Storyline360: Creating Interactive Content with Slide Masters

Hi Scott,

Welcome! 

What you are describing is not so much an issue, more of a what's the right feature for my purpose.

Slide masters are great for using design elements across multiple slides and can also be great for some interactivity, for example, you might have interface elements on a slide master (like a menu, home, or resources button) and then layers on the slide master where you build said menu or resources screen, so each slide you create that uses that master has the menu, resources and home button. However, the layers you create on the slide master do not appear on the slide itself.

I think what you want to do is create an interaction on a slide, say a tabs activity like the one you showed here, where you might have some things on the master (eg design elements) but then the layers and triggers on the slide itself. Then, you can save this slide (and any other ones you may want to create) as a Story template file. Then each time you want to create a course from that template, you open a new Storyline file from template and select that one you created. You can then insert any of the slides you created for the template. 

Let me  find you a link to a tutorial on templates.