Combat Tracker - Advice and Suggestions
A few days ago I inserted a few comments in the FG unity engine thread, https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-engine/page84, that received a few responses and a request for clarification from ddavison.
Perhaps I am doing something incorrectly, or inefficiently, so here goes.
For me, at least the way I have been using it, the issue with the CT is that it seems to handle static scenes ("You enter a cave with 4 orcs and 6 trolls, FIGHT until victory or death.") very well, but not so much simultaneous scenes nor ones that evolve and interact with other scenes.
My group seems to split the party often, not as much as they used to, but it still happens frequently. 6 PCs with 4 NPCs, means that there is a lot of potential for bifurcation. Here is example, with the party split into subgroups A, and B. In game-time, the groups are separated by 5 minutes of time and virtually 0 minutes in real time (because roleplaying exploring a 100 yd. passage doesn't take very long if there aren't any interruptions - monsters, traps/puzzles.) I use teamspeak and have multiple channels to separate the subgroups.
What I have been doing is loading the largest (by number of participants) into the CT, running that for 20 minutes of real time, and then switching to the other group (not finished with the encounter). I then run the second group ad hoc from the encounters tab (not loaded into the CT) for 20 minutes of real time before switching back to the first group. Repeat back and forth until things as needed.
Ddavison suggested I load EVERYTHING up into the CT and run it from there. I'll give this a try, but while it might seem to make sense if the groups are in fairly close proximity with each other, it intuitively seems to a poor solution if the two groups are far apart in time and/or distance would have no idea whatsoever what was going on with the other group.
To me a solution would be to have another combat tracker, but I believe I heard that this was a difficult option to implement. Perhaps moving forward into FGU would make this more of a possibility?
Another solution would be have a temporary holding place for the NPCs in an encounter. It would be useful if I could pull the actors in the CT (at least the NPCs) into a newly created encounter (or some other repository) in a way that showed and maintained their current status. That way I could purge and reload the CT as needed, and keep everything continuous. The way it is now, if Orc Chief is wounded to 8 hps, and I pull him off the CT into an encounter, it reflects his original status, say 16 hps.
This last point references what I mention early on with my comment regarding "evolving and interacting scenes". If 4 orcs get beaten up and run into the nearby cave (cave12 for example), it would be useful to be able to just drag them off the CT in their current state (hurt, crippled, etc.) and plop them into the encounter for cave12. The way I do it now, it to load 4 orcs into cave12 encounter, compare each one individually with its counterpart in the CT and adjust all of the relevant parameters - can be done, but takes more time than I like.
Is there other solutions to any of the above that I am missing?