Archiving Characters and Handouts

Well, here's the deal on this. Although we call them "campaigns", I think it's very unlikely you're going to want to run an entire hundred-playsession campaign with your group with just one Roll20 Campaign. In fact, I've been splitting them up whenever we go to a new location. So we've done around 5 sessions, and for our 6th I'll be starting our 3rd Roll20 Campaign. Keep in mind that the more info/pages/handouts/etc. you load a Campaign up with, the more info has to be loaded by your players. So if 90% of it is pages you aren't going to be using, handouts no one is looking at, Characters that don't matter for this play session...well, it's just going to slow things down for no reason.

Of course I realize that right now there is no better way. But here are two things that I think *may help* that are coming in the future:

1. Ability to "copy/extend" Campaigns. Basically you can copy your Campaign, choose what you want to keep (Characters? Players? Handouts? Decks? etc.) and then create a new Campaign with those things already in it. So that would make it easy to quickly create a new Campaign as your story progresses. Of course you'd still be building up a giant backlog of Characters/Handouts, so that brings me to:

2. Integration with Obsidian Portal (http://obsidianportal.com). If you haven't seen it before, check it out, it's basically built to do exactly what the OP (original poster) is doing: serve as a central repository for your entire 30-level campaign to keep track of all your locations, characters, loot, even a "play log". It's also free to use, although they do offer a modestly priced premium account as well. In the realm of "not reinventing the wheel", Roll20 is really designed to be a virtual tabletop, not a wiki. The Journal feature really wasn't designed to store 80+ entries for a long campaign -- it was designed to hold the stuff you'd want to look at during a few play sessions. The Obsidian Portal integration would basically let you store your detailed info on your 80 NPCs on there, then when you make a Roll20 campaign you could quickly import just the characters you are actually going to use for that play session. So that way you get the long-term repository in Obsidian Portal (which you and your players can access anytime), and Roll20 stays lightweight and nimble by just handling what you're using in your actual play session.

What are your thoughts on that as a solution? Of course we are always trying to balance simplicity with support for folks like the OP who are creating epic, awesome, detailed campaigns. This was just the solution we've been kicking around to this issue, so I'm curious to hear what you guys think, since you're the ones who would be using it!

Also: I can certainly add a "Show in Talk As.. menu" option for the Characters...that's no problem. The above is more about addressing what I see as the underlying issue here (and it's come up in a few other threads as well): managing a massive Campaign/Journal with hundreds of entries, most of which won't be used in this play session.

Another possible solution (if you don't want to use the Obsidian Portal integration either because you don't like it, or you want to keep it all in Roll20) might be to use the Campaign copy/extend feature to create a "seed" Campaign on Roll20 with everything stored in it, then just copy that Campaign into a new campaign for your actual play session, possibly with the ability to copy over only certain characters/handouts/whatever. So again that way your play session campaign is lightweight and nimble, but you still have that seed Campaign where you keep everything up to date (and you could even give your players access to that if they want the ability to look at "everything")...

Well, that would be the idea. I'm not sure it's the sort of thing where you'd be able to never visit Obsidian Portal, but at least the goal would be to let you import characters, then as you make changes in Roll20 those changes could also be saved to Obsidian Portal...

I think all of the suggestions Riley mentioned are pretty functional. While I'm not familiar with Obsidian Portal yet, it certainly does sound promising. On a side note, is there a limit to the number of "campaigns" you can have created at a time?

On Roll20? No, there's no limit. And art assets that you upload in one campaign are shared across all campaigns, so as long as you're using mostly the same art assets between campaigns, you could create quite a few without running up against your quota.