Character Creation

[Stargrove]

Someone please help me...I get the feeling after toying around in FGII that it is not really made to create a character per se. It just allows the entry of information from a character sheet or "importing" from program like PCGen (an actual character creation program). If that is so, that is fine, but I want to make sure I am not missing something obvious. I prefer to use something that does the number crunching for me since I always miss stuff that benefits my characters.

1) Is there a place that has a walk through on how to get all the information from a character sheet into FGII? Like, how do I enter skill ranks and make them stick? I can mouse over a skill and use my mouse wheel to increase the number, which is red. I did not that there is a "planned increment" and a "direct adjustment" in the right click menu, but am unsure what they really do.

2) How does one get feats into the Feat Page? I can type them in but there does not seem to be any way to track any information about the feats themselves.

James

[richvalle]

Howdy.

I DM and not play using FG so I don't mess around with the character creation stuff. But I can share what I do know.

I think you are mostly right. FG is a place to hold character information, not a place to build a character.

To enter skill ranks I think you have to right click on the page and then manually adjust the ranks. Then right click again to lock them.

Feats are as you say. Its just a place to type in whatever your feats are. I actually really like it this way as any feats I change or add are done outside of FG and I don't have to worry about adding them or changing what is in FG.

Hope that helps a little. Someone else will be along to add more to what I said. :)

rv

[Moon Wizard]

FG2 has plenty of capabilities to enter a character, but it does not enforce any rules for you. Just like a pen-and-paper character sheet.

On your specific questions:

1) When you scroll your mouse or type on a skill field, you are telling FG2 which skills you are considering for increase. Once you have set all your plans, then you can right-click on the Planned Ranks field at the bottom and select the Submit Planned Ranks menu item to accept the skills. The other option is to use the Direct Adjustment menu option to change each one.

2) The Feats section is just like a blank sheet of paper, you can right whatever notes you want in there. Feat names, short descriptions, etc. If you want to link to the ruleset, I have an upgraded d20 ruleset in the Workshop forum that allows you to drag feats from the rulebook to the character sheet, so that there is a clickable shortcut link to see feat details.

Cheers,
JPG

[Griogre]

Welcome to FG boards, James. As others have mentioned Fantasy Grounds is not a character creator. The character sheet is just like a piece of paper, pretty much you can put down on it whatever you like. This is convenient because it allows you to use things other SRD d20 references. It was done that way because the OGL prevents most types of automatic calculations.

While WotC has pulled the licenses from most third party character generator developers there are still a few good (and free) character generators. I suggest you make the character outside of FG and the copy the information onto your character sheet. Heroforge (https://www.nzcomputers.net/heroforge/) uses an excel spread sheet and PCGen (https://pcgen.sourceforge.net/01_overview.php) is a java app. Of the two I would recommend Heroforge more if you have excel installed. You can do *anything* with PCGen - but the interface sucks and I always felt I could build a character faster by hand.

[Stargrove]

Thanks.

I have used PCGen extensively in the past and just now toyed around with Heroforge. Heroforge reminds me of a spreadsheet by a guy named Steve Mulhern that we used when 3E came out many years ago. He stopped supporting it long ago though.

Anyone have any experience with RPGxplorer? Seems like a nice program as well. Seems easy to add new stuff to it. Although, Heroforge already seems to have just about any source book we would want to use. Not sure how they do that legally, but it is nice.

James

[scytale2]

Well I use RPGXplorer, Stargrove and it is certainly good for those without much technical skill. It still seems a bit buggy to me, but I would recommend it, as it does print out really nice character sheets and make the working out of the bonuses a bit speedier, which makes transfer to FG2 vastly quicker too, as you don't need to be fiddling about with rulebooks.

Feat/Spell/Skill/Item entry is reasonably straightforward for a non-programmer like myself, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it was easy, which is why I haven't done much of it. If you're running the Pathfinder adventures from Paizo, the owner of XPlorer has been kind enough to sort out all the extra feats/spells items as mini patches.