Moving characters to a new campaign

[SheckyS]

Hi all,

So I just finished DMing my first campaign on FG. It went really well and my players and I will be continuing on to a new campaign in January.
What's the best way for me to "move" the PCs into the new campaign. I tried exporting them to xml and then importing them into the new campaign and that works pretty well, but it lost all of their portraits and tokens. Is there a better way?

Thanks.

[spite]

Pretty sure that's the only way to export them, and I've never had tokens or portraits maintained as they tend to come from client side not the inside of the module itself. Shouldnt be too much of an issue to reassign the portraits to the new campaign, and if the iamges came from the players themselves they can still add it to the new ones themselves.

[damned]

you are thinking about it the wrong way.
unload the adventure module from your campaign and add a new one.
leave your characters right where they are

[Trenloe]

Sometimes it's nice to start a fresh campaign - especially if your material was built into the campaign rather than from pre-built modules.

Do it the way you're doing, if you want to start fresh, the players will just have to reselect portraits/tokens.

[Targas]

The other way would be to previously zip the appropiate campaign folder and reload it when needed.
I usually do this for every campaign session as a backup and almost everytime when building a module to revert to a previous stage, if needed.
(sometimes it's hard to get rid of unused e.g. token/tokenbags you don't remember where you used them)

[SheckyS]

you are thinking about it the wrong way.
unload the adventure module from your campaign and add a new one.
leave your characters right where they are

Hm. I guess that makes sense, except I didn't think to separate them in the first place, so it's too late now. :)
Actually, I was having trouble understanding the organizational structure, but this post actually helps a lot. So basically what you are saying is that in the future, I should start a campaign and then load the adventure as a module into that campaign so the players are separate from the module. Makes a lot of sense, but I didn't really grasp that concept until just now. :)

[Xorn]

Look at my Adventure Building tutorial for specifics (keeping characters in a campaign, and loading adventures through modules), but in my campaign I have:
Characters
Story: An entry with links I reference all the time for this campaign (the classes/races of the PCs, overarching NPCs, generic maps I reference a lot, etc)
Maps/Images: Portraits for universal NPCs, generic maps and my parchement map for on the fly drawings.
NPCs: Adventure spanning NPCs, druid wild-forms, stuff like that.
Items: Common items like potions and stuff that I hand out a lot.
Notes: Adventure Notes (private) and Server Alias reminder (public)


When I'm building an adventure, I instead make a new campaign and put everything there, then export it to a module. That way I can easily add/remove adventures as we go. :)

[Targas]

What I do for Maps/Images is, I usually export only them into a seperate module which I can quickly add/discard as needed into the running campaign. Those modules usually contain of 10 or more MB (e.g. 25 Forgotten Realm City Maps, symbol set pictures, wandering encounter maps, campaign related art) and when loading them instead with the campaign upfront it takes more time to load and wastes alot of 32Bit space. Running zip files easily allow me to delete the campaign folder replace it with a previous version, module building version, etc. of the same name without the need to consider specifics. In addition all options which I activated are saved as well.

And if I cannot get rid of tokens I used from my 60 token packs I can fallback to a version where I don't have this problem where unused tokens eat up memory.

And it's never too late to start from scratch building a barebone campaign directory.
You delete what you don't want in the current campaign (after zipping it for retrieval) and Export it into a module as you like.
Then you build a campaign from scratch by exporting the Chars and importing them into the new campaign.
Anyway you can always go back to a previous state if something fails and you can always use the same directory Name. :)

[Willot]

you are thinking about it the wrong way.
unload the adventure module from your campaign and add a new one.
leave your characters right where they are

This is the way I use to do it. But after awhile I found FG got slower and slower and slower. Thats was a while back now so maybe the codes been rejiggered since?

[damned]

This is the way I use to do it. But after awhile I found FG got slower and slower and slower. Thats was a while back now so maybe the codes been rejiggered since?

It really depends on a lot of things.
How much stuff you add to the campaign directly.
How big those items are.
How many modules you have open.
How many tokens you are using.

You can as Targas suggests backup the campaign and then go thru and actually remove anything that is no longer required.

I think there are two main reasons for doing it via modules -
1. It keeps the base campaign skinnier and easier to manage and download
2. You have these modules as reusable resources for another game, another day, another group

[SheckyS]

What I do for Maps/Images is, I usually export only them into a seperate module which I can quickly add/discard as needed into the running campaign. Those modules usually contain of 10 or more MB (e.g. 25 Forgotten Realm City Maps, symbol set pictures, wandering encounter maps, campaign related art) and when loading them instead with the campaign upfront it takes more time to load and wastes alot of 32Bit space. Running zip files easily allow me to delete the campaign folder replace it with a previous version, module building version, etc. of the same name without the need to consider specifics. In addition all options which I activated are saved as well.

And if I cannot get rid of tokens I used from my 60 token packs I can fallback to a version where I don't have this problem where unused tokens eat up memory.

And it's never too late to start from scratch building a barebone campaign directory.
You delete what you don't want in the current campaign (after zipping it for retrieval) and Export it into a module as you like.
Then you build a campaign from scratch by exporting the Chars and importing them into the new campaign.
Anyway you can always go back to a previous state if something fails and you can always use the same directory Name. :)

Is there some way to export the portraits from the original campaign into a new one? Or is there just no way to do that. Like... if I export the old campaign into a module, and then open that module in the new campaign, will the portraits be there somewhere? If so... where? :-P

[Trenloe]

Is there some way to export the portraits from the original campaign into a new one?
Not automatically.

But you (the GM) can get access to them from the \portraits directory within the campaign directory (not the <FG app data>\portraits directory). There will be a number of files in this directory with filenames id-XXXXX (where XXXXX is a 5 digit number starting at 00001). These files are the portraits the players uploaded when they originally selected the portrait for their PC. Copy these files to your <FG app data>\portraits directory and add file extensions of .png - for example, id-00001 becomes id-00001.png Then these portraits will be available to the GM when they open the portrait selection window and will allow you to manually add these portraits to PCs in another campaign.

[Targas]

Another remark - if a player uses a different portrait picture meanwhile, on the DM side you will get an access error like this:
Runtime Error: D3DXCreateTexture failed - D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM Network Warning: Unable to locate requested file 'campaign/temp/drawing_snapshot_Playername_1449165807'
If this happens, you can correct it by letting the player use the 'Nuke' button before logging into your server.

[Trenloe]

Another remark - if a player uses a different portrait picture meanwhile, on the DM side you will get an access error like this:
Runtime Error: D3DXCreateTexture failed - D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM Network Warning: Unable to locate requested file 'campaign/temp/drawing_snapshot_Playername_1449165807'
If this happens, you can correct it by letting the player use the 'Nuke' button before logging into your server.
That shouldn't happen - I haven't heard of that before. Can you please report in the house of healing forum? Thanks.

[SheckyS]

Just in case anyone cares... I basically just went to my campaign folder and then made a copy under a different name. Then I went into one that will now be my ongoing campaign and deleted all of the module-specific stuff so it just contains the PCs, the party info, and their notes.

Then I opened up the other one (which will now be the adventure module) and removed the PCs, party info, notes, and everything party-specific. So now my adventure module is totally separate from my campaign and now all I have to do is create a new adventure, export it, and load it into the ongoing campaign.

Neat. :)

[FSHSchmo]

Another remark - if a player uses a different portrait picture meanwhile, on the DM side you will get an access error like this:
Runtime Error: D3DXCreateTexture failed - D3DPOOL_SYSTEMMEM Network Warning: Unable to locate requested file 'campaign/temp/drawing_snapshot_Playername_1449165807'
If this happens, you can correct it by letting the player use the 'Nuke' button before logging into your server.

Just so I can let my players know, where do they find their nuke button

[JohnD]

Launch screen upper right - nuclear button.

[FSHSchmo]

Launch screen upper right - nuclear button.

Found it.