Persistent handout sharing

[HywelPhillips]

HI All,

New to FG, just started running Masks of Nyarlathotep mega-campaign on Unity with 6e rules.

This has a LOT of player handouts. I need to keep track of which ones the players have seen.

I believe the state of sharing of handout material (maps, images, etc.) is not persistent from session to session in FGU, right?

So we need a mechanism for recording who has seen what. Ideally with some possibility for stuff not all players have yet seen, but just a master list of the stuff players have all seen would do.

Am I right in thinking a GM-maintained public note with the hyperlinks to all the handouts would do the trick? I can drag each handout to the list as it is discovered to record that it is one which should persistently be flagged as readable by everyone. Even if I then have to go through by hand and re-share everything at the start of each session, at least it gives me a master list to maintain.

Or is there an option somewhere to save the state of sharing of all handouts at the end of the session and reloading at the start of the next?

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

[LordEntrails]

Sharing is persistent. Remember, any player can control what is shown on their screen at any given time, but they can always re-open something they have closed. All they need to do is go back to the object list (images, items, etc) and re-open/select the item they want to see again.

As a GM, you too can go to that list and see what you have shared. If you have only shared it with a select set of characters it will have an S inside a circle, if you have made it public to all characters it will have a P inside a circle.

And, if you want to make reference guides for the players, use Stories, not Notes.

[GavinRuneblade]

If you have a main campaign image or map that you use most sessions (I use mine during the session recap at the beginning) you can pin images and handouts to it, then right click the pin and make it public. that way the players can view the handouts easily and you know which ones you've shared. You can put them on the map early, and leave them red (private) so only you can access them until the right time.

[Zacchaeus]

If you click on the All button at the bottom of the images window you will see a list of all the images which have been shared.

[HywelPhillips]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your responses. I'm still a bit puzzled by persistence of sharing. (I'm on Unity BTW). It seems sharing is persistent but then at a couple of points over the last two weeks, it seems to forget and make everything unshared. I've not figured out the pattern yet- maybe it is updates to a module?

Anyway, making a summary for all the players works and has let me give the handouts more meaningful-to-the-players name in the note in a really easy way (note stolen from such-and-such office, instead of "handout 13") without making it any more difficult for me to look up from the GM material. So that's grand.

We're really enjoying it, and I spent a few hours yesterday moving all my current D&D campaign from "other big VTT system" to FG. I can't imagine trying to run D&D remotely as the players go up to higher levels without the support of the combat tracker. It was all I could do to handle the book-keeping with them at 2nd and 3rd level fighting a bunch of thugs and a wizard- can't conceive of running 9th level characters in a big battle that way. Really looking forward to running that on FG instead.

I really like that FG is built from the ground up to support a GM running a roleplaying game and is structured accordingly. All the "top rank objects" make sense - like stories, encounters, items, parcels, etc.. It's so much easier to organise a session and keep track of and hyperlink everything with pins, too.

Cheers, Hywel

[LordEntrails]

Glad you are enjoying FG Hywel :)

Shared objects should persist unless you do a /flushdb or unshare them. So if they are unsharing, please let us know if you can reproduce. I will add that if you share an item with a single player and that player then uses a different username when they log in, they will not have the previously shared content. Individual shares are to players, not characters (I'm 90% sure).

Oh, and you can say things like Roll20 here. We don't have a problem with community members talking about other VTT's. We enjoy all respectful discussions :)

And note, I'm just a community member, not sure how to say the above and not sound more official than I am :)