Using the Cards System to Manage Inventory

I really do like the idea of using roll20 to handle loot and have weighed both the pros and cons of Cards vs Tables. I have gone to the work of uploading the inventory cards made by Paul Weber. You can find him on facebook by searching Dungeon Master Paul Weber. He has a ton of free, high quality, and did I mention free? work that he puts out every few days. Now I would like to distribute these cards to my players. I have run into a number of problems that I'm hoping that someone in the community can help me with. Even if only to develop a work-around. The Problem The cards are not searchable. While I can select a card by its face, or simply deal a random hand to a player to generate loot, its not exactly easy to distribute pre-determined loot such as when my player says "I want to recover that bear trap I just stepped in to use later". I definitely have the card for that but I don't want to slow the game up by manually scanning for it. I can type a search filter when looking for tokens, as luck would have it uploading card images automatically adds them to your library as well, but results pulled up via this method can't be added to a players hand which would be the point. Is there a way to convert an image into a card after it's been laid on the tabletop? In addition I am left unable to even scan via alphabetical search which, while onerous, would be worth my while all the same. However because of the distributing and recalling plus occasionally shuffling of the deck to distribute random loot I'm left with a jumbled mess to search through even when searching cards via their front face. -------- Any information, solutions, or alternatives would be appreciated. Thanks again.

You asked for alternatives, so here's what I did... I used a graphical inventory script in a separate campaign.&nbsp; There's been a couple of different iterations of this script, and I think I've tried all of them, but here's a link to a thread about the one I finally settled on: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/2309387/slug%7D" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/2309387/slug%7D</a> It took a lot of work to set up - you have to create a character sheet and token for every item you want to have available to players, and you have to create the inventory areas for each player.&nbsp; The advantage is that you can pull out tokens for whatever item you want, drag it onto the player's inventory area, and then the script automatically calculates weights, and GP value (for coins).&nbsp; You can create storage items (like backpacks), which creates a separate area in the inventory area, so you can visually see where every item is, and then when the player removes the backpack, it automatically adjusts the encumbrance level. Like I said, it's a lot of work, but works great once you get it set up.

+1 for inventory manager slim. Well worth the effort.&nbsp;

Another alternative that doesn't require the API would be to create a Page (you could call it whatever you like) and the deal all of the cards from a deck onto that page, face-up. Then when you need to give one of them, you can see them all all (larger than the little images you normally get). You go there, select the card you want to give, right-click and copy, go back to the main page, right-click and paste. Not as efficient, but it you could order the cards anyway you want (Alphabetically, type, whatever makes sense to you). If you flip the card over before copying it, then when you paste it back to the main page, it will paste as flipped over, so others can't see what it is (if that's important). The player can then "Take" the card. If you don't like the whole copy/pasting method, you could take the card from the "hidden" page yourself and then give it to the player (or have them take it from you).

That was an option I had thought of as well. Randomly rolling the loot beforehand. Placing the necessary cards just outside a dynamic lighting area, then revealing the area as they find the items. Then they can take or leave whatever they like. As cool as this all is I think until some improvements to the deck system have been made I'm going to place this project on the back burner. I'm not interested in dedicated a section of every page to player inventory. I appreciate the effort everyone made to help bring this about. I'm going to go back to only using the card desk system for key items, of which there are far fewer. You'd think that an alphabetical search function would be easy. Especially since they allow you to name the cards.

Or just create a "Loot Map". A dedicated page, you put a section or portrait for each party member, deal into the common area and they grab from the middle to their portraits.

Andrew said: Or just create a "Loot Map". A dedicated page, you put a section or portrait for each party member, deal into the common area and they grab from the middle to their portraits. You can do that with the Inventory Manager as well.&nbsp; In fact, I had a "Loot" area at the bottom, and an area for each character, then I used a teleport script so that, when the character moved loot to his area, it teleported into his inventory area, and then he could place it on his character as he saw fit.