Monster / NPC Tokens

[Wizards Ghost]

Hi,
WotC does a pretty bad job in delivering Monster Tokens for too many Monsters. Even a standerd 'Dire Wolf' only comes with a crappy Letter token.

So playing Premade Adventures to me means copy the needed tokenless NPC's (since they are write protected), change token, change any encounter using this updated NPC.
Really, that sucks.
There must be a better way to do this, im sur
So the Question is: how can i permanantly change the tokens of these NPC's from PHB, MM, and so on?

[Zacchaeus]

You’ll need to copy them, replace the token then export them to a module. Then replace the existing ones in any encounters with your exported ones. Probably just easier to replace the tokens in each encounter as you come to them which you can do by dragging a new token and dropping into the existing token in the encounter.

Note also the tokens are made by the module developer from art supplied by WotC, so if there isn’t any artwork there can’t be a token.

[Wizards Ghost]

Thats how i do it now.
Im searching for a once and done solution to direct replace the original Tokens.
No way?

[Zacchaeus]

No, because you can’t access the modules directly which you would need to be able to do.

[kronovan]

I haven't found any other way. I lessen the pain though by noting the Monsters/NPCs in pre-written adventures or inventorying the monsters I've included in my own adventures and then checking if those NPCs have tokens. If they don't, I make a copy of the NPC and move it to a custom NPC group and add a token for it. Of course you have to have a decent library of tokens to make that approach work. I take a sandbox approach to running campaigns and mostly allow the players to drive which locations they adventure with, so I do run the risk of taking the trouble to copy NPCs I may very well never use. The way I see it though, I'm likely to use them again in some other adventure or campaign, so it's probably worth it in the long run.

Something else I recall (Zacchaeus can correct me if my recollection is wrong), is that if you have an encounter that uses 1 of your copied NPCs and you later update their token, it gets updated on the encounter as well. However, if you've already placed that NPC token on an encounter map, you need to delete the token and place the NPC again.

[Wizards Ghost]

Hmm. well i guess we than should heavily complain to WotC to address that.
It is very, very poor to sell a premium priced Product and not even put this Little efford in it.
Poor enough how little love the spent in their Maps (showing just empty Rooms everywhere.)

I mean a Premium Product, with they Claim to sell, should offer more. Ist promised to be Play - Ready, but be honest it's not. Or do you like to offer your table an Encounter versus a 'D' in an Empty room, that has 6 liens of text describeing what should be where??

[kronovan]

Hmm. well i guess we than should heavily complain to WotC to address that.
It is very, very poor to sell a premium priced Product and not even put this Little efford in it.
Poor enough how little love the spent in their Maps (showing just empty Rooms everywhere.)

I mean a Premium Product, with they Claim to sell, should offer more. Ist promised to be Play - Ready, but be honest it's not. Or do you like to offer your table an Encounter versus a 'D' in an Empty room, that has 6 liens of text describeing what should be where??

TBH I stay away from their FG products and have only bought Volo's and the PHB - the latter only because my players needed it for the Feats. I run Kobold Presses' Midgard World setting and if I buy anything it's something they've published. That said, I've been homebrewing my own tabletop settings and adventures for so long, that I find it's minimal effort and 2nd nature to just adapt content from a PDF source.

[TXCBoy36]

Hmm. well i guess we than should heavily complain to WotC to address that.
It is very, very poor to sell a premium priced Product and not even put this Little efford in it.
Poor enough how little love the spent in their Maps (showing just empty Rooms everywhere.)

I mean a Premium Product, with they Claim to sell, should offer more. Ist promised to be Play - Ready, but be honest it's not. Or do you like to offer your table an Encounter versus a 'D' in an Empty room, that has 6 liens of text describeing what should be where??

Not sure what your referencing...? The source books thru FG are at 1/2 price of the hard back copy or what you have to pay thru Roll20....I prefer to customize my own tokens.

[LordEntrails]

Hmm. well i guess we than should heavily complain to WotC to address that.
It is very, very poor to sell a premium priced Product and not even put this Little efford in it.
Poor enough how little love the spent in their Maps (showing just empty Rooms everywhere.)

I mean a Premium Product, with they Claim to sell, should offer more. Ist promised to be Play - Ready, but be honest it's not. Or do you like to offer your table an Encounter versus a 'D' in an Empty room, that has 6 liens of text describeing what should be where??
Different people have different expectations. All FG products have the same or more content than the printed product has. Specifically, no print version comes with tokens, pogs or mini's. And yet I don't think people complain that a printed adventure book is not ready to play. So if you are playing at the table you need to provide that. FG will use any artwork from the product to make tokens, if their is such, but most creatures do not have artwork associated with them.

As for maps with empty rooms, that is currently WotC's map style. I don't like it either, but many people do and it is what is in the print product. Note that often times one of the community members (Zacchaeus is well known for this) will create an auxiliary map pack for WotC adventures. Most of which are on the forums here for free, or sometimes are even included with the adventure DLC (like Dragon Heist does). But because they are not official products, they can not automatically replace the official maps.