Characters

[Imago]

Hi everyone,

Is there a possibility to trasform in-campaign characters to local ones? If not, can I, as a GM, assign owners to characters created by me? And last, if I create characters myself and then want to give them to the players, how do I do that?

Thanks in advance for your help

[Griogre]

Is there a possibility to trasform in-campaign characters to local ones?
Possible but quite iffy unless you are using the default d20 ruleset. That is the only ruleset where creating local characters work well.


If not, can I, as a GM, assign owners to characters created by me? Not exactly, however you can make it so anyone can use a character created by you (or anyone else actually).


And last, if I create characters myself and then want to give them to the players, how do I do that?
You don't have to do anything. It works this way by default for Host created characters.

The best way to make characters you want the players to use is to make them on the server. Anyone who logs in will see these characters and can choose one. Once they select a character it, becomes associate with the players user name. In the future only a person logging in with that user name will see the characters. The Host/GM can clear the user name to allow other users to log in with that character. I do this regularly when a player has to miss a session and I ask someone else to open the character from me.

[Imago]

Thanks! That's one big trouble solved by a wise word :p

[kcheu]

whats the normal process for character generation? I mean in face to face, we sit down before the campaign begins and make our characters. I am new to FG2 and all i can see is the three choices , host game, join game, create/view local characters. Do you create a local character and then export them to a host game? If so, how to export the made character? All I seem to be able to do is create a local character and then nothing else.

[Griogre]

You can make characters the same way you do in a normal game.

1) Have everyone log into the host and roll their characters and build the characters togeather. This the most common way of setting up characters for non d20 games.

2) Many D&D and other games use point buy so players can make them ahead of time.

3) You can make a local character ahead of time and export it to the server - but only for the default d20 ruleset (or rulesets compatible with this ruleset). Exporting a local character is as easy as selecting it when you log into a server.

Once logged in you see any character you have on the server, any character on the server not assigned to a user name and your local characters. If you selected a local character a copy is transfered over to the server. The next time you log into the severs you will see two of this character - a server and a local. Forever more you want to select the server character. If you don't you will make another copy of the local character on the server. This is a common mistake by new players and it scatters that character's xp and equipment over serveral different characters with the same name.

[Ged]

The next time you log into the severs you will see two of this character - a server and a local. Forever more you want to select the server character. If you don't you will make another copy of the local character on the server. This is a common mistake by new players and it scatters that character's xp and equipment over serveral different characters with the same name.

This is not a bug per se, but it is not one of the best thought of workflows in Fantasy Grounds II. Maybe a simple date/time tag per character in the character selection screen could make a big difference to make the distinction more comprehensible. What do you think?

[Griogre]

Ged, it appears that people accidently select the local character instead of the server character because it comes up first on the list of characters before the server one - thus if you have a few characters and need to scroll down that is the first one that comes up. People seem to just be looking for the name and token of the character and the text saying server/local is so small it is easy to overlook and they just select the first one they see, sometimes never scrolling down enough to see the second server one.

The easy low tech fix would be to sort all the local characters at the *bottom* of the list of characters after the server characters. I think it would also be nice and maybe not too hard to have the background of the local characters on the list be a different color or have the word “Local” slanted across it in transparency.

Kinda like the mock up below made from a GM list:
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/CharacterSelect.png

[Dachannien]

Griogre's suggestion is probably easier to implement, but you could also have a "display local characters" button on the window that replaces the server character list with a local character list.