Adding allies in Savage Worlds

[Magniloquent]

So I figured out how to add Allie’s to a character sheet, but I can’t figure out how to add the ally on the same initiative of the character.

I have a shape changer that I have added all his shapes as Allies. When he shape changes I’m going to skip his turn and act through his alternate form

Please help

[HywelPhillips]

Drag and drop the ally NPC link from the character sheet towards the combat tracker. You should see that the action card is highlighted with a red box. If you drop the NPC link onto the character's card - rather than to an empty bit of the tracker - it will add the ally to the character's initiative.

Similarly for characters already on the tracker you can drag and drop their link (usually the little white dragon a red square, depending on your theme) and drop onto another character's card and it'll group the two on to the same initiative card.

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

[Lonewolf]

Button on CT opens radial menu to add all PC and allies on one click. Any NPC on Allies section of player character sheet automatically gets added on same action card.

For shape changers I would not use allies. Instead use effect on CT to modify character. Note that these effects can even be saved to their own module for future reuse.

[Jiminimonka]

So I figured out how to add Allie’s to a character sheet, but I can’t figure out how to add the ally on the same initiative of the character.

I have a shape changer that I have added all his shapes as Allies. When he shape changes I’m going to skip his turn and act through his alternate form

Please help

Use the Menu button on the CT and the Add button. It has options to Add Allies, Players and Vehicles to the CT and assigns them to the right Action Card.

[zarlor]

Unfortunately I have a "summoner" in on of my games so the easiest way to handle all of his summons where he can have multiples of the exact same thing summoned I found it easiest to just create copies (with numbers after to distinguish them) on his Allies section of the sheet, so using the Add Allies would blow up CT! :D The most efficient way we've found so far (and maybe there is something far better) is for me as the GM to drag the summons off of his sheet onto his card in CT, make the visible (since they normally come in hidden), then the player can grab their picture on CT and drag that to where he would summon them within range on the map. That also lets him double-click individuals on the map to pull up their character sheets to do rolls from. The modifiers (where he might spend extra power point to give them Edges and stuff) can be a bit of a pain, but usually it's just something there is an Effect for so we can just grab the appropriate Effect and drop it onto the summons to add that, or we create it on the fly (for things like just +1d to a Trait or something).

I'm all ears for better ways, but so far that doesn't work too bad. I will say with all of the updates happening recently and likely the Forge add-ons I'm using it was a bit painful last night with constantly having the error log pop-up with any change happening on CT, and text overlapping things. I think it's all just getting the add-ons updated to fix all of that. (I still have the encumbrance issue in PFSW, too, FWIW.)

[Mike Serfass]

Can you create a log and post it here? If errors are coming from the ruleset we'll identify them and fix them.

The latest changes include these changes:
Allies now default to visible when dropped on the map.
Allies can be moved between characters and the party sheet.
Ally targeting can be set by the owning player.

I'll look into allowing players to add their own allies to the CT and map.

[zarlor]

I'm pretty sure the errors we were getting were extension-related, but I'll check the files and see if the logs are stored on the system from last night's game, if it helps any, when I get a chance.

[Lonewolf]

Unfortunately I have a "summoner" in on of my games so the easiest way to handle all of his summons where he can have multiples of the exact same thing summoned I found it easiest to just create copies (with numbers after to distinguish them) on his Allies section of the sheet, so using the Add Allies would blow up CT! :D The most efficient way we've found so far (and maybe there is something far better) is for me as the GM to drag the summons off of his sheet onto his card in CT, make the visible (since they normally come in hidden), then the player can grab their picture on CT and drag that to where he would summon them within range on the map. That also lets him double-click individuals on the map to pull up their character sheets to do rolls from. The modifiers (where he might spend extra power point to give them Edges and stuff) can be a bit of a pain, but usually it's just something there is an Effect for so we can just grab the appropriate Effect and drop it onto the summons to add that, or we create it on the fly (for things like just +1d to a Trait or something).



I'm all ears for better ways, but so far that doesn't work too bad. I will say with all of the updates happening recently and likely the Forge add-ons I'm using it was a bit painful last night with constantly having the error log pop-up with any change happening on CT, and text overlapping things. I think it's all just getting the add-ons updated to fix all of that. (I still have the encumbrance issue in PFSW, too, FWIW.)

Yes there is much quicker way. Make the players do all the work ;)

Use the Party sheet to store Allies. The player can create NPCs on his charcater sheet. Then drag them to the party sheet to store them!

So if there is lots of choices the player can do them for the GM as required. During combat he picks the one in use from the party sheet and puts it back on his character sheet. GM just using one menu click to add it to CT or drag it on.

During a game you can switch consol error reports off so they don't pop up. The errors will still save to the log.

PFSW has the Good Backpack extention already built into it for extra encumbrance support. If you got issues coming from the ruleset tell us.

[zarlor]

Hmm... maybe, although in this case for this particular player I'd probably fluster them too much to do all of that. They're not all that fond that I'm using FGU at the tabeltop as it is, they'd rather go all dice-at-the-table instead, but as a GM FGU makes things sooooo much nicer! (I have other players who love it, though, so we're sticking with it). They didn't realize all of the extra stuff they would need to deal with by focusing on being a summoner, is all (and they're not fond of the fact that their summons are so relatively short duration compared to D&D where they're used to calling an elemental to do their bidding and taking out all of the guess-work for hours on end instead of for just 5, or 10 with the Concentration Edge, rounds).

For PFSW encumbrance, yeah we're still seeing encumbrance calculated incorrectly. D6 Strength folks with a Load Limit of 20 instead of 40. Either an extension is messing with it or it didn't update right since, as you note, I thought that was fixed. I may need to see if I can dig into that some more to find out what's up or if it's not updating or something.

As for switching off Console errors... I don't remember seeing that. I'll definitely have to check that out! Thanks!

[zarlor]

Here's the console log file. I still had Chilhelm's activated (wasn't completely sure if it had been integrated yet, but I've disabled it now for what it's worth).

[Mike Serfass]

@zarlor
Thanks for uploading the log.

Yes, Chillhelm's Fast Tests functionality is now it the SWADE ruleset, enhanced.

The combat tracker stores things between sessions, including components and data nodes from extensions.
These remnants remain even if an extension is disabled.
This happens with updates to CoreRPG and rulesets as well.
This can cause errors and quirky behavior.
To fix this, completely clear out the combat tracker. Remove everything.
To be extra safe, restart the session before adding anything back to the CT.
This is a good practice any time there are big updates to FGU, CoreRPG, or rulesets.

Let us know if that clears up the errors.

For encumbrance, go into options, filter on 'load limit', and set the value there. It's probably set to 10.

And the chat slash command to silence console logs is

/console skip

[zarlor]

Awesome help here, as always. I'd never realized the bit of clearing and reloading into the CT, just that things always work best having the characters in there all the time. I'll give all of that a shot. Thanks a ton!

[zarlor]

BTW, that was definitely the fix on the Load Limit. Not sure how I missed that before as I read the forum adamantly, I guess I just read it as if there was a code fix doing that and not that it was something to set in Options for those of us that started with it that way. Still, that's definitely good now.

[Ikael]

The ad-hoc way how you can give any NPC control to player is to add that NPC into PC group and set its faction to friendly & share the record sheet with player; no need to add it to PC's ally section.

[zarlor]

I've tried to play around with it in a few ways, but for a summoner it ended up being something like 80 different NPCs (because he can call multiples, sometimes as many as 9 at a time, of a given summon). The best way I could find to handle that was by either putting all of those onto the PC's ally section, or onto the Party Sheet Allies section, and putting it on the Party Sheet means extra clutter for everyone while on that PC's sheet is only clutter for them, so I went with that.

[Mike Serfass]

On the player's character sheet you have 9 copies of the same NPC?
Would it help to create the NPCs under a separate category in the NPCs list, then drop them onto the character in CT? You could drop the same NPC 9 times and it would make 9 instances of it.
The NPC list has filtering, so you could select the category from the drop down, or type the name at the bottom, or a combination, to quickly find the NPC.

[zarlor]

The problem I've had is that it wasn't really making separate instances of the NPCs. It would be the same one, or you could have the multiples on the map but they might not be targetable... just a lot of odd behavior that we couldn't figure out, so making sure we had as many as he could summon (So Aasimar-1, Aasimar-2, etc., for example) just seemed like the way to go to make sure it all worked right. That doesn't even cover if he spends the extra power points to boost Traits or give them some Edge, but we deal with those as best we can. Kind of a pain dragging something like that onto the effects of all the summons he could call, but thankfully it's rare that the does that as he's mostly using them just to try and boost or counter gang-up bonuses (also another thing that seemed to not calculate right with trying to make instanced versions of a single NPC).

I'm probably doing something wrong, mind you, but at least this way seems to work.

[zarlor]

Finished up the combat I had saved tonight, cleared everything from the Combat Tracker, then cleared out the Part Sheet for good measure, added from Characters back to Party Sheet and drug up the characters from the Party Sheet onto Combat Tracker. The main error I seem to get when doing that is "[ERROR] window: Control (pendingtest) anchoring to an undefined control (pendingtestsection) in windowclass (ct_entry)" Not sure if that is anything of note, mind you, and it may not show up once we play again next week, but thought I would post that here as a follow-up.

Oh, also I have one player (the summoner) where we we were looking at Items and it only showed a few things from one of the loaded modules. He's got all of the modules loaded (Fantasy Companion, SPWF Core Rules, etc.) but for some reason only saw items from, of all things, RotR Book 2. Works fine for everyone else and we verified he didn't have any filters on it. Not sure if anyone else has had that issue before or knows of a way to potentially fix it (maybe the clear from CT thing will do it, I won't really know until next week) but just wondering if other had some ideas we might try on that.

[Mike Serfass]

Do you use the Fast Tests extension? If so, stop using it. All those features are now built into the ruleset.

For the player not seeing modules, there's a way to clear a player's local cache. Start with this post:
Players can't see custom content. (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?81637-Players-can-t-see-custom-content-Other-content-takes-a-long-time-to-load&p=722083&viewfull=1#post722083)
One of the suggestions on this thread should help.

[zarlor]

I had been using it but thought I had pulled it out after the announcements here. I'll double check all my extensions, though. Thanks.

[Mike Serfass]

I welcome others to share how you use NPCs.
The recent fixes to NPCs I made got me thinking about how NPCs (and vehicles) are used in FGU.
I'd like to make NPC use more elegant. So share your ideas.

[dogfisc]

I’m curious about the difference between having allies on the party sheet or on an individual character sheet. In testing, it seems that only those on a character sheet are added to the CT when using the “add allies” menu option. Is there some other functionality difference I’m missing?

[Mike Serfass]

The NPCs on a character sheet are "owned" by that character's player. They can update the NPC, set targets, set effects, stuff like that.

[dogfisc]

The NPCs on a character sheet are "owned" by that character's player. They can update the NPC, set targets, set effects, stuff like that.
Cool, okay. I’m converting my current Pathfinder game to PFSW so little things like this will be very helpful to learn.

[Redemption77]

Im wondering as Ive just come back to Savage worlds in fantasy grounds after being away playing other things for a few months. Why is the NPC box lagging SOOO much. When I create a new group..Lag. Make a new NPC...Lag. Open an NPC sheet...LAG. it was never doing this before

[Mike Serfass]

Welcome back!

This is all happening from the CT?
If so, completely empty the CT. There have been numerous changes over the last few months. Sometimes that requires everything in the CT to be removed. For good measure, restart FGU after emptying CT and before adding anything.
Please post the results of doing that and we'll go from there.

Also, unload all extensions. A couple have been deprecated because they're part of the ruleset now. They'll throw errors and cause slowness.

[Redemption77]

No, its actually causing it from the actual side tab where you open the NPC box to select them, create new ones, etc. It could be because the rifts npcs are so numerous, but honestly don't remember this ever being a problem before

[Redemption77]

It appears to be too many modules loaded that slows it down. If I close a huge number it loads better. This was never really an issue before but I'll make do. Thanks guys! Keep up the good work

[Mike Serfass]

Out of curiosity, which modules, and how many NPCs were loading when it was slow?
Do you normally load that many modules?
I'm trying to establish a threshold and priority.

One thing I like about Rifts is that there are plenty of NPCs written up.

[zarlor]

I had been using it but thought I had pulled it out after the announcements here. I'll double check all my extensions, though. Thanks.

Sure enough I had forgotten to pull it out. Running last night things went well with no errors, all of the hard work going in lately has made the experience smoother than ever (although we didn't really do any combats last night, more a series of essentially Quick Encounters). I think this was in another thread but add me as a +1 on loving to see the ability to make attacks use any Attribute instead of just Shooting, Fighting, or Athletics. I say Attribute instead of just skill because SWPF (and I think the Fantasy Companion, too), for example, allows things like using Smarts OR a Spellcasting skill to make attacks with a Wand.

[hawkwind]

my summoner is doing it this way