A couple questions about using images/pdfs without them being downloadable

Hi, so, I'm investigating the use of this site to play a table top war game called Federation Commander. One problem there though is that there are certain things called "SSDs" that are basically a picture of your ship with many check boxes and some tracking aids on them. They need to be viewable by all players, and you need to be able to make marks directly onto them. There are also many of them available - and they're a product you can purchase as a PDF. So my question is thus: Is there a way to use these cards as images that can have marks made on / erased from them so that they are visible in the site WITHOUT being downloadable files? Because these cards are absolutely critical to the game and must be viewable by all, you have to have a way to share them and mark them up. The problem there is that if it's a downloadable file that becomes a piracy issue and I won't do that to the company. It's been 6 years since I've used this site... so I'm a weeeeeeeeeee bit behind on what it can actually do these days. I'd really appreciate some help if anyone's got any to offer. If I didn't explain well, let me know and I can attempt to clarify :)

If there aren't too many of them you could put them on the VTT as part of the map and then you could write on them and erase.

And those VTT bits can't be downloaded or copied? Also wondering what you mean by too many? Is there a limit to the number of maps that can be displayed or do you mean you'd have to physically put them down as one whole map with the actual hex map*? Like I said it's been a while :( *The game requires a fairly large hex map for maneuvering and 'terrain'. The game is great but there's very little online presence or outreach and that's a shame. Would be nice to change that. Here's a link to the demo-rules for Federation Commander, if you look down at page 30 and below it has some of these SSDs, so you can tell what I'm talking about :) <a href="http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/FCFirstMissions.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/FCFirstMissions.pdf</a>

I am not a lawyer, but I think this would fall into the category of personal use to play the game. Besides, anything you can see on a web page will be downloadable in some manner; it has to download to your PC for you to see it. We need to be diligent about copyright, but I think we should not allow it to stop us from playing the game. Edit: You could also contact the publisher and ask them about your use of their cards online in a Roll20 game and if they have a policy about it.

The last bit's a thought. Pretty sure they wouldn't like it though. That's one thing that's really annoying with RPGs and online play in particular... when you're in a group, you share rulebooks and resources and no one cares. But when you're online, if you share PDFs of the same things it's considered piracy. Are like... pdfs that self delete after a week a thing yet? I can't think of any other way around this limitation :(

In Roll20, PDFs only upload one page and it would convert to an image in a handout, so you could not really use it to mark up as a "character sheet." How many of these SSD sheets are there? Making them into a character sheet might be doable if there are not too many, but I know there are many many types of ships in the Star Trek universe, so I doubt a character sheet could encompass all of them. Patrick may have the best idea, loading images of the SSD as objects on the map, and you use the Roll20 drawing tools to mark up over them. Edit: As for contacting the publisher, you can also suggest they contact Roll20 to partner and sell their materials in the Roll20 Marketplace.

There's many different ships that could be fielded. The largest battle I was ever in had 6 ships on each side, but it can be larger. Depends on how crazy you wanna get and how long you wanna play. How's the map drop? Again, my problem here is not having used this site in 6 years, I'm very ignorant of what it can do now. Would you just plop an image onto the map, could that image then be moved around, too? Can anyone drop them in whenever? Can anyone mark up the thing? Or would a ship card dropped onto the map simply be a part of the map and immovable? There is actually a site to play the game online that's prebuilt to be pretty detailed, but there are barriers to entry. You've got to buy it in 3 month or annual increments, and as far as community goes it's pretty insular. These are niche games. The reason I'd like to do it here - even if it's just time spent running the training-rules until someone decides to buy in and play a real game - is because there's more people and it's more accessible and I think it would have a better chance of attracting new players. That and I over think things pretty commonly.

My suggestion was to make it part of the map and unmovable.&nbsp; The markings are on a layer, if the image gets moved, the markings would be left behind.&nbsp;

Just off the top of my head, and following Patrick's idea, I would upload the SSDs as images to Roll20. To further insulate yourself from copyright concerns (though again, IANAL) and to discourage people from wanting to download them, you could do mockups or low-resolution scans of the official SSDs, but enough that they are still functional to play the game. Place the image on the Object Layer and resize it to a point that it is legible at a reasonable zoom. Click the Add button in the Journal and add a character for this SSD card. For example, "Klingon Bird of Prey SSD." Save this "character," then call it up and click the Edit button. With the SSD image on the VTT selected, click the Use Selected Token button to set the image as the default token for that sheet. Click Save Changes and close the sheet. Delete the image from the VTT. Drag the Klingon Bird of Prey SSD from the Journal to the VTT by its name (not by the three bars). The image should re-appear on the VTT at the same size it was. Repeat these steps for each ship type. Once the players join, set both the "In Player's Journals" and the "Can Be Edited &amp; Controlled By" permissions on each ship's sheet to "All Players." Now any player can drag one out to the VTT if they want. Position the SSDs and players would use the Roll20 drawing tool to write over them. The problem with this is you will need a very big map to both move your ships and display these sheets to a readable degree. Question: do all players need to see all the sheets, or are your sheets hidden from other players? It's a little complicated but you could run one game with just the SSD sheets and another game with the ship combat. Roll20 only recognizes one game logged in at a time in a single browser, so you would have to run one in Chrome and one in Firefox, or you could run one game in an Incognito or Private Browsing session. I will ponder more. Other folks may have better ideas as it is late for me.

Wow that's really detailed and way more complicated than I realized this thing could even do. I will try to play around with that some tomorrow. Also getting late here - in that place where I'm thinking a mile a minute but too tired feeling to do anything else, lol. Thank you all for the help and instruction :)

Kalanth said: That's one thing that's really annoying with RPGs and online play in particular... when you're in a group, you share rulebooks and resources and no one cares. But when you're online, if you share PDFs of the same things it's considered piracy. Roll20 is designed with copyright protection in mind. Any stuff you load into roll20 is visible only to your gaming group, when you share it with them. It's not like a file sharing site where you upload something, and other people can search for it and download it. No-one outside your group can access the files in your game. So don't worry about copyright - using things here is exactly &nbsp;the same as sharing books with your face-to-face group.

GiGs is correct that things in your game are not available to the whole world - just to players in your game. I was working under the assumption (possibly incorrect) that the Kalanth was looking at pick-up type games and that he did not know the trustworthiness of the players in the game to not download these SSD cards.

You could also watermark the images. Put a disclaimer over them that is difficult or impossible to remove.

I advise using only the aforementioned suggested method of: Put the cards on the "Map Layer". Let players mark them on the Token Layer. The end. Anything that is posted anywhere on the internet, is and can be stolen, copied. A graphic you put on the map layer cannot be downloaded individually by a normal computer user. But it could easily be Screenshotted by someone who is in the game. If that would not be an acceptable risk then I would not upload/play it on the internet.

Gold: the ability to just right-click and copy image is exactly what I was concerned about, after having to share these as PDFs was eliminated as a need. There is actually an online-play option for the game that uses an app and is very nice; but it has barriers to entry and limited utility, and almost no LFG/PUG. That said, people could screenshot the things there every bit as easily, so I will ask the publishers about whether they're ok with that risk I guess. And yes, Rabulius is correct: I wanted to do pick up games as the player base for these games is tiny and shrinking (at least to my knowledge, I have no sales data, but I haven't seen the game supported in local stores in years) and for such a pedigreed and excellent game I find that very sad. I figured I'd probably start with the intro-game they have freely available since none of that is worried about. As for watermarking, I'm not sure how to do that. I'm not a subscriber to Adobe Acrobat (which is egregiously over priced) so pdfs are often kind of a pain in the ass, lol. Thanks again for all the help! Just dropping them onto the layer seems the safest/best route now that I've been told you can't just download the file directly and have to take more steps.

Kal, I'm following up to confirm. There is a possible right-click place in Roll20 but it only occurs if the GM use the "Shift-Z" technique to pop up a lightbox (full screen) of one of your images. As long as you (The GM) does not use Shift-Z technique, right-click Save As.. will NOT work for players. Screenshotting works everywhere. Any game on any digital platform is subject to screenshots. I am not familiar with your game type. If it is a game background board that you arrange tokens / cards / moving pieces on top of it, then you will know that any screenshots will be marred by the overlaying game-pieces. So then even a screenshot would not be useful for copying the content. There is no way to copy/download a PDF that you upload here. PDF uploads are immediately converted to JPG graphic. The actual PDF file is not existent in your library or tabletop, no matter what. The tabletop simply does not serve-up PDF's in PDF format. You can use PDF to add graphics or text, but it will not remain as a whole PDF document on Roll20's servers.

Right on, thanks for that information :) I'm glad they have these measures in place!