Character management & 4e questions

[dr_venture]

Hey folks,

Haven't heard back on the previous issue I had about FG crashing with the RoleMaster ruleset, so I'm trying my hand at converting everything to D&D 4e. I run the game sessions on a single computer - FG is mainly a tool to allow me to run a game in a small house without having a ton of space for battlemats and books and such. For this it works very well.

However, I naturally, I ran into some problems:

1) I see folks talking about opening their reference books for 4e in FG, but of course unlike the Rolemaster ruleset, the 4e ruleset does not come with any data in it. Am I to understand that there is no source of this data pre-entered into FG, and everyone hand enters umpteen thousands of words/forms/tables/etc.?

2) I just spent several hours figuring out how to enter characters and their powers/feats/etc. into the Character management section of FG. Since I GM the game on the same computer, I then opened up the 'sandbox' campaign that I'm using to try out FG & 4e, and the characters I just created are not available. Am I correct that I can now only add those characters to someone else's game that I join as a player?...or is there some way to bring those characters into the sandbox campaign on the same computer.

Please tell me I didn't just waste my whole afternoon :|

-Craig

[Moon Wizard]

Hi there,

I don't have much experience with the RMC ruleset, but I am the creator of the 4E ruleset, so I can help you out on your questions.

First off, I suggest you take a read over the 4E ruleset manual. Remember that you should only use as many of the features that you are comfortable with, and ignore the rest.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/userguide4E/

To answer your specific questions:

1) I'll quote from Griogre in another thread:


Because Wizards has forbidden the electronic distribution of 4E, no legal library modules for 4E can be distributed. You are free to make your own library, of course, if you have a legal copy of the content. Different laws apply in different countries.

Tenian has written a parser tool that allows individuals to legally make their own library modules. It sounds like you have an incomplete copy of someone else's attempt.

Many people use Tenian's parser to create 4E modules using their DDI account with the parser (or you can also cut and paste from scanned books, but that is more error prone).

2) The local character creation mode is primarily for players to enter their data prior to a game. You can actually create characters directly in hosting mode, just open the character selection window, right click and choose Create Item. (In general, right clicking will give you options available.)

Also, since you've already created the characters in local mode, you can add them to your campaign by launching 2 instances of FG on the same machine.
* Start up the host instance first (Create/Load Campaign).
* Then Join Game with the second instance.
* Once the second instance loads up, you can select the characters you want to add to the campaign. (You can take control of more than one character by opening the character window again).
* You will see both the local characters and the server characters in the character selection windows. Each time you select the local characters, you will create a new instance of the character on the server. So, make sure you only add one of each.
* Once you have taken control of each character using the client instance, you can close the client instance. All of the local characters are now in the campaign.


Cheers,
JPG

[dr_venture]

JPG,

1) The manual - now there's an excellent idea! You know, the existence of the manual was floating around in my head at one point, but it disappeared from the sieve that is sometimes my brain. I took a brief look, and it seems to have quite a lot of info - I'll begin pouring that info back into the sieve straight away.

2) Much appreciated on the parser tip - I will investigate that, too. I have tried to type in and/or OCR large volumes of data in the past - it would be a lot faster to just run Rolemaster and either build really extensive pre-populated modules, or put up with the constant crashes.

3) Also, I didn't realize you could run two instances of FG on the same machine - yet another excellent tip!

Thanks for another example of why, in spite of the difficulties I'm running into, I really want to make FG work out. I've always had such friendly and helpful responses on the boards here!

I wish there was a section of the FG web site that had a kind of editable/growing FAQ structure like the web sites of so many products have. I'm sure that many of the questions I have have been answered before, but it can be hard to search them out on the boards. I did search for that character question I had, but I couldn't find anything, thus the post.

If that's something that the FG Gods would be appeased by, I'd happily do some research on the subject and present my findings to y'all. There's prolly even some free solutions out there... although I think the optimum solution would be something that tied into the forums as an interface to connect the good information that's already there.

Thanks again for the help - very much appreciated!

-Craig

[dr_venture]

Just brought in the characters - worked like a charm. It's also a very handy way for a beginning GM to learn how FG works, in that I can now see the shadowed die rolls and exactly what info passes between client & server - thanks for the tip!