Too many NPCs

Hi, sorry if this topic is covered in another area, but I couldn't find it. I'm trying to make a sandbox style game for my group. I have material that ranges from 1st to 14th level. I figure the more I set up the earlier, the better it is. I've learned about the charachter feature and it seems really nice. I even enjoyed making an NPC into a charachter so I could type using it's name. All is great. I just have some organizational questions. 1. How can I store monsters, so that I can easily pull them up when I need them? I know my players will encounter a lot of goblins for example, is there a way I can save a generic goblin with all it's stats, and then make new instances of it easily? 2. How can I hide characters from the players? Say I have 10 NPCs but I don't want the players to see them yet. How can I hide them? 3. How can I break up my characters into groups? Meaning, I want to have my NPCs from village A, but don't want to accidently choose, or see clutter for the NPCs from village B. Thanks

1. first, create a single entry for goblin in your character sheet journal with the relevant stats you want on it. tag it with whatever you want to use for easy sorting (I would use monster, goblin, low-level, but you can put as many or as few tags as you like). make a token. link it to the goblin character sheet. do NOT link HP, just put in the average for a goblin (4, I believe) in whichever bar you wish to track HP in. once the token is set the way you want it, open the goblin sheet and make that token the default token. every time you want to have a goblin show up, type goblin into the character sheet search bar, and pull it onto the field. adjust as necessary. 2. easiest way to hide anything from the players is to put it on the GM layer. they cannot see anything there, and you just need to select the right token while on the gm layer and move it to the movement layer to have it become visible. or you can create journal entries for each NPC with linked tokens and just drag them onto the field as they are needed. 3 to seperate the villagers from village A from all your other NPC's, use the tag system, as described above. simply put the name of the village in as the tag, as well as any other ways of sorting that you might want in there, (family name, clan affiliations, etc) and they become very easy to find - the search bar searches each word for a corresponding tagline, so you can get as complicated as you like (eg, finding the kids of the hastle family from the village of qwant - type qwant hastle kids and it will thin out the list to only those with the relevant tags. putting in gwant kids would find ALL the listed children from said village, and only gwant would like every resident that had a created journal entry.)

Thanks that is really helpfull, but just two things. 1. I don't want to hide the charachters/monsters from the players on the Map, I want to hide it from the list of Charachters in the Journal page. 2. How do I restrict the list for the drop down "As" menu option (on the bottom right of the chat screen)?

Hiding the NPCs and changine the As dropdown: this is already done by default. Go to the settings tab, find "Rejoin as Player", and then check out what character sheets are visible, and what is visible in the "As" chat dropdown. That's what all players see by default. By default no character sheet is visible to players. When you edit a character sheet, the Visible to Players checkbox allows you to select which players can see it, and you need to specifically assign it to players, to allow them to see it. There is also an "Can be Edited and Controlled by" box. You can assign control of characters to certain players. The "As" dropdown shows to players only those characters they have control over.

Wow, thanks for the tip Michael H! (My cousin?) I had linked the health on about a dozen different creature clones spread throughout my map, didn't realize they would all have "died" before my players reached them lol

G G said: Hiding the NPCs and changine the As dropdown: this is already done by default. Go to the settings tab, find "Rejoin as Player", and then check out what character sheets are visible, and what is visible in the "As" chat dropdown. That's what all players see by default. By default no character sheet is visible to players. When you edit a character sheet, the Visible to Players checkbox allows you to select which players can see it, and you need to specifically assign it to players, to allow them to see it. There is also an "Can be Edited and Controlled by" box. You can assign control of characters to certain players. The "As" dropdown shows to players only those characters they have control over. How do I filter the AS dropdown to only show me NPCs from Village A and not from Village B?

At this time the only way to filter the AS dropdown is to archive character sheets. Archived sheets do not show up in the AS dropdown. However, you can jump to the name you want by hitting the first letter. For example, if you want George McFly and you do not want to scroll through all of the letters to get to him you can hit "G" and it will bring you to the names that start with G. Perhaps you can rename your NPCs from each Village with a letter to indicate the Village.

That sounds like a good way to do it. If I archive a character sheet, will it come up in the Search? Cause if it does that might be my best bet.

No, archived sheets will not come up in the Search. Sorry.

To speak as a specific character it might be better to set up a macro instead of using the drop down i the chat window. I Think Michael H. has written some for that: [whisper] - /w @{selected|token_name} ?{message?} [say] - /emas @selected|token_name} ?{message?} You would select the token you want to speak as with the mouse and then hit the Macro. Maybe that could help you?

just like to point out that this works better now that its open also, you have to have the open bracket in place its missing in the above cut and paste. must have missed it in my original post, so make sure you have the format correct. [whisper] - /w @{target|token_name} ?{message?} [say] - /emas @{target|token_name} ?{message?} you don't have to deselect your current token this way, and it stops the occasional snafu where you have the wrong token selected...