Revision as of 20:11, 7 October 2021

Page Updated:   2021-10-07

Often when you create a new game as a GM, you need to move/copy a ton of macros you have already created. Rather than do a laborious copy and paste, a good practice to get into is building your campaign macros as character abilities, within a Macro Character Sheet.

Macro Character

You will still need to load any API Scripts they might call. The Aaron has a script for that, too (technically a bookmarklet), although it doesn't work for One-Click installs.

Why it's useful

Starting a new campaign on roll20 does have its quirks: a big one is that transferring all macros can be downright infuriating. But, with some prep over time you can transfer all your macros in a couple of clicks! This trick is equally amazing at keeping GM notes organized, as well as making updating any macro a breeze.

Roll20 has a Character Vault and a Transmogrifier, for the sake of easily sharing work between campaigns, but it does not work with macros. Following Roll20's simplest workflow of copy&pasting you are stuck with a task that is prone to errors and extremely tedious. All that work, creating maybe hundreds of macros, and now they are are spread over so many windows that are slow to access in bulk... Let's fix this.

How it works

You probably know that the characters on Roll20 have an Attributes & Abilities-tab. We will focus on these character sheet abilities, and use them to store pretty much all our game's macros.

A character's Attributes & Abilities-tab, showing some of the stored abilities/macros it has.

This character sheet is normal in every way except for one: the abilities it has are actually many of the macros you use in your game for utility purposes. It is not intended to be used during live sessions in the same way as an enemy character for example. The idea is, you store all these macros here, instead of in the l Collections-tab.

You can still access all these macros during gameplay, but now the transmogrifier or Character Vault can easily copy this character and with it all the macros it holds as abilities.

The Result

You can now save all types of macros and information in a portable way. You can create a single character and save all the macros you have in the game to it, but it can be a good idea to splitting it up in multiple characters, such as:

• one for GM utility macros
• another one for monster attack macros
• one for Player-used macros
• one for all your GM notes / shop info

Using a GM Notes Character Sheet can be useful to have everything in one place, avoiding duplicates, being able to review info very quickly, as well as much easier to transfer to another game.

This requires that we create a macro character sheet only once, and we can keep updating the single master copy, and then transfer copies of the updated one to all your campaigns.

If you play multiple game systems, it might be practical to keep separate macro character sheets for each sheet/system type, and have your universal/API-related macros on a separate macro character sheet.

Access an ability stored this way

Just use the format,

%{MacroCharacterName|AbilityName}

What this means is you can access these abilities from the chat through API buttons, but also from any token/ character... just add this piece of code to the ability entry of your monsters, NPCs and Players... The token still has quick access, but it uses the reference ability to work. Updating the ability in the macro Sheet will update how all the tokens work that use this reference.

See Also

• Complete Guide to Macros & Rolls
  • Chat Menu - creating menus with roll buttons in the q Text Chat
• Character Vault
• Library Campaign - good idea for reducing load on your campaign
• Community FAQ
• Forum Tricks
• Category:Tips
• Category:Guides