Is it possible for players to play as NPC's?

[Sydeout]

I have an idea for a short campaign that's a little like "quantum leap" where the party "jumps" into different NPC's each week. I thought it would be cool for them to play as Orc war party one week and dragons another.

Anyway. My workaround on this so far is to make the NPC friendly and then drop the token on the PC, enabling party movement and sight on the map... and it works, but is clunky. The players can open the NPC and see their stats/abilities, but it's awkward when you are grabbing the actual text "Cast fireball" and drag onto your target (when opening an NPC they don't get to see it like they do their own characters with easy to grab icons and such with attacks and spells).

I'd like to avoid spending time manually creating a PC out of an NPC which they can select on loading the campaign. But is there a way to make them able to select the NPC or at the very least see the attack options like the GM does on the combat tracker?

I'm assuming it would work like a pet, but instead of having the pet as an extra character on the CT instead it would only be the pet.

I've been playing around with it and since it's such an odd thing, difficult to find much info on how to do it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks and have a great day.

[SilentRuin]

Speaking for the 5E ruleset (only one I know):

1) FGU allows you to drop an NPC onto a player portrait in upper left of your host app to give them partial control of it with "Party Vision and Movement" option set to on. Don't use this much but it has limitations - for me mainly that it does not give them true ownership of the NPC - faction control other than green. I'd experiment with this first to see if it works for you.

2) Friend Zone extension - free - and never used it myself but you do own the NPCs I believe in a cohort of the PC like pets or something. Experiment with this and see if it supports your needs.

3) Write your own extension to meet your needs.

4) Find extension that does all you want or some combination of them. These usually cost money and are last resorts.

EXTENSIONS = RISK so caveat emptor!

[Sydeout]

Appreciate it.

Am looking at the "Friend Zone" extension and it sounds very promising. But how do I get it to work? It is in my "inventory" on forge, but isn't showing up in any downloads or in any of the files for FGU. I then went to GITHUB to download the .ext and placed it into the extensions folder, alas nothing. What could I be doing wrong? Thanks mate!

[Sydeout]

AHH FEATURE! gotta click the friend zone feature! GOT IT!

Thanks again for the help mate!

[Zacchaeus]

I don't know if this makes it easier but the players can double click the highlighted text for attacks, saves, damage etc just like the DM can. Your players might find that better than dragging and dropping.

[LordEntrails]

I've found it pretty easy to manually convert/create PCs from NPCs. Doesn't take much typing and you can do a lot of cut and paste. Then the players can just chose the PC from the character list and you don't have to worry about extensions or anything else.

[SilentRuin]

I've found it pretty easy to manually convert/create PCs from NPCs. Doesn't take much typing and you can do a lot of cut and paste. Then the players can just chose the PC from the character list and you don't have to worry about extensions or anything else.

Wish that the entire PC/NPC/VEHICLE data structures were all one - so many problems would simply vanish. Choosing different ones simply because books differ in data presentation was a horrible mistake IMHO.

One data structure to rule them all, One data structure to define them, One data structure to display them all and in the FGU bind them

[anstett]

In the 2e ruleset you just open the NPC, scroll to the bottom and click Clone to PC.

New character for the players to use. I do that with familiars, followers, etc.

So it can be done.