Control which books in the Compendium are shared with the Player Sharing feature

Turning Compendium sharing off or on for players at the table is a great touch, but it's sort of awkward that if you happen to own the monster manual that your players end up with a handy search bar to look for the strengths and weaknesses of any monster at a moment's notice.  You may think you have trustworthy players, but when the effort to research an encounter becomes "type the word Gnoll into this search bar and we'll know the stats of what we're fighting," I feel like it invites unnecessary metagaming.  The current choice to prevent this is to turn off player sharing of your whole compendium which is like telling GM's to choose between buying GM resources or player resources for the table, or to turn off player resources while playing if they don't trust everyone at the gaming table like their own mothers do.  Just seems like a fix could be implemented where you could browse a checklist of Compendium resources and choose which resources to share and which to not.  I'm pretty sure implementing this would sell more Compendium resources, considering I've seen at least one forum post suggesting that some GM's are skeptical about buying the Monster Manuals and Bestiaries for this very reason.

Decades ago, when I first played D&D, I didn't know all the rules. Everything was a bit mysterious, and I couldn't always figure out the "best" course of action... I loved it! It's different now... I've got a grasp of the rules that can only be described as "obsessive" ; No worries... it's all good. But I can't help feeling a bit sad that "childlike delight" is gone ... replaced by precise calculations fueled by accurate information & analytical thinking (i.e. being "grown-up"). As a DM, I want to provide the same sense of wonder that I felt playing D&D for the first time. And the third-party "home-brew" materials are per fect for that purpose... fresh & new ... amazingly creative and well-produced content. Such wonderful surprises in store for my players...so pumped! And then I realized that everything I purchased is either fully visible (or fully invisible) to my players. Ugh! So, yes - a thousand times yes! Please give us the ability to control which books can be shared with our players.

Clearly, the feature doesn't currently exist.  As a DM, it would be a considerable benefit to allow me to select which compendium resources I wish to include, or exclude, in my various games particularly as I purchase the resources to use in specific ways to enhance the gaming experience. I am definitely a yes vote.

This has been particularly rough when running games of 5e and when players look up spells they want but can't tell if it's from an official book without looking for it in the compendium.

Oh, I already upvoted this suggestion. :( 4 arguments for implementations 1. AL leagues would be easier to run on Roll20. With the recent addition of D&D Adventure League to Roll20, it would greatly benefit people running those games to be able to display AL-legal content only, along with any of the other reasons given in this thread. With the amount of options in especially the 5E compendium could grow pretty large. 2. Both D&D5E and Pathfinder have character options that are meant to be available only with GM approval. It would be useful if GMs can manually or with a toggle preemptively remove these from the compendium, or at least disable them in the Charactermancer. Examples: Dunemancy spells in D&D5E Wildemount, Pathfinder 2E's "rare" spells & alchemy blueprints. 3. Would help the GM in shaping their setting. Removing classes, races, spells and other options not intended to be available to the player can make the GMs work easier upfront rather than having players comb through the menu for the handful of available options. If someone wants to run "Odyssey of the Dragonlords", it would greatly help the clutter to be able to exclude content from all other books and keep only the things needed for the setting available. Same goes for any other game that isn't played out in the Forgotten Realms. 4. Could be used to hide annoying duplicates. For those who own both D&D5E Essential Kit & the PHB, the compendium shows entries for both PHB & EK, even when the content is the same, and would make things less annoying. Future content that will also likely to have duplicates are the Genasi, that are now on Roll20 through Wildemount, but also exist in "Princes of the Apocalypse" with to my understanding identical stats. Same would also be with any spells that might be printed more than once.

This is a neat idea - but don't kid yourself:  if players want to know what Gnoll stats are, the internet is a click away and the stats are there.  Or if you're old school, nothing is preventing them from spending a few bucks to pick up whichever book has the information in question.  Switching it off in game is going to have zero effect on players' abilities to get to the underlying info.  There just isn't a 'fog of war' world available out there unless a DM completely home brews something. Which leads to an intriguing twist on the idea in this thread:  granularity -- to allow DMs to set their campaigns up as they see fit.  Perhaps in your world, there's no coming back from beyond the grave:  Raise Dead, Resurrection, Reincarnation and the like don't exist.  Or perhaps you think gnomes are ridiculous and shouldn't exist as player character options -- or at all.  In a blackboard world, each rule, item, spell, weapon, etc. would have an on/off switch, default set to 'on' -- but that would allow a DM to customize as necessary and perhaps allow another feature to exist:  modding.  Pay a book-sized fee, and you can write up any rule, item, spell, weapon, etc. and turn it 'on' for your players.  This is probably a fantasy and programming nightmare -- but it IS an interesting idea, no?

The problem is bigger than just players going and looking up monsters. As the compendium is linked to the charactermancer (or that's what it looks like), a GM may not allow content from a specific book or has purchased third party content that they use in one game but not the other. Not being able to set what is allowed where can (and in my case, dose) lead to players making "illegal" characters for a specific game just because ether the GM purchased the material for another game or the player has all the books because they happen to also be GMs for a different game. I am running into that problem right now. I run a D&D5e game as GM using a third party setting that has compendium and charactermancer support I got from the Roll20 marketplace. Since the third party content is mixed in with the official stuff from Wizards of the Coast, it is difficult for me to separate out the character options in another game I play in where that GM only allows official content. If the GM can specify what compendium content can be in each game, it would make things way batter. Right now it feels like I have a large binder filled with both official and homebrew stuff inseparably mixed together.

I found the community roundtable where they mention that this feature is being worked on. Roll20 Community Roundtable: Compendium Limiter Thank you Dev team!

Pedro S. - Thx for the update ... yep, that sounds exactly what I was hoping for. And many, many thanks to the Dev team!

This suggested feature is now live: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/8738570/release-note-for-may-26-2020" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/8738570/release-note-for-may-26-2020</a>

Nice.

Well you all beat me to it! We launched enhancement to the Compendium Settings that allows the game owner to choose which books are available in the Compendium and connected features. However, this isn't just limited to resources that you're sharing. You as the Game Owner can choose which resources are available even if you are not sharing them.&nbsp;