Winging it and NPC Prep

Hello all,  as I am more of a winging GM I am wondering if it would make sense to basically precreate the whole monster/enemy catalog in a base Campaign? Then I could easily search, drag and drop and have a token and abilities and macros all set up. Or will the campaign load speed suffer if I have 100+ journal entries? I know I could simply look for a token, but having everything pre set up would speed up play immensely. Also anyone else more of a spontaneous GM? How do you use Roll20? Any tips for a new Roll20 GM?

make your journals and archive all that you don't think you will need and leave about 10 to 15 out that would be the common encounters aka what they would randomly encounter. That is what I did. I built a complete monster manual basically, had about 75 journals and sheets that I archived except what they would encounter or could encounter in the session while the rest was archived. NPC's I just treat as a persona aka personality. Just a few words that describes the npc like a stereotypical blond valley girl ( that brings to mind a specific image correct) or it could be a busty farmgirl covered with freckles, bucktoothed, that when she speaks it reveals her lack of education. It could also just be a large solid looking man with almost no neck with a spider tattoo on the back of his bald head that cracks his knuckles constantly. You don't need to put in any stats or such unless you plan on them fighting or doing a skill check against the pc's. Does that help any?

That does help indeed, I had not figured out the archive function. Neat! That will declutter my journal nicely. Thanks for the tip!

you go into the edit on the journal or handout and select archive instead of save unless you change something then you need to save first then archive

Question on the archive, what exactly does it do? I haven't played with it and am just curious

Archiving a map, journal, etc gets it out of the list. Primarily, it reduces scroll. Additionally, in the case of maps it saves you from having to load all of those elements when you enter your campaign.  - Gauss

Just went through my maps, renaming them for easier archival searching and reloaded the campaign. Boy, what huge a difference in load time!  Thanks AGAIN Gauss!

That's great! Thanks a lot... I'm starting an open-world RPG and I'm yet not surr how I'll manage maps and stuff... As players would be more free to go where they want... Well, I would need tons of maps... Archiving them will surely help a lot, thanks