Organising Characters Within the Journal (GM)

I have recently started dming a campaign online for my regular gaming group. As we are split across the country it makes for a very easy and convienient way to play in the evenings after work with little to no preparation (other than the gm prep). One of the things as a GM I like the most is the ability to create a character page for any notable NPC that the players meet or interact with. I use the GM area to track everything I know about the character and let the players use the bio area as a "party record" area. This is really nice because as the players meet people and make contacts they build up a list of people that they just feel they can turn to in specific situations. The big downside I'm finding though is that I'm quickly generating a massive list of characters that is clogging up the journal.  My suggestion is that you add some way to group characters, much in the archive feature works. This allows me as the dm to group together characters who are all affiliated with a specific gang or trade without having to edit their names and put this affiliation at the start ensuring they all turn up together. This makes it far simpler and cleaner for both the GM and the players.  As a corollary to this suggestion I would also add the ability for a GM to hide groupings from the players, allowing me to group together npcs but hide this grouping if the players are not yet aware of the gang or group.

Bump - I also want this.

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Good idea!

Great suggestion.

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This would also be great, so that the DM can hide the "monster" group, as well. Making one copy of an orc so I can reuse it over and over agian is great.

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+1 folders???

We have tagging available right now, which is actually somewhat better than folders. If you tag an Orc Berserker with level, type, size, name, etc, you can look them up by those tags instead of just sticking them in a folder.

Tagging doesn't clean up the interface, though.  Where folders allow me to not have as much visual noise.  Also, if I mistype my tag, I'm not finding it then, either.  But, then again, perhaps I'm too old, but I've never fully understood the benefits of tagging as a method of organization.  I think it works great for searching, but when it come to organization I like a clean slate (or as clean as I can get it).

Like GV says tagging is fine for searching but I'm like him in the fact I don't like or enjoy having the clutter of journals and sheets all about. Archiving them doesn't help much either because if you search with a tag and it is archived then all you get is the archive moved to the top without it showing anything but the title archived files. If you go to look in the archive all you get is the complete mess that you would normally have if it wasn't archived so it does nothing for me at all but move the mess from one section to another section. I don't consider it being organized when I can't have all my files separated into specific folders. For example : I have 20 files that deal with character races, character classes, attribute rolling, gold rolling, equipment lists. Now you archive them. Now I have 30 other files for the setting that I make for future reference and present reference. I archive them also. I now have say 45 files archived. Now I create another 40 monster handouts and archive them. I'm up to 85 files I go to tag search for a file that is archived. Well it pulls the archive title but nothing else. I still have to dig through the archives to find the file. If I don't archive it I have a clutter of 85 files. Yes I can now search them through tags but to my eyes that is just a big clutter of files and it drives me nuts to have something like that. Consider it almost an OCD on my account in the fact I need a clean working area. Having all those files cluttering my work area which is where I run my game from just bothers me to no end. I can deal with folders holding my files because I can seperate them more clearer than just tagging them or archiving them.  Sorry for the long post but it has been pestering me big time for a while.

I could even handle being able to archive the files into separate archives and being able to rename them also. That would work also.

tom b. said: "As a corollary to this suggestion I would also add the ability for a GM to hide groupings from the players, allowing me to group together npcs but hide this grouping if the players are not yet aware of the gang or group." This. +1 Will always support the idea of folder organisation for Characters and NPC's in the Journal. Tagging is a great feature, but it is not a substitute for the intuitive organisation that folders provide. For instance I still haven't figured out how to keep player characters listed in the Journal and cycle through the various NPC's and monsters I want in play all at the same time via tagging. This might be less of an issue if I could access a character sheet via a linked token, but that's not currently an issue either.

The benefit of tagging instead of folders is that you only ever have one instance of a monster. Instead of copying Orc Warrior to six different encounter folders, you just tag the orc warrior with encounter-1 encounter-2 encounter-3 encounter-4 or whatever your encounter naming/numbering system is. All the tags appear in a drop down list at the top of the journal tab and you can select them from there.

If you say so but I just prefer a folder like structure for my organization. It is what I learned and what I'm comfortable with.

I don't organize things into encounters, though.  I have a bestiary where I keep all my monsters so I'd have one instance of Orc and not multiple anyway...unless there are different kinds of Orcs.  So, tagging doesn't benefit me in that manner. My organizational structure is typically something like: Templates, PCs, NPCs, Bestiary, etc... Tagging would be great in Bestiary because if I have a lot of monsters I could go into that folder and search for the tag.  Or, I could even have a generic monster template that might apply to multiple types of monsters and I could include them in the tags, but I'm still going to have more monster sheets than I want to see all the time.  So, I'm not saying tagging isn't useful, but it doesn't cut down on clutter.  In my current campaign I have: 4 basic templates, 4 active PCs, 7 active NPCs, 20+ monsters and 11 handouts.  I've only entered the 4 templates, 2 of the PCs and the 11 handouts and my sidebar is already full. And, like Metroknight said, it's kind of an OCD thing for me.  I could tag the templates with "Template" and the NPCs with "NPC", etc, but does nothing to remove the clutter.

You'd just have folders of clutter. I didn't like tagging at first until I started making monster templates on my campaign. Tagging works better than folders.

I agree, so +1 Apart from that, a grouping of the entries under headers you can name, which can be collapsed or expanded. Much like grouping rows or columns in Excel.

This post is 4 weeks old now, not sure if anyone will pick this up, but I love the tagging feature!  The problem however is that the character bar isn't just a mess for me, it is also a mess for my confused players.  Since the search and tag functions only operate for GMs as of right now my players still have to search through all the congestion trying to find that one guy who sold them that potion one time from that old city we stayed in.  I can see issues with GMs who use the tagging function and want to keep it a secret to avoid player discoveries (ex. Jake is in the super secret "assassin" guild)... but since I, as a GM, spend WAY more time with my campaign and tend to remember better than the players who Sebastian the Assassin is, 90% of the time the issue is something like a player saying... "Oh!  Don't we know someone from that church/guild/town/bathouse/death cult/swing dance club/blah blah blah, BUT for some reason I can't find him listed under the S's for Shady Merchant Guy?  Oh, his name is Tanis O'hulahan? What gives GM!"...  Is there any talk of helping the players out with the tagging and search funtions?

+1 for folders.   Tags are great for searching but folders help with mental organisation and removing clutter.   My perfect organisational system is a combination between tags (the detail) and folders (high level).    Anything that gets rid of clutter is great.   And as 95% of my players understand folders over tags - the more we can here the better.

If the Devs do anything next update...Please let it be folders...  +1

Metroknight said: If you say so but I just prefer a folder like structure for my organization. It is what I learned and what I'm comfortable with. yea, I don't really see why having the option to use folders would be an issue.  If you don't like em, don't use em, plus you can still tag stuff if you want to search for stuff and have built up a large number of npcs across various folders.

I would really like to see this as well, my character journal is getting crowded with just my players and their pets (2 rangers and a summoner) with the addition to my NPCs many of whom are only relevant in one specific area of the world it would be nice to be able to organise them in such a way where if they go back to city A I can easily access them. Tags are ok in the right situation but it means you have to predict how you're going to need to access them, 'Right I need to tag this guy as Duke, Nobility, Wizard, City A, Evil, Goatee, lisp'... and then remember what you tagged them with 6 months down the line when you need to access him again

I can see (and do use) the benefits of the Tag system, but I'd sure like to have folders available to keep my tagged handouts organized. :D +1

To me having the best of both would be great. Have folders that are taggable while their contents are taggable also. This means you could search by folders then when you go into the folder you can searched again by tags for the handout. example of  folders (tag) way maps(world) -city(region1)-city(region2)-city(region1) Npc -Region1-Region2-Region3 Monsters -All the monsters needed(area,level,etc) folders are bolded, tags are inside (these things) Now with the tag only system it looks like this city(region1) city(region2) city(region1) Npc(Region1) Npc(Region2) Npc(Region3) Monster  (area,level,etc) Monster  (area,level,etc) Monster (area,level,etc) Monster (area,level,etc) Monster (area,level,etc) Monster (area,level,etc) etc... Who know how many monster some gm's need and how much they mix up because the handouts sort by default alphabetically. That mean if a monster name starts with an A and the next one starts with a B but you have an NPC sheet that starts with an Ai while there is a map name that starts with an Au they will be all jumbled together. Never very way of having things organized. I'm not knocking tags they are great if you remember what you tagged your stuff as but a clean visual organization (to me) is a better way of going. Now when those two methods are combined and made optional (letting a person chose which one or both they want to use) then that would be wonderful.

No one is saying that the tagging feature is bad.  But, personally, as I am about to become a GM for the first time on Roll20 to keep a game I am part of from dying, I know I would also greatly prefer being able to organize things into folders.  I don't want to have to look up what I need by search strings, I want to be able to double click my way through a well known due to creation/familiarity file tree