server character, home character

[greowhiste]

Questions about server characters vs. characters that players have on their own computers:

If I want to run a campaign where the Players can only adjust their character sheets while in the game, they have to build their character when they first join the campaign, correct? From that point on it is housed on the DM's computer? Can they at least view the server character?

What's to stop a player from creating a character identical from the one on the campaign mentioned above, and then next session running the one from that one from their own machine? Is it listed somewhere whether the character is a server character, or is there a way to bar players from playing with anything other than server characters for a particular campaign?

[Griogre]

In FG2 each character loaded onto the server is kept seperately. So if you have a player who changed his character each session you would see a series of copies for that character and be obvious what he was doing.

[Sigurd]

There should be a way to capture a server character again. If you want to update something on the local character you have to screen cap the server char to get every (in game) change - its a drag.

sigurd

[greowhiste]

In FG2 each character loaded onto the server is kept seperately. So if you have a player who changed his character each session you would see a series of copies for that character and be obvious what he was doing.

Griogre, are you saying that if a player uses a local character in your campaign, a written copy is archived session by session when they log on? Where are these copies located for viewing?

[Sigurd]

The server keeps 1 copy that is updated in play. If the players update their local character and re-log on, I think they make another server character that duplicates the local char.

[Griogre]

Like Sigurd said, every time you have a player log on with a local character instead of the server character - he creates a new server character. This is very different from FG1 which use to just overwrite the character which often was a huge problem. People would do this by accident and suddenly revert back to a character they started the campaign with. I knew people who would delete their local characters to make *sure* there was no chance of this happening.

[greowhiste]

Well how do you guys play it usually? Do you ask your players to use a character that lives on your server (is that the correct terminology? does it actually live on your server?) or do you have them make a local character and keep a running list of all the progressions of their characters each session (isn't this tedious?)

[Griogre]

I have them use one server character. That is really what the app expects. The whole local character thing was apparently more to setup a starting character so you wouldn't have to do it in game. The change to FG2 I think was just a response to so many players accidently overwriting their server characters with local ones. It's there to protect the server character.

If I saw a bunch of characters I would think the player was clueless and tell him to quit making characters and once he got his stuff sorted out I would delete all the extra copies (character xml is fairly large particulary for spell casters). I should mention that in some of my campaigns, the character sheet of record is kept on my Yahoo Group.

[greowhiste]

Thanks for the input.

Another question on this topic. Let's say I'm running a campaign and I have a character that I want another player to run, how can I do that? Is there a way to pass characters to other players if, say for instance, the original owner can't make it to the game and agrees to have another player to run the character? Where are the characters "stored"?

[Griogre]

This is easy to do. I do it. All you have to do is clear the owner on the list of characters (right click on the character in the character list and select "clear owner"). This sets the owner to none and allows any player to run the character. You can do this after the players are already logged in but they may have to open and close the character list again to see the character appear. One caution, the delete character option is on the same right click menu so be carefull.

Also remember once you do this, you will need to clear the owner again from who actually ran it, so the player that actually owns the character will be able to see it next time. One last comment, even if I am going to run the character myself I will ask a player to open the character for me so I can use the combat tracker with the character.

[greowhiste]

That's so easy and very brilliant. thank you, i was really wondering if it was possible.

[Sigurd]

There is one element however, that I think is inconvenient. The actual server characters are stored inside the main db.xml file and there is no good way to export them as new local characters.

This means that after some time the server characters become more and more diferent from the local chars. If you ever have to update the locals, or if the server has a problem you have a lot of fiddly work to do mechanically getting all the details right updating the old local chars.

My players have run into this twice when something hiccuped and the server character wasn't stored properly.

I wish you could export the server chars into a library of reusable local chars either to the players or on the server machine.

Sigurd

[Vergence]

Yeah this has been a pretty annoying problem for my group as well. There have been a few times where the server characters have been corrupted (most commonly the Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha stats oddly) and we've wished that before we exited the last session we could 'save as local' so we could each have a recent backup of the server character....

Anyone know if something like this could be in the works?

[greowhiste]

i'd like to open this conversation further... questions and comments:

q: can a GM run a game where some of the players are server chars and some are local?

i think it would be a dream come true, if there was a button in FG that basically exported your character, at that moment, into a multipage pdf document. Something that can be viewed outside of FG, and something that records the char at a specific level/experience.

[Griogre]

It is not possible to run server and local characters because, as far as the server is concerned, there is no such thing as local characters. A player *always* runs a server character. He may not think he does but once he connects and selects a character, if he picked one not on the server, a copy is then transfered over to the server and this is the character he runs.

I am totally mystified why you would want to run local and server characters. I feel as if there is a misunderstanding between what each are. In a face to face game this would be like making a new character sheet in between each game by memory instead of just using the same sheet each week.

I can understand Sigurd's position - I don't personally feel the need for the feature he wants but I can understand why he wants it.

As far as the PDF converter, Smiteworks is unlikely to want to drop the cash on the license for a converter to pdf. Someone who knew what to do could get a html sheet out of the character xml without too much work though.

[Toadwart]

I'm guessing the difference is like: the GM collecting up all the character sheets at the end of each game and taking them home with him as opposed to the players taking their own character sheet home.

Would be nice to have the option as you sometimes want to take a character from one campaign into a new one, or to a session run by a different gm then bring him back again.



Now, I thought that (in FG1 at least) your local character was updated to reflect the current state of your server character. Letting you see your character but not modify it.
Could be wrong.
Usually am ;)

[greowhiste]

my players complain that they can't really edit their sheets when we are not in the game. I understand that too. Though i like to know all the changes they make, there are things that they are going to want to do outside of game on their sheets, like level up, and organize their inventory.

I get frustrated because my players' sheets look like a fourth grader's bedroom, and they get frustrated because they can never edit their sheet.

[Sigurd]

Its part of replicating the game table experience. You take your characters and go home - the dm keeps copies of the most recent.

If the DM's machine dies or the dm stops playing you still have the last version of your character on your client.

With all the available games I think it might be fun to branch a character. Take the same character and make different development choices in different games - PRCs, Alignments etc....

Making the player sheets behave more like a library would make that a fun experiament.

Sigurd

Down the road I'd love to be able to move old characters into an NPC collection - just like I did with old character sheets. D20 characters have a lot of fiddling and represent an investment of time for some people. Making the sheets portable and tracking them gives a greater return on their creation.

[Griogre]

export char = control...
True. Which is why I understand your request, but am not excited by it.

The other factor is time. Trying to preserve game time for actually running the game not doing admin details. Online games typically are shorter per session than face to face games in my experience, so admin overhead consumes a bigger part of the session if you let it.

In my non open table game I have a Yahoo Group where I keep the html "character sheets of record". I started doing this when I was using another VTT app for online play. In part because of FG1's instablilty I kept doing it.

The other reason was that normally a session or two before I think the character(s) where going to level I would tell my players to send me the class, skills they were going to add to and any feats and I would update these html sheets for the character's next level. Thus when they actually leveled in the game all they had to do was roll hit points and then open the html sheet and adjust the FG sheet to match. Actual sheet modifications for leveling are very fast - it is figuring out what you are going to do that is slow. If a player did not send me the information prior to the character leveling in that session then he didn't level except for hit points. Amazingly, almost every player was very prompt at sending me the feat/skill/class choices. Those who were slow still always seemed to get them in before the next session. ;)

I am dead serious that a sheet could be generated from character xml fairly easy. PCGen is open source and has the ability to print sheets. Lifting the code (with all due credit given) *should* be possible. You even might be able to do it with just an xml style sheet. I'll even put it on my list of side projects - but those are stacked up and I be shocked if I could get to it before September.

[Sigurd]

The other factor is time. Trying to preserve game time for actually running the game not doing admin details. Online games typically are shorter per session than face to face games in my experience, so admin overhead consumes a bigger part of the session if you let it.

Updates could be voluntary and take as long as transfering a small file - much shorter than mechanically updating your local copy by hand. I would do them after every significant change so my store might have a new save at every level.

It could easily be an exported xml file dumped in a known directory -- so long as there was a proceedure for importing those files. I imagine this could very easily be a 3rd party program but I happen to think that this would be a core feature worthy of developer attention. I would hope that everyone would save and recover characters the same way.


Sigurd