Character & Monster in Right Toolbar

I would like a minimize and maximize for the Character sheet with a additional Monster tab in the right toolbar. You could have your players and npcs in the character side and underneath you would have the monster tab. The reason this would be better is the you wouldn't have to rummage through your archive when looking for you monster list. It gets a little cluttered with all the players, npcs, and monsters on one list.

Roll20 is system agnostic so this is probably not gonna happen. This is what tags are for.

Tag players with "player" and monsters with "monster". Type monster in search bar and boom... you only see your monsters. Add more tags and you can continue to search and whittle down the list. It works great. Try it.

Yes but I need my players to be left on the character sheet. I have 6 or 8 characters plus npcs. This is taking up space. I don't need to do a search everytime i want a new npc. I want to have in the characters and npcs left in the character section. The Tag function is basically a hassle if you ask me. I really don't under why Roll20 dislikes or wants players to use the search function when a simple folder option would work much better.

So search for the monster and then open its character sheet... you can then double click on the title of the now open character sheet to minimize it on the map. You can then close your search and have quick access to the monster sheet and still have the pc and npc sheets showing in the list. It's not the devs fault if you're not able to figure out how to use the tags the way they can be used to do what you want.

I understand the way you're are saying to do it. I get it. But you keep hammering the search function. Bottom line searching is a hassle sometimes and you just want the list of needed characters and monsters ready to go. Why is it that if you don't do it your way it's considered the wrong way. I don't want to search every time I need a new monster. I want to have him on this list. What's so bad about that? You guys seem to think that searching is the only way to get things done. And if you don't do it your way that we're inept for some reason. I don't want to seem argumentative. But this search drumbeat is not the best option. Look I'm basically having this same issue as the guy below. David S. said: I guess my biggest issue with Tags is you are forced to memorize your tag list in order to look for something. If I forget that a month, 6 months, a year ago I created a tag for ETU-Savage-Worlds-NPCs I could spend all day looking through the myriad tokens I have for other games trying to find my tokens for that game. Tags aren't bad, but they are no substitute for folders. When searching the journal, you can click the tag button on the right side of the search box to bring up a list of your tags. Unfortunately that's not available when searching your library images, though.

Then tag the monsters you want ahead of time with encounter# so that you can pull up just the monsters for that encounter.You can open player character sheets by alt/shift double clicking on their tokens. No need to have them in the list any way. As for memorizing tags... no you don't need to in the journal. Click the little button to the right of the search bar and it will bring up a list of all your tags. It would be nice to have something like that for the marketplace/library too.

My biggest complaint with the tags system is the OR relationship of tags. If I put in "undead" and "Mage", I only want to see undead mages. I don't want to see all of the things that are undead and all of the things that are mages and I certainly don't want to see things with the word daMAGE in them. Additionally, I fully grok the concept of tags and understand it's facility as a categorizing system. It just isn't the categorizing system that I find has the greatest facility for me. At the end of the day, it's just a means of organizing data, of which there are many, and what would be wrong with supporting others? People who love tags would be just as unhappy if they only had folders for organization. Bottom line: stop trying to "fix" people that want to so something a different way than you. (And if you do want to try, do it by writing some awesome tutorials on the wiki showing the unwashed masses how to do great things using tags, then present them with "this might help you get by for now" and leave unsaid that it might be forever instead. )

That suggestion has been made before. A way to use AND, OR, NOT with tags. It would solve a number of "issues". However... The problem with folders is the increased load on the servers. Instead of having just one copy of Orc Warrior, you'll make ten copies of Orc Warrior and put that Orc Warrior in every folder it needs to be in. Which just increases the amount of server hardware required. It also makes YOUR life more difficult since if you found a mistake, instead of just one orc warrior to update, you have to go through and update all ten orc warriors. Tags are simply better. Learn to use them properly and learn to make it a habit to tag things as you make them and things will go much more smoothly for you as a GM.

There would be no increased load on the servers from having an orc warrior in more than one folder, any more than it uses more of your storage to have the same graphic on more than one map. It's a matter of data organization, not data duplication. Look at any of 10,000 database indexing white papers for ways to handle it. And "Tags are simply better." is just an opinion. I wouldn't tell you "automation is simply better" would I? And if I did, would you immediately go out and add a bunch of automation to your Power Cards script?

This seems to be a culture problem. Some people find tags clearly better, others work better with folders. Personally, I can adapt and use tags, but folders work much better for my personal workflow. Example: We use video and voice for our games. I have no problem keeping up a running commentary/description/conversation with the players while dragging and dropping into the virtual tabletop, but having to use the keyboard to type in search terms breaks my GMing process pretty badly. Uses the same area of the brain so to speak. I have to stop and think what I need to be typing, instead of just glancing at my organized and labeled folder trees. Frankly, I'd rather not touch the keyboard at all when running a game -- and yes, I can hear the collective gasp of all the command line gurus out there ;) From what I can gather, the Devs themselves fall strongly on the "Command Line Guru" side of things, which is fine, but it would be nice to support both styles of organization (and keep people like me supporting this fine product).

Mandella +1 (You might be able to get by without the keyboard in some cases by clicking the little tag icon on the side of the search bar for characters and handouts, then selecting the right tag. That is not available for the art library though. )

Aaron said: There would be no increased load on the servers from having an orc warrior in more than one folder, any more than it uses more of your storage to have the same graphic on more than one map. It's a matter of data organization, not data duplication. Look at any of 10,000 database indexing white papers for ways to handle it. In fact, behind the scenes, such an organization system could be achieved with tags. =P Of course, in order to get nested folder behavior to work properly with tags, you'd need AND searches. An object in "folder" npc/monster/undead/Mage/ could simply be a tag search for objects with exactly the tags npc, monster, undead, and Mage (no more, no less). Then you also display any tags which are on objects containing those as well. (Eg, if there's an npc-monster-undead-Mage-dragon, the npc/monster/undead/Mage folder doesn't display it, but does display the dragon "folder". As a bonus, you don't need to follow the same "folder" path every time to reach your destination; dragon/npc/Mage/monster/undead/ works just as well.) All of that is simply a change to the display and searching of tags, not a change to the storage of them. Unless you're running mklink all over the place on files on your PC, tags can accomplish more than folders can. However, a lot of people have folders ingrained into them by existing operating systems, and likely by real-world filing cabinets, too.

@Brian -- Indeed, there is a very large overlap to be sure. Folders can really be considered as one possible traversal of a graph of tags, where the children of the root node of the traversal tree is specified and the importance of each of the unspecified tags is fixed as a function of the child node that is accessing it. =D The biggest deviation from tags to folders is that notion that you have a fixed and minimal initial set. Folders are about defining groups and using the groups to successively refine a set of nodes below them. Tags are all about describing the properties of a node. Searching tags is finding nodes that have the same properties or all have a set of properties. The are conceptually very similar, but philosophically different.

AND NOT and OR would fix a lot of problems until folders get implemented. Especially if it gets brought to the Art Library

another limitation of the 'tags' system. My players tell me the search functionality isn't available on their side. I use that dropdown alot, because it is folder like. But doesn't help my players in campaigns with 100+ Hand outs. I'm constantly archiving and archiving stuff to keep the clutter down. I only use 4 or 5 new hand outs a game. But a 25-30 Session campaign can accumulate hundreds with enough time. D@D is kind of like art. You want to know what colors you have available to you at a glance. A painter can't make a masterpiece when he has to type the color he wants into a search bar. I don't build dungeons 'rationally'. I build them with bad ass music, imagination and a heavy dose of alcohol and nicotine. When i'm in the zone, i can't put it down fast enough. I'd like to be able to see 10,000 items at once, because your next design decision is often felt instead of thought. As it stands right now, you can only see about 4 in the bar on the right, and you need to remember the tag you used to categorize it, and you may forget about art you bought a year ago. That breaks my flow pretty badly. So I don't use it anymore. I save it to my computer, and drag in the stuff I need, which does add to server load. +1 to Aarons and Mandella s comments above. Thanks for being helpful everyone, that is important to the community. But no one is really looking for a Tag Tutorial. We know how to use them. Nelson isn't looking for help. He is airing a gripe haha. Still want to complement the dev team. Doing fantastic work, and keep it up. The folders thing is my biggest complaint at the moment, but it is a small issue compared to what this tool lets me do, and is worth every penny.

Request a search bar for players in handouts.

Bryan W. said: another limitation of the 'tags' system. My players tell me the search functionality isn't available on their side. Of course, they also don't have access to the tags themselves, which is probably the reasoning behind that design decision. Even without a switch to folders, there are improvements that can be made.