RPGG Character Manager

Manage your TTRPG characters and inject formatting into RPGGeek forum posts

RPGG Character Manager — your tabletop RPG characters and combat tracker, built right into RPGGeek's play-by-post forums. RPGG Character Manager is a companion for playing tabletop role-playing games by post on RPGGeek. It keeps your characters, their stats, resources, dice rolls and reusable text ready at your fingertips, adds a small toolbar directly above the forum reply box, and — for game masters — runs full combat with initiative and HP tracking. No more copying numbers back and forth, hunting for the right BBCode, or fumbling with the dice syntax. Everything you need to play lives one click away, exactly where you post. The extension is completely system-agnostic. There is no hard-coded Dungeons & Dragons logic, no fixed character sheet, no assumptions about which game you play. You describe your character out of small, reusable building blocks, so the very same tool works for Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, homebrew systems, or anything else played on the forum. WHY INSTALL IT Play-by-post games are wonderful, but they are also fiddly. Every turn you find yourself scrolling back to your character sheet to check a modifier, retyping the same speech or action formatting, working out what your attack bonus adds up to, and pasting dice notation into RPGGeek's roller. As a game master it is worse still: you are tracking everyone's hit points across encounters, keeping the initiative order straight in your head or in a scratch file, and manually applying every hit and heal. RPGG Character Manager takes all of that off your plate: - Your character's live numbers travel with you. Adjust hit points, spend a spell slot or tick off ammunition from a compact popup, and it is instantly reflected everywhere. - Real dice rolls are one click away. Pick a roll, press the button, and the extension creates a genuine RPGGeek server-side roll and drops the result tag into your post — the forum renders the actual outcome, with no way to fudge it. - Your favourite formatting becomes a button. Turn "italic speech", "bold action", stat banners and any other BBCode you reuse into one-click snippets that wrap your highlighted text or insert at the cursor. - Game masters get a complete combat runner: initiative order, turn tracking, per-combatant HP, conditions, and the ability to apply any dice roll in the thread straight to a target's health. - The right character loads itself. Link a character or campaign to the threads it plays in, and it is selected automatically the moment you open that thread. If you run or play even one ongoing forum game, this removes a dozen small frictions from every single post. WHO IT IS FOR - Players in ongoing play-by-post games on RPGGeek who want their sheet, rolls and formatting one click away. - Game masters who need to track party HP across sessions and run initiative without a scratch file. - Groups playing any system — mainstream, indie or homebrew — thanks to the system-agnostic model and shareable templates. - Anyone tired of retyping the same BBCode and dice notation into every forum post. PRIVACY FIRST The extension asks for a single permission — local storage — and nothing else. All of your characters, campaigns and settings are stored locally in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, no account is required, there are no analytics, no trackers, and no external servers of ours. The only network traffic the extension ever makes is to RPGGeek itself, and only when you press the Roll button: it reuses your existing logged-in RPGGeek session to create a dice roll, exactly as the website would. Your data stays on your machine. HOW IT WORKS — THREE SURFACES The extension shows up in three places, each suited to a different moment of play. 1) THE CONFIGURATION PAGE (options) This is your workshop — the set-up-once place. Here you create, edit and delete characters and campaigns, define what they are made of, choose your theme, and read the built-in help guide. Everything you change here syncs live to the other two surfaces. 2) THE POPUP (toolbar button) The at-the-table companion. Click the toolbar icon to quickly change state mid-game: nudge a statistic up or down, tick a resource, or reset for a new day. For a game master, the popup becomes a full combat runner with initiative and turn tracking. 3) THE FORUM TOOLBAR (content script) A small toolbar the extension places directly above RPGGeek's post/reply box. It gives you one-click snippet buttons and a roll picker, so you insert formatting and post real dice rolls without ever leaving the message you are writing. All three surfaces read and write the same local storage and stay in sync live. Edit a stat in the popup and the options page sees it instantly; add a snippet in the options page and the forum toolbar updates immediately. THE CHARACTER MODEL A character is simply a name plus four kinds of components. This tiny, flexible model is what makes the tool work for any system. STATISTICS — a single number: hit points, armour class, an ability modifier, a save bonus, anything. A statistic can carry an optional "base" value (for example maximum HP) so a single Reset restores it, and you can choose whether it appears in the popup with quick adjust buttons. RESOURCES — a row of checkboxes for tracking limited things: spell slots, hit dice, ammunition, luck points, ki, inspiration. Set how many boxes there are, tick them off as you spend them, and optionally have them clear on reset. The popup shows a handy used/total count such as "2 / 4". ROLLS — a dice template that can reference your other components. Write "d20 + $DEX" and it resolves to "d20 + 3" using your current Dexterity. Supports full dice notation: NdM, plus/minus terms, and keep-lowest/keep-highest suffixes for disadvantage and advantage (for example 2d20l and 2d20h). SNIPPETS — reusable text a toolbar button drops into your post. A banner, a stat line, italic speech, bold actions — anything you type over and over. Snippets can reference your components and can wrap your highlighted selection. REFERENCE TOKENS — THE GLUE Rolls and snippets can point at your other components by their ID, so everything stays consistent as your numbers change: - $DEX inserts that statistic's current value. - $SPELL inserts the number of checked boxes in that resource. - $SPELL:bar renders that resource as a visual bar, for example ■■□□□ (filled = used), using the glyph style you choose in Settings. - $SELECTION (snippets only) is where your highlighted forum text lands. Include it to wrap your selection — for example [i]"$SELECTION"[/i] turns a highlighted phrase into italic quoted speech — or leave it out to simply insert at the cursor. Everything is validated live as you type. Unknown references are flagged in red so you can spot a broken link immediately, and invalid states are never saved silently. REAL DICE ROLLS, NOT FAKE ONES When you roll from the forum toolbar, the extension does not print a random number of its own. It resolves your template's references, then asks RPGGeek's own dice server to make a genuine roll while you are logged in, and inserts the resulting geekroll tag into your post. RPGGeek renders the true outcome when you submit — the same trusted, un-fudgeable roll everyone expects in a play-by-post game. If you are not logged in or a roll fails, the toolbar shows a clear error and inserts nothing, so an un-rolled formula is never accidentally posted. No extra browser permissions are needed; it simply reuses your existing RPGGeek session from the page. SYSTEM TEMPLATES — START IN SECONDS New characters can start blank (Custom) or pre-filled from a system template — a shareable preset holding a system's typical components. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition are built in, so you can spin up a familiar sheet in one click. A template is only a starting point: the character it creates is a completely normal, fully editable character, never a locked link. Templates are plain JSON files designed to be shared. Export any template to a file to hand to your group or to use as a reference for authoring your own, and import shared files straight into the picker without reinstalling anything. Every import is validated: IDs must be unique and valid, and every reference inside a roll or snippet must point to a component defined in the same template. THEMES AND RESOURCE STYLING The Settings panel offers two global, all-surfaces preferences that apply live: - Theme — choose the colour scheme for the options page and popup from several hand-crafted looks (Parchment, Arcane, Cosmos, Verdant, Tide). - Resource rendering — decide how a :bar renders your resources. Pick Squares (■□), Circles (●○), spaced circles, Checkboxes (☑☐), or supply your own custom glyphs and spacing. The choice applies to the editor preview and the forum toolbar alike. THE POPUP IN PLAY Mark the characters you are actively playing with a star. The popup lists only those active characters, so it never gets cluttered with retired or one-shot sheets, and you can switch focus from a dropdown. Statistics you flagged for the popup appear with -100 / -10 / -1 / +1 / +10 / +100 buttons for quick mid-game changes; resources appear as tap-to-toggle checkboxes with a used/total count. A single Reset restores every statistic that has a base value and clears every resource you marked to clear. A Quick Reference section lists all your stats and every roll's resolved notation at a glance. SMART CHARACTER SELECTION BY THREAD Tell a character which RPGGeek threads it plays in — just paste the thread URL or its numeric ID into the configuration page. From then on, opening a matching thread focuses that character automatically and adds it to your active set, so the toolbar and popup already show the right sheet before you type a word. A manual switch sticks until you move to a different thread. You can link one character to many threads, which is perfect if you play the same character across several games or sub-threads. FOR GAME MASTERS — CAMPAIGNS AND COMBAT Alongside single characters, the Campaigns tab is the game master's side of the tool, and it reuses the same three surfaces: set a campaign up in the configuration page, run combat from the popup, and apply damage from the forum toolbar. A campaign holds the threads it runs in, its players, and its combats. Like a character, it auto-activates when you open a linked thread or when you press the star, and only the active campaign appears in the popup. PLAYERS — the party as the DM tracks them: name, maximum and current HP, an optional condition, and an "active in initiative" flag. Because HP lives on the campaign, it persists across every encounter — knock someone to half in one fight and they start the next at that value until you heal them or reset. COMBATS AND ENEMIES — each combat is a named encounter with its own foes (name, HP, condition). One combat is active at a time; that is the one the popup runs and the thread targets. THE COMBAT RUNNER (popup) — when a combat is active the popup lists every active combatant, players and enemies together, sorted by initiative. Type each combatant's initiative, or roll a d20 for every enemy at once with a single button. Drag a row by its handle to fix ties or rearrange the order freely. Start begins round one; Next turn advances to the next living combatant, skipping the fallen and bumping the round each time it wraps. Per-row buttons let you jump the turn marker to anyone, adjust HP with -10 / -1 / +1 / +10, type a free-text condition, or sideline a combatant and bring them back later. A combatant at 0 HP is shown as dead and skipped by turn advancement but kept in the order so their place is held. End stops the fight while keeping its state for review or resumption; Reset heals everyone, clears initiative and starts fresh. DM SNIPPETS — INITIATIVE MACROS — a campaign defines its own snippets on a dedicated forum-toolbar row. Their bodies support macro tags that resolve against the active combat at the moment you click, so one button posts the current initiative order, turn marker, HP and conditions exactly as the fight stands. An initiative-list block repeats once per combatant; conditional tags gate content for players, enemies, the current turn, the dead or those with a condition; and value tags print names, HP, damage taken, conditions, initiative, the round counter and the combat name. Ordinary BBCode passes straight through, so macros and formatting mix freely, and the editor previews each snippet against your live fight (or a sample one) and flags broken structure as you type. Your first DM snippet even comes pre-seeded with a ready-to-use status block. ROLL TARGETING FROM THE THREAD — on a thread bound to a campaign with an active combat, hover over any rendered dice roll in a post and a "target at N" button appears, where N is the roll's total. Click it to expand the combatant list, then deal N damage or heal N to anyone with one tap — damage floors at zero, healing caps at maximum. The new HP is written live to storage, so the popup's combat runner updates immediately. Because it reads the roll's shown total, it works on any roll in the thread, not just the ones the extension made — apply a player's own attack or a monster's save with equal ease. A check mark records every roll you have applied, and the marks clear when you reset the combat. GETTING STARTED As a player: open the options page, create a character with a name and a few components, mark it active with the star, mark the stats and resources you adjust mid-game to "show in popup", then visit an RPGGeek thread — the toolbar appears above the reply box. As a game master: open the options page, switch to the Campaigns tab, create a campaign, add your players with their HP and a combat with its enemies, set the combat active and mark the campaign active, then open the popup to run initiative and track HP. A thorough in-app Help guide walks through every feature, and a step-by-step how-to covers each surface in detail. Install RPGG Character Manager and spend your play-by-post turns telling the story instead of shuffling numbers.