GM owning a PC identity?

[Carlos]

A player may associate multiple characters with their session, activating characters, and playing those characters.

Has anyone tried to modify the scripts to give this ability to the GM?

I would really like to add extra NPC's to the party, but I want to treat them as if they were PC's.

I have begun modifying the identity*.lua scripts, but with little luck. Double clicking on an identity as the GM only opens the view of the character sheet.

[Griogre]

I would really like to add extra NPC's to the party, but I want to treat them as if they were PC's.

I personally just choose to keep things simple. I just have a player open the NPC's character sheet for me, so I can drag it onto the combat tracker and have the character portrait appear in the top left. I then run the character.

[Elf]

Thanks Griogre! You can open any PC sheet but I never thought to ask a player to open it up so I could add it to the tracker.

[Farnir]

Or you launch a second instance of FG and connect to yourself. Then you activate all NPCs there. This prevents players from peeking into the char sheet :)

[Griogre]

True, depends on whether you care if the players know about the NPCs. For long term party NPCs I don't care.

[XpressO]

So only way for me as a GM to control the PC who's player is unavailable and get it to combat tracker is to fire up a new instance of FG2? Player's cannot take on characters who are owned by others and that's a shame. We've had a tradition in PnP that if a player is absent he chooses who gets to run his character for the session. In FG2 it has to be me, but I still have to start a new instance of FG2 then?

[joshuha]

So only way for me as a GM to control the PC who's player is unavailable and get it to combat tracker is to fire up a new instance of FG2? Player's cannot take on characters who are owned by others and that's a shame. We've had a tradition in PnP that if a player is absent he chooses who gets to run his character for the session. In FG2 it has to be me, but I still have to start a new instance of FG2 then?

The GM can at any time clear the owner of a PC to allow others to control his character. I have done this many times when a player misses a session and I have a volunteer for someone to play his character.

[XpressO]

Oh :o
I must try it immediately. Thank you :)

[joshuha]

Oh :o
I must try it immediately. Thank you :)

To do this as a GM, open the character list and right-click and select Clear Owner.

[Valarian]

In my Babylon 5 ruleset, I've added the portrait of the character on to the character sheet (instead of the d20 icon). I can drag the portrait from the character sheet to the combat tracker to use the PC as an NPC. The modification for this is somewhere on the board here.

[Sharn Penndroen]

Or you launch a second instance of FG and connect to yourself. Then you activate all NPCs there. This prevents players from peeking into the char sheet :)

I tried this but it tells me that I have License key conflict. So does it require me to buy an additional Player Copy just to get my NPCs to work as Players? Is there another way to do this?

[Sharn Penndroen]

Okay, I answered my own question. For some reason when I tried to join using the alias to the game rather than the IP, it gave me a license key conflict error message. When I put the actual address in, it worked fine letting me run two instances. Don't know if this info will help anyone else.

[Pheonix-IV]

Gives me a liscence key conflict no matter what i do. Damn.
That was actually a sneaky trick, i can think of a couple of neat things i could do with a 2nd instance of FG :(

[Foen]

I use 'localhost' as the address when I connect (usually NPC@localhost is stored in the recent connections list).

Stuart

[Master]

When you connect to yourself you can not connect with your IP address or with the pass code. You have to either connect with 'localhost' or with 192.168.x.x where x represents the last two digit pairs in your local host address.

[joshuha]

127.0.0.1 is a loopback that should work on most PCs as well.

[Pheonix-IV]

Zomg, that is oarsome!

ROFL

It had to download the custom ruleset i was using, so i just downloaded the ruleset from myself to... myself!

[Foen]

Yep, it happens that way! The downloaded ruleset is stored in a campaign cache, along with downloaded images.

It seems crazy, but the host and client behave in a sandboxed fashion.

Stuart

[Griogre]

Personally I don't think it's crazy, I think it's good design to keep the client and host modular.

[Foen]

Hehe, I said it 'seems' crazy: I'd build it the same way too, and think that sandboxing is the way to go.

That said, using uncompressed image transfer wouldn't be a design choice of mine, but it isn't easy to second-guess design decisions and the difficult choices faced by a software architect.

Have a good weekend all,

Stuart

[Griogre]

Yeah, I find the image transfer strange but I suspect in the beginning they really didn't think people were going to transfer such large images and it was simple to do it that way - and usually KISS has its own benefits.

Have a good weekend. :)