Character Creation Question

[Danimal66]

After 4+ years we finally got every player to buy their own copy of the PHB. The current DM has all of the books as do myself and one other person. Since until 2 weeks ago I was the DM for the past 4 years people would always log in to my campaign to create a guy.

Now that everyone has the PHB they should be able to make their guys outside the campaign right? they just can't use content from Xanthers or anything else correct?

So lets say they make a guy offline, how do they use it in the campaign?

I'm very confused by all of this.

Thanks

[Zacchaeus]

Yes, if the players own the PHB then they can make characters in their own campaign or in Manage Characters. And you are correct if they don't own something like Xanathar's Guide they won't be able to use that.

Once created the player will then want to export the character by clicking on the blue export button next to the character portrait in the PC window. Once they do that they can then import the character into the DMs campaign by clicking on the blue import character button on the PC selection window once they have joined the game.

[Trenloe]

To clarify what Zacchaeus describes:

If you create your PC in Manage Characters it will be available for you (the player) to import when they join the GMs campaign.

If the PC was created within their own campaign then the player will need to export the PC from that campaign to a XML file and send that file to the GM so that the GM can import that into their campaign ready for the player to select when they join.

[Danimal66]

Thank you and instead of starting another thread I have another question. When we were making characters inside the DM's campaign one of the new players kept dragging his class to the character sheet and gave himself multiple levels. We couldn't find a good way to undo this so we just scrapped the PC and had him start over. I assumed he could just delete the skills etc from his sheet and reduce his level to 1 but he was unable too. Did we miss something obvious?

[Trenloe]

You have to manually remove all the things that were added - which are not always obvious.

Then you go into the class details window (click the magnifying glass next to the class and level field) and manually reduce the class level there.

[Griogre]

However if someone does mess up a first level character by dropping too many levels it's usually easier and faster to just scrap it and rebuild.