Are you completely new to macros? Check out this introduction first! Rule 0: As you read through these methods, remember that there is pretty much only one rule concerning macros: they should be clear and concise. They should be long enough that they are easy to understand but short enough that they do not clog the whole chat. They should allow the DM and other players to quickly and easily identify the important parts of your powers. With that in mind, here's a bunch of tips to make macros easier to work for you! (If you want to see a video tutorial of some of these tips, you can watch that here .) Part 1: Using Attributes Effectively Hi, everyone, this is the current attack template: (Power Name) (Action Class) ✦ (Action Type) ✦ (Keywords) (Range) ✦ (Target(s)) /me attacks with a [[1d20 + (your attack bonus) ]] vs (AC / Fortitude / Reflex / Will, pick applicable, remove the rest ). Hit: [[(Power or Weapon damage) ]] (damage type, if any) damage (and any conditions applied by the hit). Miss: (If the attack deals any damage or has other effects on a miss, put this here.) (Crit : [[ (total damage and special effects on a critical hit) ]] Effect: (If the attack has any special effects, list those here) This is a pretty solid starting point for macros, and if you make a character that always has the same attack bonus or damage bonus or dice, then this is probably good for you. The only downside is that every time you level, you will have to change some of those numbers in all of your macros. What if I told you there was a way that you would only have to change one number on your sheet and it would automatically update all of your macros? Well, you can , and it's super simple. You can use the attributes in your journal entry to call your (fairly constant) attack and damage bonuses. For instance, if you have an attribute called "attack bonus" in every macro, you could have [[1d20 + @{attack bonus}]] and all you have to do is change that one number and you're good to go whenever you level up or get a new piece of equipment. Now, people who have varying attack bonuses (because of different weapons, proficiency bonuses, enhancement bonuses, etc.) may want to break things down even further for their macros. For instance, you could do [[1d20 + @{Str} + @{Half Level} + @{proficiency} + @{expertise} + @{Enhancement}]], and then whenever you go up a level, get a new item or better stats, or change tiers of play (e.g. to paragon or epic), you just change those numbers for the attributes. If you have attacks that don't use proficiency or enhancement (like a minotaur's goring charge) or if you have a mix of weapon and implement abilities, you can just leave those out for that macro. This seems really wordy and complicated, but it's actually quite simple: once you do it once, you can copy/paste it to almost all your macros, and will save you lots of macro-editing time in the future! Part 2: Macro prompts! You can also have the macro prompt you for bonuses, saving you and your fellow players time, by adding in a ? prompt in the macro. For instance, if we add a ?{atk bonus|0} to our previous macro, we get [[1d20 + @{Str} + @{Half Level} + @{proficiency} + @{expertise} + @{enhancement} + ?{atk bonus|0}]]. This allows you to add in bonuses from combat advantage, flanking, leader bonuses, etc. to your roll right away. In my experience, this is also useful for reminding you to look for bonuses that people gave you that you may have forgotten about ! You can just as easily use attributes and prompting statements in your damage macro as in your attack macro! The format of the prompt is ?{Thing it will ask you for|Default value}. For instance, attack bonus will usually be 0, but you could also use it for things like: /me makes a bluff check to ?{reason|hide the truth}. With this macro, every time you make a bluff check, it would prompt you for a reason, with the default output being "<Character name> makes a bluff check to hide the truth" Part 3: Making Reasonable Blast/Burst Macros Making blast and burst macros can be a challenge because the number of attacks you have to roll will vary depending on the situation. By 4e rules, you roll an attack against each individual enemy, but one damage roll that is the same for every target (excluding crits). I've seen several solutions to this from players and DMs. The option most preferred by our DMs is Rolling a list of attack rolls as part of your burst/blast macro . For example : /me makes a Freezing burst attack! [[d20+7]], [[d20+7]], [[d20+7]], [[d20+7]], [[d20+7]] vs Reflex Hit: [[1d6+6]] cold damage. Crit: [[6+6+1d8]] cold damage. The DM then takes however many attack rolls as are needed. For instance, if there are 3 creatures in the burst, they will take the first 3 attack rolls (usually counting monsters in "book order," left-to-right, top-to-bottom). If for some reason you need more rolls, you can just hit it again, and the DM will still take the first damage roll for everybody. The good thing about this method is that everything is compact in one macro. The bad thing is that adding in conditional modifiers to each of the different rolls involves a little messy coding, but you can just leave them out altogether and tell the DM about them individually. Ultimately, whatever method you choose, remember it should follow Rule 0 ! Part 4: Expanded Crits (not widely applicable) If you take a weird paragon path/feat, you may crit with some powers with a 19-20 or an 18-20. If this is the case, then you can attach cs20cs19 (for crit success on 20 or 19) to your 1d20 so it gives a green box for a crit success for those numbers. For instance, instead of saying [[1d20 + (attack bonus)]], you would say [[1d20cs20cs19 + (attack bonus)]]. You can also use something like [[1d20cs>18]] for a crit for anything 18 or above. Note that this > sign actually means "greater than or equal to"! With all this together, you get a pile of complicated bonuses that you just call up from your sheet which you can change as you need to, and it will work for all your macros. So even though your macros look wordier (see below), they are actually much more organized and will barely need to be adjusted ever again! For example, this is a macro made for a level 5 character that did not need to be changed at all until the character hit level 21. Sly flourish At-Will ✦ Standard ✦ Martial, Weapon ✦ Melee or Ranged 5/10 /me makes an Sly Flourish attack (with CA) [[1d20cs18cs19cs20 +@{Dex} + @{proficiency} + @{expertise}+ @{Half Level}+ @{Weapon Enhancement}+ 2 + ?{atk mod|0}]] vs AC. Hit: [[1d@{DaggerDie}+ @{Dex} + @{Weapon Enhancement} +@{Item Bonus} + @{Focus} +@{CHA} + @{Sneak Damage} +?{dmg mod|0}]] damage. Crit: [1d@{MaxDaggerDie}+ @{Crit Die} @{Dex} + @{Weapon Enhancement} +@{Item Bonus} + @{Focus} +@{CHA} + @{Sneak Damage|Max}+?{dmg mod|0}]] damage. If you don't understand everything going on in these macros, that's fine, but you too can use these tricks to make your life easier and your macros better. Part 5: Drop Low, Stay High! For some classes (like avengers), you roll twice and take the highest result a lot . Actually rolling the whole macro twice can be a pain. Additionally, other classes may want take the biggest of several rolls automatically. There are two functions that allow you to do this: "Keep highest" and "Drop Lowest," which have the commands kh(number) and dl(number) respectively. For example, if you're an avenger, your attack macro will have [[2d20kh1 + (attack bonus)]], telling it to roll 2d20's and keep the highest 1 die roll. To do this with attributes, you have to put them in {} and separate them by commas, putting the kh on the outside. For instance, if you wanted the higher of your Dex or Int, you could say [[ {@{Dex}, @{Int} }kh1]]. Similarly, if you were going to roll for stats (which you don't do in this campaign !), you might roll [[4d6dl1]] to drop the lowest. Note that [[4d6dl1]] and [[4d6kh3]] are equivalent. (Side note: Even less frequently used are "keep lowest" and "drop highest," which have the kl and dh commands, which are coded the same as the kh and dl macros. Make sure you use the right one!) Part 6: They Won't Be Able to Show it on the News Because it Will be SO BRUTAL Lots of weapons use Brutal 1 or Brutal 2 rolls, which means you reroll every die until it comes up as something other than a 1 (for Brutal 1) or a 1 or 2 (for Brutal 2). Roll20 has an easy way to macro this: you just write the normal roll and then add r<1 or r<2 to the end of it. For instance, if you were using an execution axe (1d12, brutal 2), the roll would be [[1d12r<2 + bonuses]]. Keep in mind that the r<2 works for anything less than or equal to 2. Some powers, items, and feats (e.g. Axe Expertise) allow you to reroll a 1 only once, in which case you could use the "ro" function, e.g. [[2d6ro1]] which will reroll each 1 only once. Part 7: Organize your Macros! Roll20 has recently started doing this thing where it alphabetizes your token action macros, rather than having them appear in the order you put them in. To turn off this "feature," go to your in-game settings tab (the cog on the far right at the top of the chat window) and scroll through till you find it. When you re-order your macros in your journal entry, you may want to drag them into place twice (as shown in this video ). Sometimes they move around if you don't put them in place twice. In general, macros for player characters should be put as token actions rather than in the macro bar, for several reasons: they take up less space when you don't need them, they all can show on the screen at the same time rather than having to scroll, GMs can look at them if you're having trouble getting them to work, and if you have multiple PCs, you only get the relevant macros appearing rather than all of the macros for all of your characters. If you find that you have a lot of macros and they are clogging up your screen when you click on your token, you could abbreviate your macro names, e.g. instead of "At-Will-Energizing-Strike-Augment-1," you could say "Energ-A1" or something similar. You also have the option of consolidating several similar macros into drop-down menus (See Part 8, Method 4 below).
