This is something sheet authors aren’t warned enough about, but will happen – possibly several times – in any long-term sheet author project.
Sometimes while editing a sheet, something doesn’t work that should work. Maybe some CSS you’ve applied doesn’t work properly, or a sheet worker fails to fire when it should.
They could be any number of reasons for normal failures – a typo in the syntax is very common (at least for me). But if you have a situation where you are certain that something should work, but it doesn’t, what you might have is sheet corruption.
There’s a very simple solution to this: create a new character and start working on that one. If the issue is sheet corruption, the problem will instantly go away. Delete the old character and continue.
Unfortunately, there is no good indication that this is happening, so you may find yourself repeating the same code for days and struggling to figure out why its working. You might even think Roll20 is having a buggy few days or think the problem is the server connection. (That’s almost never the problem.)
So my advice is: whenever something isn’t working properly, create a new character and see if it works there.
What Is Character Corruption?
I have no idea. All I know is that characters can become corrupted and just stop working properly, and this happens frequently over time when making a lot of changes to the design of a character sheet.
This is something you almost never have to worry about with production sheets. i’ve only seen it happen during the sheet creation process, so it might be a bug with the sheet author sandbox.
The sandbox is so useful, it should still be used. But bear this in mind. Whenever something should work but isn’t working, test it on a new character.
If you find a character is corrupt, delete it so you don’t accidentally use it any more and shift over to your new character.
Update: I realise I didn’t emphasise this enough in the post. I have never seen this happen in normal campaigns. It is just happening in the custom sheet sandbox, so don’t worry about your normal character sheets getting corrupt.
In Conclusion
I can’t repeat this often enough: Whenever something should work but isn’t working, and you’re in the custom sheet sandbox, create a new character and test it on that character.
Remember this and your sheet design will go a little smoother.
