5e Macro Mule best practices/tips/organization?

As our West Marches campaign is growing with dozens of players the character macro situation is getting out of hand. I'd like to standardize a lot of them, particularly spells and class abilities, into macro mules. Before I embark on such a big process I want to think about the best way to organize it. Are there performance issues with having a ton of macros all on one sheet? Should spells be split up by, say, class & level, or all dumped in a single Spell Mule?  Any suggestions on how best to organize it? Pitfalls to avoid? Thanks!

snuh  said: As our West Marches campaign is growing with dozens of players the character macro situation is getting out of hand. I'd like to standardize a lot of them, particularly spells and class abilities, into macro mules. Before I embark on such a big process I want to think about the best way to organize it. Are there performance issues with having a ton of macros all on one sheet? Should spells be split up by, say, class & level, or all dumped in a single Spell Mule?  Any suggestions on how best to organize it? Pitfalls to avoid? Thanks! My macro mule is pretty simple, it started off by using Token Action Maker (API) to make them, but then I modified things from there. Note: Most macros can be set as either token actions or as macro bar buttons.  Initiative macro (specifically Token Action to make sure people grab their token first) Abilities macro  Skills macro Saves macro Spells macro button: this is the complicated one. It is actually 21 macros but it fires off of a single macro button.  The "Spells" macro button first off the "Select Spell Level" macro.  From there you select the entire spell list or spell level as desired.  Below shows the results from "Entire Spell List".  The Spell macro ignores any spell that does not have a red dot next to it.  Then you click on the spell name and it casts that spell as if you had clicked it from the spell page.  To prevent screen spam the spell macros whisper to yourself except for the final macro (casting the spell).  Attacks can be set up similarly, set up buttons to reference repeating attacks.  I don't do that on my sheet, but it wouldn't be hard to over-build the attacks macro to account for anyone's characters. 

I don’t think there’s any limit in the number of abilities that a character sheet can contain. My D&D 5E Universal Macro Mule  has over 30 attributes and over 80 abilities. It might help you streamline your West Marches campaign. 

You might want to divide your macrios into multiple macro characters, one for spells, one for skills, etc. But this is purely for organisation - there's no harm in putting them all in a single character. Since you're a Pro user, and if you plan to stay that way, you might also look into using mod scripts - they can do away with a lot of macros.

Thanks, everyone! Well, here's an example of why I'm looking at doing a huge amount of macro muling, and y'all can tell me if there's a smarter way. In our campaign we use the Combat Master API, the Spawn API, the FX tool, and a 5e hack called Darker Dungeons and this has ramifications for how spells and abilities are handled. Light In Darker Dungeons, Light now requires Concentration. When cast, the Spawn API places a preconfigured token in the appropriate square. Just for fun, the Light spell has a little sparkle FX when it flares into existence. Combat Master tracks the spell duration. (This doesn't require any changes here, but does for other spells.) To support all of this, each player (or more realistically, a GM) has to update the Light spell on each character sheet, and then create a Light spell macro with the Spawn and FX on each character sheet. Not a big deal in a small party, but in a West Marches campaign with 30+ characters (and growing!) it's a chore. Chill Touch On a hit, Chill Token applies an effect tracked by Combat Master To support this, a chat menu button is appended to each casting. Again, this has to be done on a per character basis. Etc. And god forbid I change my APIs or FX or something - I'll need to update every instance on every character sheet. It's also not portable - every game I'll have to import all these settings manually. There's also a couple players who are just... sloppy. Some of their stuff isn't configured correctly, so standardization is a good thing. My Current Idea Instead, I'm thinking of just creating a bunch of macro mules for all our spells, traits, magic items, etc. Each ability is created as a macro and customized in one place. Every other PC in the game has a character macro that simply points to %{Mule-Spell-Cantrip|Light} or whatever. And now it's portable across campaigns. Scalable and sustainable, albeit with a lot of up-front work. Thoughts? Any pitfalls that I'm not seeing?

So far, I think the largest "mule" I am using holds about 160 ability macros. I don't notice any sluggishness when opening that sheet compared to others.  To make things somewhat easier to find, I do have multiple "mules" and I'll give you a rundown on how I have handled these things.  Even though it is for a different game system, some of my rambling might be of use to you. First off, I have created one of these for each form of magic in that game system. So, I have "Wizard Macros", "Air Warlock Macros", "Earth Warlock Macros", "Fire Warlock Macros", "Water Warlock Macros", "Diabolist Macros", and "Psionic Macros".  That was all I intended to do with it, but (as things do) it sort of snowballed into covering more things that I wanted to be easily portable and reusable.  I ended up adding "Priest Macros" (non-spell abilities like remove curse, exorcism, etc.), "Cobbler Macros" (which holds certain racial spell abilities), "Poison Macros", "Character Creation Monster" (everything from stats to names to random reincarnation tables), and "Civilization Creation" (random creation of general landscape, government, conflicts, etc.). My primary advice for these sheets is: don't do as I did (in a few ways). Don't just do what you think will be the most used first.  I started these sheets of mine that way, and it was fine for a while.  But it means that when you finally realize that you can have every casting character in the game run from these sheets, meaning that you will want everything from "insert category of abilities here" to be accessible, then you will need to go through and fill in all the gaps.  At that point, you realize that you won't have your macros in order.  I still haven't gone back and sorted all the pre-existing mixed macros.  All other macros added after that point for me are added in alphabetical order and by spell tier if applicable.  That makes it easy to find things in the ability list.  Except when they are in the jumble of things I thought would be the most common.... Don't forget to leave 1 or 2 (or more) blank ability macros at the beginning of the list.  You will want to have a chat menu of all the things listed on the sheet. With wizard spells, I have 3 (spell levels 1-3, 4-6, 7-11 in this case) which makes each just short enough that I can avoid scrolling when I pop a complete list up.  This means they will be right at the top where you can copy/paste in full, or simply copy out specific buttons from the chat menu to add to a character's menu.  If there is a certain category where there is a specific starting basic list, then have one of those, so that you can quickly copy/paste that to the sheet of a new character being created. I have one of those as well on the Wizard Macros sheet (though that may not apply in 5E). If the sheet you are using has the capacity (which I think it does), don't forget to write each of the individual spell macros in such a way that they can respond to the whisper settings of the sheet.  Don't forget to come up with a naming scheme that makes sense to you.  While it is useful to name the "mules" in a recognizable manner, the individual ability macros need to be that way too. I tend to use the first 3-4 letters of each major word in an ability name.  That way, I can make sure that every ability name on a particular mule is unique, and it will have enough letters in it to be recognizable.  As an example, WalSto is good enough for me to know this is for Wall of Stone.  If you wanted it even more plain, you could go with WallSton.  Just keep in mind that the longer your ability names, the longer it will take to type out all your buttons! You may also find yourself making additions after you have gotten through with the list of abilities.  For example, does anything have a random duration that the player(s) may not always know?  You can make public and whisper macros for those and insert buttons to call those into the description of the spells that need them. You may also end up needing to make macros for victims of things (not sure how it works in 5E, but confusion is a random result that gets rolled each turn of the victim in Pathfinder). I have probably rambled enough (and hopefully some of this makes sense because I should really be in bed now), so I will just add that I generally make the chat menus whisper to the gm.  That way I can simply copy/paste them to npcs as they are.  For a pc, I change the gm to the character name.  I won't see that when the player uses the menu, but I will see it if I trigger it as the GM. Welcome to the crazy world of macro mule skinning!  Or something like that....

Super-helpful! One of the things I have been contemplating is building the spells/abilities macros in a spreadsheet first. The idea of going through 160+ macros and then discovering a pattern mistake, or wanting to add a new API feature, and having to edit each macro one at a time in Roll20 gives me nightmares. In theory, having a spreadsheet would be easier for making bulk changes and then have a script to automatically delete and repopulate the mule from it. In y'all's experience, is that something that would be a significant help, or is that just a lot of extra work for little yield?

snuh said: Super-helpful! One of the things I have been contemplating is building the spells/abilities macros in a spreadsheet first. The idea of going through 160+ macros and then discovering a pattern mistake, or wanting to add a new API feature, and having to edit each macro one at a time in Roll20 gives me nightmares. In theory, having a spreadsheet would be easier for making bulk changes and then have a script to automatically delete and repopulate the mule from it. In y'all's experience, is that something that would be a significant help, or is that just a lot of extra work for little yield? I haven't done much with spreadsheets, so I am assuming that it would take me a longer to set up the spreadsheet right than it would be worth.  For people more familiar with that sort of thing, I could certainly see it being a useful tool.  I find myself using a text editor for find/replace quite often.  I tend to make up some group macros that I move from game to game, so I just find/replace the character names to update each macro for a new group.  You can update multiple macros that way by having them all in the editor at once. I think I have redone the spell macros on my mules 3 times at this point, but that isn't all due to my forgetting things.  I am also the sheet author for the Palladium Fantasy 1E sheet, so when I created a roll template specifically for spells, I had to redo all of the macros to make use of that template and the sub header entries for range, duration, etc.  I then later made a switch on the sheet to offer multiple background color options for the roll template header and outline so that you could "theme" your earth warlock rolls to look differently than another player's wizard rolls.  So I had to insert the color switch in for that... The sheet didn't start out with a whisper setting either, but that was just copying a certain thing and pasting it in at the beginning of each macro once I added that feature to the sheet.  It did take some time due to the number of macros, but it was much simpler and quicker than the other changes. So, the majority of the time I have spent on those was totally self-inflicted due to changes I made to the character sheet.  With an official sheet, you shouldn't run into that unless they end up changing basic attribute names.  I can't say for sure that has never happened, but it should be incredibly rare, since I assume that would force changes for internal sheet workers and compendium interaction.

snuh said: Super-helpful! One of the things I have been contemplating is building the spells/abilities macros in a spreadsheet first. The idea of going through 160+ macros and then discovering a pattern mistake, or wanting to add a new API feature, and having to edit each macro one at a time in Roll20 gives me nightmares. In theory, having a spreadsheet would be easier for making bulk changes and then have a script to automatically delete and repopulate the mule from it. In y'all's experience, is that something that would be a significant help, or is that just a lot of extra work for little yield? Generally your Macro Mule macros should be pretty universal, use things like "selected" rather than character names.  It is my experience most 5e player rolls can be made using just a handful of buttons. 

snuh said: Super-helpful! One of the things I have been contemplating is building the spells/abilities macros in a spreadsheet first. The idea of going through 160+ macros and then discovering a pattern mistake, or wanting to add a new API feature, and having to edit each macro one at a time in Roll20 gives me nightmares. In theory, having a spreadsheet would be easier for making bulk changes and then have a script to automatically delete and repopulate the mule from it. In y'all's experience, is that something that would be a significant help, or is that just a lot of extra work for little yield? A spreadsheet is exactly how I have mine set up - I have a 'Settings' tab that has all of the items that are shared between macros, then each repeating section is on a separate tab, and all of those are collected onto a single Macros tab, then they are referenced/concatenated on the ModScript tab. So if I want to update something 'universal' into all of the macros, then it's often just changing a single field on the Settings tab. Once you've created the spells/abilities/etc. in a spreadsheet, you should be able to copy and modify the  Mod script  I use for my MacroMule ( which I heavily borrowed from Marco R. ).  

There are some macro-generating spreadsheet examples near the end of the index of the  Tips n Tricks  thread.

Awesome!