Pathfinder Bestiary

[Desmodaeus]

Just curious as to how those of you who use pathfinder go about using monsters from the bestiary in FG. It is really annoying to keep minimizing to glance at the pdf as well as time consuming. The only work-around I have found is to go one by one and type all the info into the personality creator for each monster. As you might imagine this is not practical and would take forever to get the whole bestiary in there. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Doswelk]

Just curious as to how those of you who use pathfinder go about using monsters from the bestiary in FG. It is really annoying to keep minimizing to glance at the pdf as well as time consuming. The only work-around I have found is to go one by one and type all the info into the personality creator for each monster. As you might imagine this is not practical and would take forever to get the whole bestiary in there. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Unless someone clever writes a parser (like they have for 4th edition) that's about all you can do I'm afraid.

I do find it's quicker to build them in an editor rather than direct in FGII (but that might just be me)

[Desmodaeus]

Hmm... Disappointing, but thanks for the response. Guess I will wait and hope.

[Leonal]

I would guess it'd be quicker to use the PRD to copy from than the PDF, but other than that I have no suggestions.

[Desmodaeus]

Prd? What is that and how would it be faster?

[Leonal]

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document https://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/. The monsters are there along with the core rules. It's only faster as much as a webpage and browser is faster than a pdf though. I prefer using it when refering to rules and the pdfs when reading them out of game.

[Tenian]

The fact that it exists in an electronic format (i.e. the PRD) and looks ot be fairly regular means it's very likely someone could design some sort of conversion routine.

Or as an alternative, it might be possible for a group of like minded people to convert the PRD to an FGII XML format by hand (FGII exporting) and then the efforts be combined into one distributed module, assuming of course the legalities of the PRD allow this.

[Zeus]

As Tenian highighted; as the PRD is available in HTML, you could:

1) download the entire PRD as a local copy (.html files)
2) Use XSLT 2.0 to transform the individual HTML files into a single client.xml using the d20 ruleset module schema (as I understand it Pathfinder is pretty close to d20 / 3.5e, is this correct?) or the Pathfinder ruleset module schema (does it exist?)

3). Create a definition.xml and zip up together with the generated client.xml file to produce a module.

For the modules to be really useful it may require said rulesets being expanded to support things like drag n drop items, NPCs etc. But for simple reference material you should have everything you need by simply mimicing the d20 SRD module schema.

As examples of how XSLT can be applied, I'm just completing some final touches to the first release of an XSL based tool which decompiles 4E_JPG modules into 4EParser source files (xml -> text), this along with some of the other XSL solutions out there (including the HTML char sheet XSL which does XML -> HTML and the campaign tools app which does both XML -> HTML and XML -> XML) should point the way for anyone wishing to take up the challenge.

Once you have an agreed schema in place, its trivial stuff to convert from one format to another. Someone could even build an XSL based Parser, its definatley possible.

Given the new owner of FG has some extensive experience of XSL, he may be open to colloborating by providing support for a longer term solution. Say by providing a basic tool which can produce modules from simple text/HTML files. Such a tool could be easily made to be extensible by using different XSL stylesheets for corresponding rulesets, these could even be contributed to/maintained by the community.

[Leonal]

Nice, that sounds like it could be possible in the not too far future. Afaik the new owner expressed intention to create an official Pathfinder ruleset if it worked out with Paizo, so maybe things could be coordinated.

One of the main differences is the addition of the stats CMB/CMD (combat maneuver bonus/defense). While madman created a place for the CMD value in the Pathfinder extension (great work btw), I'm not sure how that would work with a module of monsters to be dragged to the personality list.

Now if I wasn't busy with term papers and my thesis next semester I'd love to dive into something like this and learn something in the process. I'll have to leave that to someone else though.