Advice on Dealing with Disruptive Players - Drawing, Pinging, Dice on Tabletop

I am DMing a game for my nephews (10-14 one is borderline autistic) and their dad.  I am not going to dump them for more mature players.  When they are behaving it is loads of fun and great bonding for quarantine.  I have tried searching without enough luck, but am hoping for community advice and tips on minimizing the Roll20 disruptions that tend to show up or to help us establish accountability for out of Roll20 consequences: They doodle on the map when they get bored, creating distractions and obstructions for the other players to do what they need. They sometimes drag dice rolls from chat onto the table, creating distractions and obstructions again.  They like using the ping and measuring tool non-stop everywhere and anywhere. I have already figured out: Minimize messing with tokens by turn off player control of tokens when needed. Move/banish an individual player back to the landing page by dragging them to the page in the page menu. There are settings in a player’s client to turn off advanced dice and make measurements hidden from others.  As far as I can tell, when my nephews find these they could turn it back on. Other things that might help: How can I tell who the offender is?    The measurements are fixed to their own color, but the dice don’t seem to be and they can change the color of the drawings (to their siblings character color).  We have been having my brother going to each screen to see who can delete it, but I should be able to determine this directly.  API should be able to do this with a simple script, but I would sure appreciate some help writing it.  Maybe you select an object (dice, drawing) and run the script and it whispers it to dm in chat? Is there an API way to turn on and off player tools? Can I lockdown the color assigned to characters to make it easier to recognize without having to keep comparing pings to the square by their names. How can I write an API script to move the owner of a token to the jail page?  I saw a few that moved the party flag, but couldnt figure enough about how they work to adapt them for my purpose. Secret tricks you like that I haven't thought of. Thank you in advance!

Hi Eric, sounds a little like herding cats... Not sure you can do much about roll20's default player agency in the vtt. I believe dice and ping colors are tied to the player's avatar color setting.   This might help to stop doodling; [Script] DryErase -- Gives you control over how your players are drawing on your maps.

As Vince said, DryErase should help with the drawings.  With dragging dice to the screen, are you talking about the 3d dice, or the 2d dice that show up from /roll?  For the latter, you could write a script to delete them automatically when they show up on the tabletop.  You could also create a script that keeps players' colors set to transparent, so their pings don't show up (same would probably work for drawings, but since those create objects, using DryErase still would be a good idea).  Probably a lot of it will just be dealing with it socially which I know will be challenging.

Thank you so much for your fast reply.  DryErase looks like just the set of tools that I was looking for.  It will keep the drawing from distracting others and let me know who made them so we can try fairly to correct the misbehavior.  Wonderful! The ping and measuring are at least restricted to the players color, so hopefully we can do some policing that way.  If it doesnt settle down I will try a script to set it to transparent.

Cool.  Let me know if you need help with the script.  I was sitting here thinking about this, the best thing I can come up with regarding how I'd handle this with my few unruly kiddos would be redirection.  At that age, giving them a secret handout to design some part of the world might get them more involved and keep their hands from being idle.  You might also be able to design some sort of brain teasers, or puzzles they could solve that would occupy their attention.  Possibly break an image up into puzzle pieces and mix and rotate them on a map page where you put them and have them re-assemble it.  You could even give control of part of the pieces to each of them, if you want to foster a bit of teamwork (and it wouldn't break down into arguments...).  If you could tie that to the adventure some how (reassemble this shattered tablet to learn spell X), it might pay dividends in their focus and involvement.  Hope that helps!

DryErase worked great for our monday game.  Much easier to issue prompt correction and the troubles quickly subsided.   The idea for puzzles is great.  I'll bet I can work that into a nice side quest.

Great question and answers, above. Only tip/trick I could add besides what's already been said --- Make your Page size very large, much larger than your "Map" area. Create large margins. Tell them they are allowed to Draw, but ONLY in the margins areas. Slightly higher level, create colored & labeled Boxes in the margins. "Billy you can draw, but only inside the blue box labeled Billy's Coloring Area." Slightly higher level again, make the boxes that I described as above, but put the boxes on Dynamic Lighting layer with vision and movement restrictions turned on. Give Billy a token with sight, and put his token inside the box, so he can ONLY see the contents of the box. (And everyone else cannot see the content of his box, unless they have Editing Control of Token:Billy). I used this last technique to create a Coloring Book Contest page. Everyone was drawing inside their own box without seeing the others. At the end of the challenge I could turn off Dynamic Lighting, and everyone sees everyone's drawings, side by side on the same page.

Another one, You know about "Split The Party". You know you can send Billy to the splash page (drawing jail). You also realize, of course, you could send Billy to the Free Drawing page, more of a distraction than a penalty. New tip: There is an API script that makes Split The Party faster/easier. With that API you can just put a command or a button that works like !send:Billy and quickly always move one person to their drawing page when it is not their turn. I don't think this is better, just adding to thread for sake of options. In the first place I was gonna say that DryErase script that Vince recommended that The Aaron made. :) Glad that's working for you.