Grouping: Handouts and Characters

As a first time DM I'm having trouble keeping up with all my notes and references to particular actions, locations and skills so I've began noting them in the handouts section of the Roll20 interface, which is very useful but is becoming extremely cluttered, as you can see. A simple but amazingly useful feature I would love to have would be the ability to sort my handouts and characters into custom groups so I can keep the place tidy and only see what I need to see at the time. Additionally I would like to have "sort alphabetical" as an option rather than forced, that's the reason why I've had to number everything so it stays in the proper order I need it. I've still got a lot to prepare for this campaign so by the end of it the list will have doubled at least. Otherwise it's great being able to add information directly into the Roll20 client because anytime we need to reference something (such as the climb skill) I can share my pre-made writeup on how it works with the players to save time looking into it.

A lot of people have been suggesting the use of tags to help sort your handouts, if you want only a specific handout showing then you use a tag for it and have that in the tag search box. This will only allow specific handouts to show if they have that tag. It still gets cluttered but it does cut down on the amount somewhat.

Ah I hadn't even noticed the tag search bar at the top, that will make things much easier for the moment. I would still love the ability to create custom folders and sort it manually but it's a good start. Thanks for pointing this out :)

For more tips, that will probably help you on your Pathfinder /DnD 3.5 game, which it looks like your playing, which include tagging among others, see&nbsp;<a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Pathfinder" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Pathfinder</a>&nbsp;

Xuiryus said: Ah I hadn't even noticed the tag search bar at the top, that will make things much easier for the moment. I would still love the ability to create custom folders and sort it manually but it's a good start. Thanks for pointing this out :) I prefer custom folders also but I'm forced to work with what is allowed.

Yeah, that still kinda doesn't solve the issue. It's like have no folders in your computer. You can still search for the file and it will be found since the computer will look at its title and contents but sometimes you don't really know what you are looking for, yet you know you are in 'village A' where you have the vague idea (after having built several bunch of encounters, npcs, etc etc) that it is the place where Awesome stuff with capital letter happens... then you cannot really just tag stuff and hope it appears. Sure you could tag the respective notes and characters as with 'Village A', but what if there was some note that is related to Village A but happens in the outside of it and you forgot to tag it because furthermore it is not easy to visually know whether or not it has been tagged, then the note wouldn't appear in your search. Or furthermore... what would happen if you forgot to tag anything and ... of course, there is no easy way to know it unless you double check everything... so many issues that can easily arise.

Actually, untagged items could be handled easily by having Riley add an untagged field to the search bar thing and automatically include anything without a specific tag added.

Right, but what if everything is tagged? So let's say for example, that you have castleNote (castle, country), cityNote (city, country), and countryNote (country) with their respective tags in parenthesis. when you did a 'city' search, the cityNote would show up, but not the castleNote which is in the city, yet because all of them are tagged and you have 1000 and 1 notes, it is hard to know and see what is tagged with what and what isn't. But yeah, handling untagged items would be slightly more helpful than nothing...

Why would you not tag the castle with the city it is in? That's not a problem with the system. That's a user error.

Yeap, and it's a developer's duty to prevent all sort of user error. Blaming stuff on the user will rarely get any software to be successful at all. That being said, a visual way is way better than a non visual one, hence why folders &gt; tags. Hopefully you can see what I am saying.

It's not the softwares problem if you forget to tag something. It would be no different than if you forgot to copy/paste the castle into the city folder with the most current, up to date entry... since you can't paste/link the same entry into multiple folders. This is why tags are superior to folders. &nbsp;Instead of having to maintain a copy of the castle entry in the castles, country, and city folders (3 places), you simply tag it with all the location based tags you need and maintain one copy of the journal entry.

The suggested use of tags is a kludge to the posed problem; not a solution. Not everyone spends their life on social media, tagging everything. It is not unreasonable to expect a more universal system for organizing a game session’s files.

+1 ^

A folder like set up would be nice for organization purposes. Sure, tags can work but its not a very 'clean' organization deal. Having folders or something of that end would work in terms of having say a 'city' organization tab, then being able to list by tags lie 'rogue' or something like that. Just good to work together while being organized.