Tooltips on monsters

[DNH]

Is there a way to disable the display of monster tooltips? That is, say I have twenty orcs in a fight, spilling into the room to attack the party. If a player mouses over one of them and reads "Orc #18", he or she instantly knows that there are at least 18 orcs to contend with.

Similarly, there are any number of monsters (in 2e, certainly) which have variant hit dice versions. But if I have made entries in my ruleset for "Goblin (1HD)" and "Goblin (3HD)", then these names will show up in the monster tooltips! That's another thing I would rather keep to myself!

I realise the possibility is there to name monsters etc as anything you like (using the chat line and drag-and-drop) but ... thing is, I like the ability to number my monsters and NPCs and have added in combat tracker scripts to allow that, but I don't particularly want that displayed to the players.

Any thoughts?
Thanks.

[kalmarjan]

That is so funny, because this is actually a feature added with FGII. In the past, you had to drag the text to a token to get the pop up. As a work around, why not try to drag something like "orc" to the token, and see if that overides the numbering.



I agree though, it would be cool to toggle the visibility of tokens to the players. It is essential for the GM, but not so much for the players.

Sandeman

[Dachannien]

You could change the autonumbering scripts to assign random numbers instead of sequential ones to each NPC as you add it to the tracker. Your players should freak out when they see "Beholder 84" on one of the tooltips ;)

That wouldn't solve the overdescriptive labels problem, of course.

[DNH]

*bump*

I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to resolve this issue. I am about to start a large combat with some hd-variant monsters, and plenty of them, and i don't really want the players to work out who these guys are and how many. Is there perhaps some code I could hobble? I don't know, maybe a <tooltip> flag I can delete, or some onMouseOver code I can use.

Also, I have already mentioned this on the wish-list post, but it would be EXTREMELY useful to be able to have monsters target players, just as players can target monsters.

[Griogre]

The only thing I can tell you is to change the monster's personality name or name on the tracker. Like you I find the automatic eccoing of the monster name to be anoying. The token represents the monster, I don't see the players really need a tool tip too now that they can target a monster. One trick I do use sometimes is just a monster's personal name. Gash, Bash, Smash, Sqawk, etc differenitate the monsters but tell the player nothing about what they are. It can be amusing sometimes for both the DM and players. There many good random name generators out there.

I would definately like either a switch to turn off showing a monster's name or an alias entry on the personality to tell FG what to display to the players on the map with the tool tip.

[sloejack]

I wonder if the tooltip for tokens could be made to display for host only. This of course means that the players wouldn't get tooltips for any tokens, including their own, but it would certainly solve your problem if it could be done.

[DNH]

As a workaround, or perhaps a new way of thinking, i have removed the numbers from the monsters. I don't know what this will mean for my game, but we shall see.

Oh and I have renamed the monsters to be a little less descriptive, since I discovered that FG2 will permit two monsters to have the same name. Admittedly, I can no longer tell at a glance which is which but the benefits probably outweigh the drawbacks.

Anyway, we shall see come Thursday when my game really gets under way.

[Griogre]

I don't use numbers on multiple monsters. I found it works well, with the following caveats: The Player selects the monster he is attacking. The player deselects the monster when it is the next players turn.

Thus only one character has monsters selected at any one time. The more monsters there are, the more important it is the players select and deselect. When a character selects a monster it "expands" the monster on the tracker and puts a character portrait at the right so you can see right way which monster is selected especially when just one or two monsters are selected.

When you have a bunch of the same named monsters though and the characters do not deselect after their turn, eventually most monsters will be selected and it becomes similar to spotting a tree in a forest to spot the selected target(s) by the current character. It’s even worse if the characters leave the dead monsters selected and you don’t delete the dead ones from the tracker.

If you find this annoying then you can also just wait to number the monsters only when they are hit. That way the players don’t still don’t know how many monsters are out there only that they have hit X number.

[DNH]

Thanks for that advice; sounds good. And that last bit (about numbering monsters as and when they are hit) is a touch of genius! Admittedly I will have to rename monsters on the fly but I (we) will at least be able to differentiate between them.

I shall probably leave things as they are for the moment, however. I want to see just how big a deal all this is in practice.