More questions from a new(ish) group

[RyanRMC]

Hello once again!

Myself and my group now has about 5 sessions under our belts, and we are getting much more conformable with the FG2 system. We are still running into some small issues, and I wanted to see if there were solutions available.

First off - when in combat, I lock tokens and make players plot their moves. Which works fine unless someone needs to make a turn that occurs on another friendly player's tile. Inevitably the tiles get mixed, and we have to move tiles around to allow the active player to plot their move. Is there a way to make the tiles of monsters and players who are out-of-turn completely inactive? So we can work around them without needing to shiffle them out of the way temporarily?

Second - do hand drawn maps not get exported with a module? I tend to make adventures then export them to modules, which I open within my larger campaign. The only thing I seem to lose are any maps that I draw up by hand. I just get a blank page with monster tokens on it (from where I had placed them for the encounter.) I don't mind drawing the map live, I just like to save time where possible, and having these pre drawn makes the flow of the game faster.

Third - how do I go about creating my own NPC and monster codex, like the premade ones that come with FG2? I tend to take the stock monsters (say a kobold or golbin) from the PF Beastiary, then make two or three copies of it to make variations on the monster. I would like to save all these out to a module that I am constantly able to update, so that in the future I could just load that module and have an expanded list of premade enemies and NPCs.

Thanks!

[Trenloe]

First off - when in combat, I lock tokens and make players plot their moves. Which works fine unless someone needs to make a turn that occurs on another friendly player's tile. Inevitably the tiles get mixed, and we have to move tiles around to allow the active player to plot their move. Is there a way to make the tiles of monsters and players who are out-of-turn completely inactive? So we can work around them without needing to shiffle them out of the way temporarily?
No, there's not a way to do this. The GM could temporarily make the NPC tokens hidden by clicking the "eye" icon on the combat tracker, but there's no way to do this for the PC tokens.


Second - do hand drawn maps not get exported with a module? I tend to make adventures then export them to modules, which I open within my larger campaign. The only thing I seem to lose are any maps that I draw up by hand. I just get a blank page with monster tokens on it (from where I had placed them for the encounter.) I don't mind drawing the map live, I just like to save time where possible, and having these pre drawn makes the flow of the game faster.
I don't think hand drawn stuff is exported with a module.


Third - how do I go about creating my own NPC and monster codex, like the premade ones that come with FG2? I tend to take the stock monsters (say a kobold or golbin) from the PF Beastiary, then make two or three copies of it to make variations on the monster. I would like to save all these out to a module that I am constantly able to update, so that in the future I could just load that module and have an expanded list of premade enemies and NPCs.
If you're using Pathfinder, you can use the creature parser to make your own NPC library modules: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15475

Or if you're using something other than Pathfinder or prefer to do it in FG, manually modify them in FG, export them as a module and then either use the modules to display in the NPC lists or modify the underlying XML to convert it into a library entry.

[Griogre]

Drawings are not exported with a module. They are kept in the drawings folder in the campaign and have names like drawing_XXXXXXX.png were XXX is a number (probably a time stamp). If you wish to export the drawing you need to do two things to make it usable as an image.

Drawings are drawn like negatives in they have a black background with white lines. IE from my 5E game where I went old school and made them map the dungeon:

https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/drawing_1357967556_zps5258ad39.png

The inverted colors make it hard to use as an image especially if you plan on adding stuff to it.

To export this, first you need to copy the image from the campaign's drawing folder and paste it into the campaign's image folder. Then you should rename it to something meaningful, I called my drawing Dungeon 01.png.

Then you need to load the image into an art program - for this I just use IrfanView a free art manipulator program, and pull down the Image menu and select Negative and then save the pic so it looks like this:

https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/Dungeon01_zps4368cb85.png

Then you can just export the campaign with the image.

[RyanRMC]

The hits just keep on coming!

#1
In the game I am running, the party just leveled up for the first time. Each of the players went to Hero Lab and used that to level their character to 2. Our assumption was that we could output that character and then use the output file to update our characters on the server. But with an existing character of the same name, FG2 would not allow the players to even import the characters, much less update the existing ones.

What we did (which was dumb) was to delete the existing characters and import the new level 2 versions. Oops, now all the presets and setting are gone.

So what is SOP for leveling up characters in FG2? Is there a method to continue using Hero Lab to update a character, or do you just need to do the leveling manually inside FG2 on existing characters?

#2
We are having a lot of trouble getting spells to import from Hero Lab. Characters import fine about 90% of the time with no other problems, but spells are never available in the spell list. What we end up needing to do is Left Click -> Add Spell Class then drag each spell over from the PF spells module.

Is this working as intended, or should our Hero Lab characters have spells imported automatically, meaning we are doing something wrong?

[Trenloe]

Quick answers:

1 - do the leveling in Hero Lab and then manually apply the changes in the FG campaign.

2 - I found a problem with the character converter recently - it doesn't recognise a spell caster class as a spell caster if the class name has anything other than the base class name - e.g. Wizard is fine, but Wizard (necromancer) is not.

When you export the .hlfg file, open it up in a text editor and search for all instances of the class name - remove anything in brackets and any trailing spaces, save the .hlfg file and then use the character converter.

[Moon Wizard]

I use Trenloe's method 1 personally. I use Hero Lab to determine which selections are allowed on a level gain, then add the level changes to FG.

Once a game has started, then the only "official" record of the character is on the GM's machine. So, the player should send their HL export file to the GM to import. If there is a concern about losing information, the GM can keep both records on the server until the player can verify that nothing is lost.

I have found that the hardest thing to synchronize between HL and FG is the items and money. I find HL to be awkward to manage inventory, albeit very correct for character sheet generation and calculations. FG is relatively easy to manage, but doesn't do any correctness checking.

There was actually a discussion among the various character creator and VTT vendors a while back regarding a common format. However, every program has unique data requirements, and there is no easy way to convert something like a "Longsword +1" between character creators and VTTs without a very sophisticated translator that knows the ins and outs of how to build items on every platform.

Regards,
JPG

P.S. I'll look into the Wizard (necromancer) issue.

[Mgrancey]

I will also warn you that mounts, summons, familiars, etc in Hero Lab disappear in the converter as there isn't a place for them in a character file.
You can retrieve them from the output file but I don't remember off the top of my head where to cut out. If you know XML its not hard to find the right sections and run them through as well.

[RyanRMC]

Thanks for all the replies. We will update characters manually, as it seems the easiest.