I have some homebrew monster stats from reddit that I want to add into my campaign but it's really tedious adding in every detail every time, is there any way to use scripts or an API to speed this up? I don't code or anything I'm more hoping for suggested APIs. Also, given that most of the stat blocks I use are just images or text I can see why it may not be possible, but I thought I'd ask anyway! Thanks for any help
You could use the ChatSetAttr script, and set up all the relevant stats in an Excel spreadsheet to set up the import commands (similar to using the TableExport script). So that would still need all the stats to get imported into a spreadsheet.
Also, whatever attributes you use will be character sheet specific, so importing stats for D&D 5E will use different attribute names than Call of Cthulu or Pathfinder or any other game.
I have been looking into automating monsters/npcs with an api script a few times. However every time i started, i found it is too complex to build. The DND 5e npc sheet is a versioned sheet that can have more than 200 attributes plus attributes for repeating sections (actions, reactions, spells, etc).
And even when one person would build it, it would be a lot of work to maintain, since the sheet evolves.
Next it is needed to ingest data from a source and that interpretation will always be error prone and require manual afterwork to check the import.
So the way i approach it is a game dedicated to store monsters/npcs. When i find a cool monster, i add it there manually with the trusted copy-paste method. The only script i use is a script that automatically creates the default token when the avatar is uploaded.
I haven't tried to make an import script for 5e, but I did make one for 3.5.
As mentioned, the repeating sections might make it more difficult, but some of the stat entry can atill probably be automated quite easily. (ability scores for example) My 3.5 script would obviously not work for 5e since it uses the 3.5 attributes, unless the attributes happened to be the same which i doubt. However, the methodology could be used to alter the script.
Importing stats from an image sounds impossible. You would have to have a program convert it to text. But if it is text and there is a consistent format to how that text turns out when copy and pasted, it could be done.
Honestly, I never saw much need for this in 5e since the compendium takes out a lot of work. I developed the 3.5 script because 3.5 does not have a compendium.