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AndyPan
May 4th, 2005, 13:09
Hi! Just discovered the FG program last night, and I have to say I am blown away. I have been considering taking my game online for the simple reason that it's often difficult to get all my players to make it to the game ALL the time. I have spoken to my players about moving the game online, and they have all been receptive to the idea, and so far, FG has been far and away the most impressive platform for this. However, I do have one question.

I have three players that I DM for, and due to the scope of the adventures we've been playing, to round out the group, they all have been running two characters each. This works fine for face-to-face gaming, but I am curious is FG supports this type of scenerio, or if any of you folks that have used the program have figured out how to do so. Basically, this capability will be the deciding factor as to whether we use the program or not, so I am hoping that FG has this capability. Thanks in advance!

richvalle
May 4th, 2005, 13:43
Currently... no. :(


It has been asked for and this kind of support may come in a future update but right now there is no good way to do this.

Sorry to pop your bubble...

rv

kalmarjan
May 4th, 2005, 14:20
As the DM you are free to run as many characters as you want utalizing the /id command. The only problem with this is that as the D<, you will have your hands full online playing. (All the typing etc..)
This could be allieviated using teamspeak or something like that for sure, but that is a major thing.

Second. You said because of the scope of your adventure, you have each player plaing two characters. While that may work for PnP play, you may want to consider adjusting your adventure to fit with the players you have, then placing an NPC here and there to round things out.

Just my .02 GP

Sandeman

MythioS
May 4th, 2005, 15:22
There are plenty of players (including myself) looking for campaigns.. maybe instead of playing 2 chars each for now you could DM for some of the community? :D

AndyPan
May 4th, 2005, 16:42
Well, Mythios, that may just be an option. I am going to run the program by my players and see if the format is something they'd be interested in (they may be reluctant to pay $20 for the program). If they are all for it, and interested in playing just one character and adding other people, then I will definitely look for some other players. Thanks for the input guys!

Dupre
May 4th, 2005, 22:53
This has come up a few times before, we recognize it as an important feature and we haven't turned our blind eye to it.
8)

Qual
May 11th, 2005, 10:16
That wasn't me, in a bogus second account, pounding my drum on this issue again! Honest! :D

Not to take issue with what richvalle said, 'cause maybe it's not a "good way", but playing two characters is possible right now. Each player has to run two clients and give each one a different player name. I like to use "Greg" for one and "gerG" for the other. Of course, they should use different character names, too.

My group has run maybe 4 sessions this way, with 3 players x 2 char's each, and here are some of the issues we've run into:

1) screen clutter; you have to keep enough of both windows visible or remember to switch back and forth enough, or you can miss chat messages sent to only one of your characters. The GM can help by signaling you when a whisper has been sent to make sure you "switch" to the right window. I'm just noting this issue--we haven't found it to be much of a problem in our games.

2) Portrait weirdness; Sometimes some clients can't see some other client's portrait. Sometimes, when one client connects, two clients are shown on some clients' displays; one with the correct character name and portrait and one with an empty portrait and no name. We/I call that one Eggman because of how the empty portrait looks. If the newly connected guy exits out and comes back, it seems to fix things. We suspect two simultaneous connections by different players leads to this problem.

3) Sharing weirdness; Sometimes, when the GM shares something, each player will receive it on only one of his clients. In some cases, a window shows up on the other clients, but it is empty. We don't find this to be trouble, though, because you only need to see one copy of stuff. :shock:

4) Bub-bye! Rarely, but not as rare as we would like, the server decides one, most, or all of the clients should be unceremoniously disconnected. We've had those clients reconnect, and were able to proceed as if nothing happened, though a client may have lost edits in progress to a character sheet.

In total, though, the issues aren't that big. We find it's not polished, but it works. And we've got 4 sessions and at least 9 dead lizard men to prove it! 8)

Qual

richvalle
May 11th, 2005, 11:03
Hey! I'm glad that works for you. Are you just running two instances of FG at the same time or running them from differant directories?

My system would blue screen after about 10 min with two instances running but I'm willing to admit it could have been my system causing the problem.

Way to keep the Lizard Man poplulation down! :)

rv

gurney9999
May 11th, 2005, 14:23
when I had the demo I installed it on two different partitions and ran both as a host and player (to test what each sees when things occur). Doing it this way worked pretty well as far as seeing how things work, but it was a very limited test.

The problem I did see was switching between FG sessions... it would usually take 20 seconds or so for the other session to become active. I have a pretty solid gaming rig, but it still happened. I'm not sure if this would be a common issue.

Qual
May 12th, 2005, 09:33
richvalle, I'm just doing the lazy man's way: running two instances. As long as that works, I didn't want to mess around with the possibility that trying to install in two locations would mess up registry entries or other weird stuff. But, I think it is likely that the two instances step on each other's toes on occasion by trying to write to the same files.

I guess from gurney9999's comment that two-partition install may not be an issue like I was worried about, though.

gurney9999, one of our players complains of long delays switching that, from when he types the first message about the delay until when he says it's ok might be similar to your 20 seconds. The other two of us don't have any issue, though. Personally, I'm running on my widescreen 1920x1200, so I can just slightly overlap two standard-sized windows. Switching mouse focus works as expected. I don't know if I was maximized-window-switching if there would be a delay... So maybe I'm not much help on that issue.

Oh, I fogot to say one other issue, which I'm sure GM's struggle with a bit: saying things as the wrong character. With two clients I almost never make a mistake, but we've found out two is my limit. For one session I had to play a friend of the party in addition to my 2 PC's, and I constantly said things as the wrong character--and always the same wrong one. I don't know what my problem was. :oops: I guess it is just too much of a pain to keep switching between a plethora of windows to type in your text...

The sad thing is that we made a truce with the lizard men, who didn't seem so bad once we got them to stop attacking us on sight, but now we are about to get munched by their shape-shifting, mind-controlling, arch enemies. In a bit of genius, though, I made our advanced party, doing the diplomacy thing, have one character of each player; so, if we do get munched, we can fall back to a one-player-to-one-character game. :P

Qual

Sigurd
May 12th, 2005, 18:51
I'm sure they are thinking about ways to do this.

They still seem to be bustin out some bits with the latest patch but I'm sure this is fairly high on the priority list.

The game does not work for me right now. I hope they get this kink ironed out.

S