I wasn't sure it was widely known why people want to link to Handouts from tokens, so I wanted to share some thoughts on the topics, and maybe even offer a slightly different approach at the end to this. First, here's a basic token, which happens to have GM notes available on it. This is an "alright" place to put GM information. It does eliminate the need for a character or a handout in the tree with this information tied to another asset in the journal. So there is one advantage to just using the token to store this information (more on this later). The challenge with using the standard token as-is is that it doesn't contain a Bio and Info field, which is often useful for sharing information with players. Likewise, the standard token does not have an image placeholder. Second, is the on-demand display by double clicking on the token. There is a lot of information shown that just "gets in the way" (ie. the Bar fields, colors, etc.) and is not relevant for map notes for the GM or the Players. Ease of access to these notes I think is a major driver for this request and Character's can be linked with tokens, which contains all of the fields mentioned above in the Bio and Info Tab (shown below). Likewise, this enables the ease of shift + double click to get to the information quickly. The challenges with using characters are that you end up creating a massive number of character's in the journal and on the map. Lots of "characters" loaded on a map however seems to really slow the system down. It's like you have n extra mooks on the map (n = number of map notes). This combined with advanced fog of war, really starts to slow things down. Also, another subtle thing, is this window is sized for the default character sheet. So it's much larger than it needs to be. So, I could leave it there. Linking Handouts would be a much better solution, as they are formatted specifically for sharing information with the players and having GM specific notes. Likewise, the performance of a Handout is significantly better than that of a character. Handouts aren't without their pitfalls either. Like characters, you will ultimately end up needing to create a handout and a token for every single note on the map. Likewise, handouts require you to share them with the players. And as they are shared, they will ultimately end up populating their journal with a lot of entries, sometimes with unnecessary or irrelevant information further into a campaign. So although I would be happy enough just being able to link a handout to a token, but I think there's an even more elegant solution to this. A different kind of token all together. Sort of a hybrid of a note, a token and a handout. I would imagine that this token could simply have a text field, that would produce a note on the map, that is movable like a token. Maybe it would even look like what we're all used to from 30 years or RPGs like below. Though I would be happy with something very simple, like the other image below. I think it's important that this is tied to a text field though, as it offers more control over what's displayed in the cases where you want to call out locations on a map, businesses in a town, etc. The other major difference I think we'd be looking for here is instead of a token, that's meant to be linked to a character, contain bars, auras, and all that other stuff (especially removing any sight properties as these really slow the system down). We just would want something that simply contains an Info text field, a GM text field, and an internal image, like the handouts do today. A significant caveat to the traditional handout however would be how players can access this information. Instead of having a Show to Players button, the information could be available so long as the item was on the Objects and Tokens layer and the players could see the token. This still gives the GM the ability to control the visibility to the players by controlling what layer the note is on. So in many cases, these would just be on the GM layer and used for GM notes and be as simple as numbers. But in the extreme case, players could go to a town, and have each building labeled with a description of what business is where. I went way longer than what I wanted to. But this is a major point of frustration for me having come from maptools in the past where this was fundamental. I've Pro subbed to try and solve this, and haven't gotten anything that is remotely close to the ease that maptools offered. I should point out that this last bit was just to "do it right". Though I would be completely happy if we could just link handouts to tokens as well.
