Need Help Creating Saving Throw Menu

Hello There,

I am attempting to create a menu for each of my players that will be a shortcut to roll saving throws instead of the players having to always open their character sheets to access their saving throws.

I have a Plus account, and am using the BECMI character sheet.

I've made macros for each saving throw (Death Ray or Poison, Magic Wands, etc.), and those all work individually, and I am now trying to create a menu that the players can click on, which would appear in the Chan Menu, and from there they could select the saving throw needed. I seem to be able to create the menu in the chat, but when pushing a button for a saving throw, I get an error stating "No ability was found for...".  I am attaching a screenshot showing the error and the macro I am using.

How would I fix this? And also, is there a better way to do this?. Please keep in mind that I really don't have a strong grasp on macros.

You are using different names for your macros vs your reference in the Saving-Throws macro. 

Example: "Death Ray or Poison" is "Death-Ray-or-Poison". You need to use the correct name in the Saving-Throws macro. 

Note: If you type up the name elsewhere then copy/paste it as the name of the Macro you can avoid the space becomes a hyphen issue. 
I don't know if that will break anything but it hasn't for me (yet) and I've been doing that for years. 

Thanks, Gauss. That did the trick. Also, thanks for the tip on copy/paste to avoid the spaces becoming a hyphen. Was unaware that could be done.

Still, I'm wondering if anyone has a better way to create a menu for saving throws. I saw recently (but cannot find now) how someone created a button on the Marco Bar that when clicked opened a menu to select the saving throw they wanted. That would be the preferred way to do this, I think, and would look a bit cleaner than always popping the menu into the Chat Box.

When you say that it opened a menu, do you mean a query (ie: dropdown menu)?

If so, yes, that can be done, but it comes with significant difficulty due to how queries work (usually requires HTML entities). 

Chat Menus (what you are doing) sidesteps all that difficulty. 

Some improvements you can do to your Chat Menus: 
1) Put them in a template, this will clean up the appearance. 
2) Set the buttons up on separate lines
3) Whisper the chat menu to yourself. Nobody needs to see the menu other than the person activating it. 
4) Style it to make it look better (rather than the pink buttons)

Yes, I meant a query. Sorry about that. If queries are difficult to put together, then I would likely pass as that would be beyond my skill level.

As for your Chat Menu suggestions, thank you! I am unsure how to put them in a template or set the buttons up on separate lines (this is the one I'd want to do for sure), but I have figured out how to do the Whisper to the PC the saving throws belong to, so that helps a lot. Thanks!

Well hey, I did figure out how to set the buttons on separate lines and do it as a whisper to the player! Now to just figure out how to style it to loose the pink buttons for something not so bright.

There are lots of setups for making it look better. 

For example, this is one setup I use for my spells macro (just a chunk of the macro): 

/w @{selected|character_name}
&{template:npcaction} {{rname=@{selected|character_name}}}
{{description=[--Level 1 Spells --](" style="background: none;
background-color: transparent; border: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration:
none; display:none; color: #7e2d40; font-weight: bold; display:none; display:
block@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$0_spellname|max};)[@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$0_spellname}
](~@{selected|character_name}|repeating_spell-1_$0_spell"
style="background: none; background-color: transparent; border: none;
padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: purple; display:none; display:
block@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$0_spellname|max}; height:
@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$0_spellprepared}; overflow:
hidden;)[@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$1_spellname}
](~@{selected|character_name}|repeating_spell-1_$1_spell"
style="background: none; background-color: transparent; border: none;
padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: purple; display:none; display:
block@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$1_spellname|max}; height:
@{selected|repeating_spell-1_$1_spellprepared}; overflow: hidden;)

Wow! That looks a lot better than what I have at the moment.

I'll see if I can figure out the macro you used and apply it to the macro I have (I'll practice on a test character first). Thanks for sharing!

What is the current code for your Chat Menu?

Here is a guide to this. 

Focus on the very last bit where it provides an example for Violet Fungus, that should be directly convertable to your use case.

Here is how you can modify a basic chat menu with colors etc.

Take [command name](~ability-name) and turn it into: 

[command name](~ability-name" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;)

1: "border" can be used to create a border around your button. If you are turning the button transparent just leave it set to "none" (without quotes). If you do want a border this short explanation may help.

2: "background-color" removes the pink box by turning it transparent. You can also turn the pink box into another color by substituting a color word such as "aqua" (without quotes) instead of "transparent". You can find color names here.

3: "padding" controls how big the clickable space is around your button-name. A px of 0 is no extra clickable space. A px of 5 is a lot of extra clickable space. You will want to play with this to get a space around your button-name that looks good. 

4: "color" sets the color of the name using a hex color code (such as #3452eb). Here is a source of hex color codes.

5: "font-weight" sets how thick the letters look (such as bold). If you want something other than bold you can use a word (such as lighter) or a number (such as 300). Here is a short guide on font weights.

In the end it will look something like this: 
/w gm &{template:npcaction} &{noerror} {{rname=@{selected|character_name}}} {{name=@{selected|npc_type}}} {{description=[Macro1](~Macro1" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;) }}

A note regarding Light/Dark mode: the color(s) you set up here will not change depending on mode, so make sure you select colors that will display well in the mode of your choice.

Credit to Keithcurtis, Scott C., and Andreas J. who helped me write this up and to Oosh who wrote the original guide.

Gauss said:

Here is how you can modify a basic chat menu with colors etc.

Take [command name](~ability-name) and turn it into: 

[command name](~ability-name" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;)

1: "border" can be used to create a border around your button. If you are turning the button transparent just leave it set to "none" (without quotes). If you do want a border this short explanation may help.

2: "background-color" removes the pink box by turning it transparent. You can also turn the pink box into another color by substituting a color word such as "aqua" (without quotes) instead of "transparent". You can find color names here.

3: "padding" controls how big the clickable space is around your button-name. A px of 0 is no extra clickable space. A px of 5 is a lot of extra clickable space. You will want to play with this to get a space around your button-name that looks good. 

4: "color" sets the color of the name using a hex color code (such as #3452eb). Here is a source of hex color codes.

5: "font-weight" sets how thick the letters look (such as bold). If you want something other than bold you can use a word (such as lighter) or a number (such as 300). Here is a short guide on font weights.

In the end it will look something like this: 
/w gm &{template:npcaction} &{noerror} {{rname=@{selected|character_name}}} {{name=@{selected|npc_type}}} {{description=[Macro1](~Macro1" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;) }}

A note regarding Light/Dark mode: the color(s) you set up here will not change depending on mode, so make sure you select colors that will display well in the mode of your choice.

Credit to Keithcurtis, Scott C., and Andreas J. who helped me write this up and to Oosh who wrote the original guide.

Thanks for putting this together Gauss! This I think I can do, an the explanations really help a lot.

I tried to experiment with your early post from yesterday with the guide, just sticking to the option used on the Violent Fungus, and yeah, I was a bit lost with that. But this list of explanations, and your macro write-up helps tremendously!

Thanks for taking the time to do this. Much appreciated! (And I know my players will appreciate it too).

Please let me know if you have any questions, this is the trial run for a wiki entry. You are the guinea pig for it. :)

I was going to write a post on this topic for my blog, so I think it's a good idea to add it to wiki.

I'd recommend for clarity not starting with this:

[command name](~ability-name" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;)

I think there's too much there. Maybe more like

/w GM [command name](~ability-name" style="color:yellow;)

Then go through the styles you can add, to demonstrate you don't need to include all of them, and then after describing the styles, put the example with lots of them.

Also, show you don't need to use codes for the colours :)

GiGs said:

I was going to write a post on this topic for my blog, so I think it's a good idea to add it to wiki.

I'd recommend for clarity not starting with this:

[command name](~ability-name" style="border:none;background-color:transparent;padding:0px;color:#3452eb;font-weight:bold;)

I think there's too much there. Maybe more like

/w GM [command name](~ability-name" style="color:yellow;)

Then go through the styles you can add, to demonstrate you don't need to include all of them, and then after describing the styles, put the example with lots of them.

Also, show you don't need to use codes for the colours :)

Much of that was discussed. The codes for colors was to keep it simple while still presenting lots of options. For simplicity not every option will be presented. Also, see PM. :)