don't impact performance much.  What I think will impact performance is if you have a lot of large (data size) images for npc portraits.  My Palladium Fantasy games have well over 1k handouts (most of them archived and only accessible through links) so that all spells, psionic abilities, races, equipment, etc. are all available in game.  So far it seems like that game loads a little faster than a game with a lot less stuff in it running the Pathfinder by Roll20 sheet. Like anything else though, you will have to experiment and see what works for you. I usually use maps, images, and ambiance sounds close to the size limit, but I think I can work to reduce the size. I'm not even close to 1k handouts, but sometimes my players have issues while loading the maps, but I bet maybe it's mostly a network issue than a server one. The funny thing though is the way we managed to solve it quickly. All we need to do is just zooming out the map to 10% and almost instantly everything loads, then we go back to the original zoom and everything is ok. We discovered it some sessions ago and it was the best thing for everyone hahaha