Make 'personalities' player-accessible?

[Zakarius]

In my campaign/ruleset, I've heavily modified the wizard/sorcerer and in the process put more into the familiar. Instead of automatically being able to 'summon' a familiar, you have to track down the animal (or vermin) and 'bond' with it using a spell. More advanced spells allow you to bond with more combat-effective familiars.

Anyways, it's a pretty big list of critters which I'd like to be able to 'share' with players so they can take note when a familiar has been first bonded. My first guess was to make a 'Notes' page which had a linked list of the creatures made as 'Personalities', but this doesn't work -- clicking on one of the creatures' icons pops up a <<New Personality>> for the client which the player can't change.

I'm sure I could put them together as a module which is player accessible, but I would prefer to avoid having the players suddenly look up the stats on a caveboar during a fight because they're up against one!

Additionally, how do you other GMs handle characters who have familiars, animal companions, cohorts, etc.? Do you ask the player to open a second FG client and use a full character sheet?

Zakarius

[joshuha]

Well first, its not required to open a second client with FGII, they could just create another character and switch back and forth between them (probably better for followers).

For animal companions and the like I have seen other people put custom tabs on the character sheets to store the info (a windowlist is good here) or just use the player shared notes to track stats.

[Zakarius]

A custom tab on the character sheet sounds pretty good, especially if it's also coded for drag-and-drop to the combat tracker! Has anyone already done this or do I need to get cranking away?

Zakarius

[Dachannien]

Two of my players have secondary critters following them around (paladin's mount and wizard's squirrel familiar). They just created separate character sheets and load up both of them when they log in. A single player can control as many character sheets as they want - no separate instances of FG are required.

[Zakarius]

Cool... I haven't had a chance to play on FG II yet and I don't think this option was available in FGI.

Zakarius

[Griogre]

My players do something similar. Though mostly only with animal companions because in regular D&D familiars are not really combatants usually. However it sounds like the familiars may be more combat capable so you might want a seperate character sheet from them. You can only have multiple characters in FG2.