Wild Card Personalities

[scionofnyarlathotep]

Hi guys

I'm looking for some help here regarding Wild Card personalities. Up until now, I have not found it necessary to set up personalities as my protagonist have been either mooks or creatures. However, I am going to be running a Blake's Seven campaign which needs to have Travis and Servalan as recurring NPCs.

My problem is that although they can be created with attributes and skills and assigned to be wild cards, I cannot see a way to give them edges and hindrances. It seems illogical that they could be given the benefit of having a wild card draw yet not been/disbenefit from edges and hindrances.

Now, I can, of course, set them up as PCS and log in as localhost to control them but this does leave their character sheets visible to the other players, something I obviously wish to avoid.

So:

- Is there a workaround of which I am not aware
- Or can I add to the list for development if there is not one?

Cheers

SoN

[phantomwhale]

The Deadlands: Reloaded extension created the idea of Humans and Critters. This is due to the two being listed separately in the book, with Critters owning normal Savage Worlds monster traits and Humans having human stuff like grit, edges, and hindrances.

What a perfect split I thought. Until I saw Humans with Monstrous Abilities (in the Coffin Rock adventure) and noticed some Critters / Monsters have human abilities (frenzy, level headed and quick, for instance).

Now, with the current version of Savage Worlds (without Deadlands: Reloaded extension - wouldn't work well for Blake's Seven !?! ... although now I have thoughts of making a ruleset with slightly dodgy cardboard looking controls and I'll stop there...) you have a workaround of "just put them into the abilities box". It's just a text list, and for abilities such as "level headed" and "quick" it will process the automatic redeal in initiative.

I did have the thought of pushing the "human / monster" split from Deadlands back to Savage Worlds core. I am not too familiar with the other mainstream SWEX campaign settings, but suspect others might also have this split concept. But then as noted above, Pinnacle freely mix monster and human abilities around in their NPCs to fit the needs of the scenarios. Plus what to call the two categories - it's only humans and critters in Deadlands ! Hence SWEX's generic "personalities" box choice I suspect.

So I've not gone down the route of creating personalities with Edges / Hindrances, and instead allowed the ability list to accept drag and drop links from edges and hindrances in v3.2 :

https://sw4fg2.tumblr.com/post/56192...-be-dragged-to

More interestingly, I've also enabled Monstrous Abilities to be drag and drop too:

https://sw4fg2.tumblr.com/post/78019...rous-abilities

So with this, you should be able to create an NPC with several edges and hindrances, with all reference links fully enabled.

Perhaps you'd rather see a separate hindrance / edges list, although I'd argue it should at least be an "Abilities / edges" and "hindrances" list - as monsters with edges have them simply displayed as "just another ability" in the SWEX bestiary and other stat blocks. That is not in scope at the moment, or on the wishlist (although Doswelk DID mention it to me once...), so if that's something you'd like to see, feel free to add it (link is in the sig).

Other ideas welcomed too - sometimes I get too close to the code to see the bigger, brighter picture

[scionofnyarlathotep]

Thanks for the comprehensive response.

My own preference would for mechanism for all skills, edges and hindrances to be dragged from the SWEX library module on to a relevant 'personality' sheet. They would then retain their associated texts and effects where applicable.

Whether there would then be separate sheets for creatures and non-creatures or if there would be a drop-down menu within one character sheet to choose the race would be a decision you make based on the aesthetics and workability of the code.

What I ultimately want is to be able to replicate the PC process for NPCs, with as much of the functionality as PCs.

Going one step further, perhaps there would be a process to allow PCs to be given control of NPCs by the GM, giving them total access to their stats and abilities. This would be particulary useful for new NPCs joining a group or if an NPC is taken over by a PC with a relevant Power.

Not much I know!

[Doswelk]

Going one step further, perhaps there would be a process to allow PCs to be given control of NPCs by the GM, giving them total access to their stats and abilities. This would be particulary useful for new NPCs joining a group or if an NPC is taken over by a PC with a relevant Power.

Due to the nature of Savage Worlds allowing PCs to run NPC allies this feature is already implemented.

Just drag and drop the shortcut into the PC portrait you wish to control it. The NPC opens on their copy of FGII.

[phantomwhale]

My own preference would for mechanism for all skills, edges and hindrances to be dragged from the SWEX library module on to a relevant 'personality' sheet. They would then retain their associated texts and effects where applicable.

Should have all of that in 3.2, except for skills. They might need a GUI / look and feel redesign to fit them in. I decided these were probably better known (only ~20 of them, used all the time) than edges / abilities (hundreds of them).

Whether there would then be separate sheets for creatures and non-creatures or if there would be a drop-down menu within one character sheet to choose the race would be a decision you make based on the aesthetics and workability of the code.

I did try a dropdown in Deadlands - but it was problematic (do-able, but problematic). There is a technical detail that "list of things" in FGII must all be the same class of thing.

However, in Deadlands you CAN drag and drop Critters to the Humans list and vica versa which "converts" one type to the other.

What I ultimately want is to be able to replicate the PC process for NPCs, with as much of the functionality as PCs.

Going one step further, perhaps there would be a process to allow PCs to be given control of NPCs by the GM, giving them total access to their stats and abilities. This would be particulary useful for new NPCs joining a group or if an NPC is taken over by a PC with a relevant Power.

Hopefully we are 80-90% of the way there in v3.2. We've even got the ability to drag NPCs onto the PC list to convert them to PCs.

Llike Doswelk said, you can already share NPCs as read-only sheets. I guess if a player wanted full control over an NPC, including levelling up and equipment, then you might consider dragging into to the PC list (in v3.2) and letting them run him as a full PC - remember that Players can have multiple characters under their control. Suspect that might be more interface effort though - if they are just controlling the NPC for combats and casual rolls, then the NPC sheet fits the bill nicely.

So in summary, 3.1 already does much of this, 3.2 will do most of this, but anything we missed off, put on the list, as it's always nice to shoot for 100% !