A need standard practice for Creators to do.

[DragonBetween]

Please can we pass the word out to all the people who create content for fantasy grounds to stop making every chapter a group in stories tab. It only takes three modules that use the story group as a table of content to make the story group list way to long. The Dungeon of the Mad Mage is what brought me to this current request. People like me who spend way to much money on FGU content like to have as many modules open as possible. There is way to much usable info in every piece of content to use, especially with Items and NPC. See I don't care about the groups in the other tabs, because of the way you can filter and search on those list. But in the stories group list is the only way to filter out what module content you want to look through. Make one Story Group per module and make a table of content at the top of that group and link every chapter in there.

And please if you have created content this way I would be very grateful if you fixed this and updated it. (I had to at least ask, I know that would be a lot of work.)

I really appreciate all the had work it takes these people to convert things into FG. You guys are the life blood to the FG system and what really makes this a powerful tool. Even if I ran a pen and paper game I would use FG just to be able you navigate all the content fast.

[LordEntrails]

Current agreed upon best practice is to put each chapter of a module in its own story group. Which is opposite of what you want.

Here's my opinion on why the current method is best.

- FG has 3 levels of organizing story/written content. By module, by group, and by story entry.
- Having more than 1 module (or 1 GM and 1 Player) module per product gets confusing.
- Having story entries that are too long are troublesome, and make finding what you need difficult.
So that means the number of modules is pretty set / non-negotiable. And the length of story entries is also somewhat set (one story per location or event typically).
That leaves the only other means of organizing and filtering story content to the be the use of groups.

Reducing the number of groups to one per module now means that for something like DoMM, there would be hundreds or more story entries in a single group, making that group difficult to use, PLUS it would mimic the organizational level of module. i.e. if you only have 1 group per module, then why bother having groups since you can already sort/filter by module (by simple loading/unloading those module).

So, what I would suggest you consider is not leaving all your modules loaded. Instead, use the loading and unloading of modules as a means to help filter your story entries. Also, start using the navigation arrows, particularly the up arrow, on the bottom of story entries to help navigate.

Now, if groups could have a sub-group structure, that would allow for more refinement in the story organization, but I'm not sure that would be more desirable as it comes with issues of its own.

Let's hear what others think.

[Zacchaeus]

I'm going to have to say no to this one.

The modules are written following as closely as possible to the books on which they are based and since those are divided into chapters then that's how I divide up the story entries as well. You will often get a reference in the text to see chapter xx and so if you haven't got chapters then the user isn't going to know where to look. Most modules (not all admittedly) preface the chapter heading with an abbreviation of the module title (so in Dungeon of the Mad Mage for example the chapters are headed DMM 01, DMM 02 etc) so even with several modules open you should be able to differentiate the story entries. In addition usually the first story of the first chapter does in fact contain a contents page - so that's already in place. And of course you can use the reference manual which doesn't amalgamate story entries for several modules since each reference is unique to each module and it is more easily searched than story entries are.

Having literally thousands of similarly numbered story entries isn't going to help find anything if each module was just one chapter with a long list of stories (DotMM has 1,560 story entries alone). I'd also wonder about whether there would be a massive performance hit that having all the story entries indexed when you open the story tab as well.

I'm afraid you are in a minority here I think; most people will only have the adventure module that they are playing open at any one time. If you want to have some content from another module in your current campaign then do that in preparation. Copy the items you want into your campaign and then close the modules. Having a lot of modules open is going to impact your load times and possibly also your performance.

[DragonBetween]

You both have super valid points. I currently only have the DOMM adventure open as far as adventure modules go. But its the other modules I use that I don't want to have to load and unload. Mainly because I have no idea what is exactly in them. These are books that are filled with NPC's, Monsters, Items, etc.. So I need those open because I use the filter and search features to narrow down what I'm looking for and most of the time that is vague to start with. I.e. like I want a CR 3 monster, then I look at the list, oh lets make it undead, and so on. If those modules are not loaded then that is hard to do. This feature is what makes fantasy grounds so amazing along with other things.

I now see that my example was a bad one that yes adventures need groups for every chapter. But maybe the people converting other books into modules should not have their stuff in the stories tab. None of the core 5e books are in the stories tab. I also have a lot of extensions and all of their instructions are placed in stories.

Now I think a better idea would to be to leave the story tab for game stories like adventures and all of the other modules based on books and instructions for extensions should be left in the library like all of the core books. The story tab seams to just get crowded and there isn't a good way to filter threw that.

[Zacchaeus]

In the case of adventures the story has always been used for each location or page in the adventure. It's only fairly recently that reference manuals have been a thing in an adventure. Rulebooks on the other hand are always been just reference manuals; some very old modules may not have a reference manual but anything in the last several years will only be a reference if it is a rulebook or a supplement to the rules. So there won't be story entries in those. You may not be aware but there is (currently) no native way to create a reference manual inside FG - but that will change fairly soon I suspect - so creating story entries is easier.

As for extensions then that's really up to each extension developer. As I said above there's no native way to create a reference inside FG so I imagine that the extension author would find it a lot easier just to create a story for their instructions rather than going to the extra trouble of creating a reference manual.

[LordEntrails]

So I need those open because I use the filter and search features to narrow down what I'm looking for and most of the time that is vague to start with. I.e. like I want a CR 3 monster, then I look at the list, oh lets make it undead, and so on. If those modules are not loaded then that is hard to do. This feature is what makes fantasy grounds so amazing along with other things.
I get this. For me it depends on a couple of things, I usually try to prepare this type of stuff in advance. And I do that in a Development Campaign which I then export to a module and open just that module in my play campaign.

Usually rather than making specific encounters, I will prepare a couple of roving encounters that I can use in different situations. So say the party is in a town and their are 3 different factions (a thieves guild, a kobold gang, and an adventuring group). I might then prepare 2 or 3 encounters for each, say a strong, medium, and weak. Then as needed I can drop any of those in either as a random encounter of if they do something unexpected etc. This is a philosophy/technique I learned from the Alexandrian (https://thealexandrian.net/)and probably a few other GMing blogs. This way I don't need all my NPC products open in my play campaign.

But, I do know there is always stuff that pops up that may not fit into the above or I may not have had time to prep that. In that case, I only keep the main NPC references open in my play campaign; MM, Mordeken's, 1d6 Adventures, Monsters of the Guild and maybe Xanathar's. Between those, I have atleast something I can just rename in the CT and give them the description I want. (They don't know or care if I tell them it is an animated statue when am using the stat block of a veteran).