How do I set up Summoned creatures for my friends Druid?

[Jed Shields]

Morning all,

I'm running Strahd and one of my friends has got a Druid that uses summoned creatures. He's given me a list of ones that he's going to use, depending on the situation. How do I set these up so that all I need to do is drag the "parcel" into play in one go, rather than, for example, dragging 8 Wolves...


Cheers,

Jed

[humby]

You can set them up as an encounter and change the faction to be friends rather than foes (or empty) by default. You can then add them to the combat tracker as normal.

You can also set them up as neutral npcs by default - this would allow you add them to the CT and then drag the neutral marker from the middle bottom of the CT to the map to place them all at once. You can then either leave them as neutral or switch them to friendly as required.

[Granamere]

Also once you have the NPC in the combat tracker you should click and drag the shield icon in combat tracker on the right to the Druid character (the big picture of the Druid on the DM's upper left of the screen) and release it. This will then allow them to control the NPC. They will not be able to end the turn of the NPC but they will be able to move it and all.

[SilentRuin]

... They will not be able to end the turn of the NPC but they will be able to move it and all.

True - to control and NPC end turn (and at one point targeting not sure anymore if that is true) by a player - you would need an extension or code your own ownership/shared extension to give them the access or code they needed to do that. And of course, that would be needed to operate any other buttons or fields outside of the text hit/damage/etc. actions on the NPC sheet. Not to worry though - the Host can do all this for them.

[A Social Yeti]

Morning all,

I'm running Strahd and one of my friends has got a Druid that uses summoned creatures. He's given me a list of ones that he's going to use, depending on the situation. How do I set these up so that all I need to do is drag the "parcel" into play in one go, rather than, for example, dragging 8 Wolves...


Cheers,

Jed

I had to figure out summoning recently for myself, here's what i got.

If they are summoning a standard NPC (already exists in the library) you can just drag and drop them onto the map, make them friendly, and drag and drop them onto the controlling player's portrait so they can control it.

I believe the individual NPCs of an Encounter are also placed one at a time, and if they need to go in specific locations relative to the caster. So probably won't speed it up to drag them from the encounter or from the NPC list.


However i had to make a new NPC for this summon, and when you do that, make a new NPC, give it a token and all. Then export it as a module to load for the campaign. I found this process allows it to be made to be somewhat player intractable by default. I am a player in this campaign, i had to make my own summon NPC for a magic item i found. As a player the GM loads the module i made and sent to them. And i can open the NPC sheet, and drag and drop onto the map myself placing them where i want, they are friendly, and i can also move them myself already in this state.

We have only used this once, and mid session testing the one thing we didn't figure out right off was me getting the numbered NPCs sheets open, so i could make their attack rolls.
But the sheet i made worked properly for the GM like all other NPCs, doing the att roll, 2 dmg typs, and save against poison. And i believe if i just knew how to open the sheet myself i would have already been able to make the rolls too.

I believe i remember a check box in the making process related to being player usable or something to that effect maybe...was a few weeks ago now and have not had a second test run at it.

So little vague on it all i know but i for sure have had the player experience of dropping my own NPC summoned onto the map and being able to move them too. From an NPC i created though not one from the Monster Manual or anything like that.

The player dropping out their own summons at the least would save some time on your part, and maybe my GM just needs to do the drag and drop onto my portrait to open the sheet for me to do the rolls, or there is a way for me to i don't know yet.

I used no extensions in making it, i have a vanilla install, the GM runs a few but i do not believe they did any additional work or configuring of the loaded module(which is just the one NPC).

[Zacchaeus]

I had to figure out summoning recently for myself, here's what i got.

If they are summoning a standard NPC (already exists in the library) you can just drag and drop them onto the map, make them friendly, and drag and drop them onto the controlling player's portrait so they can control it.

I believe the individual NPCs of an Encounter are also placed one at a time, and if they need to go in specific locations relative to the caster. So probably won't speed it up to drag them from the encounter or from the NPC list.


However i had to make a new NPC for this summon, and when you do that, make a new NPC, give it a token and all. Then export it as a module to load for the campaign. I found this process allows it to be made to be somewhat player intractable by default. I am a player in this campaign, i had to make my own summon NPC for a magic item i found. As a player the GM loads the module i made and sent to them. And i can open the NPC sheet, and drag and drop onto the map myself placing them where i want, they are friendly, and i can also move them myself already in this state.

We have only used this once, and mid session testing the one thing we didn't figure out right off was me getting the numbered NPCs sheets open, so i could make their attack rolls.
But the sheet i made worked properly for the GM like all other NPCs, doing the att roll, 2 dmg typs, and save against poison. And i believe if i just knew how to open the sheet myself i would have already been able to make the rolls too.

I believe i remember a check box in the making process related to being player usable or something to that effect maybe...was a few weeks ago now and have not had a second test run at it.

So little vague on it all i know but i for sure have had the player experience of dropping my own NPC summoned onto the map and being able to move them too. From an NPC i created though not one from the Monster Manual or anything like that.

The player dropping out their own summons at the least would save some time on your part, and maybe my GM just needs to do the drag and drop onto my portrait to open the sheet for me to do the rolls, or there is a way for me to i don't know yet.

I used no extensions in making it, i have a vanilla install, the GM runs a few but i do not believe they did any additional work or configuring of the loaded module(which is just the one NPC).

This is basically all incorrect. Players have no control over an NPC unless the DM places the NPC correctly on the CT and then shares it with the player. Players can then control the NPCs movement, attacks etc. Placing an NPC directly onto the map will do nothing for you at all (apart from you being able to uselessly move it about). See this video for how to share NPCs with players so that they can be correctly controlled and used. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?43513-Video-Giving-player-control-of-an-NPC&p=387176#post387176

The correct advice was given above by humby and Granamere in posts #2 and #3.

[Jed Shields]

Hi guys and gals, I've now set up a number of different encounter, set to friendly that I can drag in depending on what the Druid summons. Excellent, many thanks.

One slight issue... most of the tokens don't have an image, just a letter. I've managed to change these before, but I can't at the moment, the lock icon in the monster stat window is set to read only. How do I edit this?

EDIT: the stat blocks are pulled from the Monster Manual or Players Handbook...

[Granamere]

The original NPC's you can not change. You need to make a copy of them then the copy you can update the token/picture. You will need to unlock the copy before you can change it. I hope that helps.

[Zacchaeus]

You can also change the token in the encounter. Drag and drop a new token onto the token on the left of the line in the encounter (not on the small icons under the name).

[A Social Yeti]

This is basically all incorrect. Players have no control over an NPC unless the DM places the NPC correctly on the CT and then shares it with the player. Players can then control the NPCs movement, attacks etc. Placing an NPC directly onto the map will do nothing for you at all (apart from you being able to uselessly move it about). See this video for how to share NPCs with players so that they can be correctly controlled and used. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?43513-Video-Giving-player-control-of-an-NPC&p=387176#post387176

The correct advice was given above by humby and Granamere in posts #2 and #3.


I describe nothing more or less here than my first hand personal experiences.
It is just describing what happened in front of my own eyes, and trying to be clear i do not entirely understand why things behaved as they did, but they did behave the way i described.

I hope to figure all this with the GM next session. And ask if they had done any thing on their end that gets to what my experience was or if this is just "out of the box" behavior we experienced. But as i say based on my interactions with them so far i suspect they did not do additional configuration work on that.

Should any useful info come of that i'll be sure to share it for everyone.

[A Social Yeti]

Info on what i discovered about summoning and NPC tokens and why i had the experience i posted about from earlier. Just good FYI in case others also didn't know about this.


Did everyone but me already know that players can drop NPC tokens onto the map that everyone sees and they can move around?

This is what was happening from my first post, that i needed to ask my GM about what was happening on their end, before i could understand what had gone on.

I made the NPC to be summoned, and exported it alone as a module. The setting about player intractable i was trying to remember from the first post was the "player module" export setting, which makes that module be player loadable by default.

So when my GM placed it in their module folder and i loaded it, by default i can see it in the NPC list (like the NPC, Cat, from the player's handbook), and while a player cannot use the left side icon to place a creature in the combat tracker, we can by default settings, place the NPC's token onto map all we want. A player could drop 50 cat tokens onto the map and all will be seen by everyone, they just won't be creatures in combat on the tracker.

However that does not matter much. After i dropped the NPC token onto the map, my GM just added it to the combat tracker without saying anything. So from my player POV it looked as if my one action of dropping the token onto the map, got it placed into the combat tracker too. And as i could move the token on my own right away, it gave the appearance that i did have control of the creature on the combat tracker.

And sense i knew when the summoned NPC in the combat tracker was up, i moved and measured from the token i put on the map, it just appeared to be working as if i had put the NPC into play myself and already had control of it.

So while in FG there is no actual player spell casting functionality for summoning creatures/familiars. GM just has to manually puts summoned NPC/s on combat tracker, and on map, and grants control to player.

For a simple summon of not too many creatures at once, it is possible let a player drop the token onto the board, and then the GM can add to the tracker and give control to the player.
That the token on the board and the combat tracker creature are not hooked up does not really seem to change the play of things much. As the summoning player will know the token and the combat tracker entry go together. Just means the GM can't target the NPC using the map token, but needs to keep to the combat tracker.

But of course a larger summon of several NPCs at once could be harder to have to manually keep track of. But for a single summon like a familiar, this method offers a slightly reduced number steps option to the process.