PC Controlled Personalities

[LuckyRob]

Is there anyway that I can allow my players to control assigned Personalities in combat? For example, let's say I wanted my player's Paladin character to be able to move and attack for their war horse. Or control a henchmen or hireling.

Any luck?

I apologize if this is a topic that has already been covered, I looked around in the message boards, but didn't find anything.

Thanks!

[Bidmaron]

Which ruleset are you inquiring about?

[LuckyRob]

I'm using 4e currently, but also have interested in the 3e OGL

[Bidmaron]

Neither of these rulesets have the ability you desire. While the rulesets could be mod-ed to do what you want, it is a completely non-trivial change.

[LuckyRob]

I'm open to learn how to add these functionalities with some pointers and advice

[Spyke]

Any character that can be entered in a full character sheet could be controlled by the player (a player can open multiple character sheets). So, in D&D you could run your henchmen and hirelings.

In GURPS this would apply to anything that could be built as a character (your squire, your war horse, your talking sword)...

Spyke

[Bidmaron]

I recommend you tackle something less complicated as your first project. You could do it manually, of course, as already mentioned by creating a character sheet for the player-controlled personality (I'm assuming your players know how to switch from one character to another during a game), but I doubt whether that's what you're interested in.

In my opinion, the most reasonable way to implement this is to build a drag and drop handler that would detect a drag of an NPC from the personalities list to, say the character selection window (I think this is the most logical place to drop the NPC to convert it to a PC). This code would then auto-fill the appropriate fields of the character sheet from the personality sheet.

Alternatively, I think it would also be possible to, say drag the NPC to one of the player's character portraits. You could then set the owner of the NPC to the player. Some kind of extension accessible on the players' right toolset could then be used to call up the player's owned NPCs. The problem with this approach is that the combattracker (at least) would have to be largely rewritten to handle player-controlled personalities. Moon_wizard, care to comment on this approach?

[Moon Wizard]

I found that the best approach for me was to create a new character sheet for those personalities, especially for long-term management. (i.e. druid companions level up, henchmen find new gear, etc.) I did this in my 3.5 campaign for animal companions and summons. Bidmaron's option would make this quicker, but it's not necessary. (and a lot of work in the code, especially spells/powers)

There's another option I can think of. When a CT entry is set to friendly, then you could change the linked the token settings to allow players to move the token. This doesn't give the clients any attacks, but allows them to move the tokens and should be a fairly easy change. Look at the tokeninstance.setModifiable() function.

Along the same lines, you could perhaps open the NPC window and share it when the CT entry is set to friendly. It would be kludgy, since the window would be opened on everyone's screen. Look at the windowinstance.share() and windowinstance.close() functions.

Cheers,
JPG

[Phystus]

You can share the NPC sheet with a single player by dropping it on the character's portrait.

~P

[LuckyRob]

You can share the NPC sheet with a single player by dropping it on the character's portrait.

~P

Thanks for all the feedback! Phystus - I'm using your solution. Thanks again guys and happy gaming.