My players decided to hire a lot of hirelings for their next delve - a handful of 125-pointers, and a few guards and laborers.
So my free time for the next few days will go to wrestling with the absolute madness that is GCS, since I don't have GCA5 mastered or tuned to Felltower, then importing the characters into the VTT, then making icons for them.
I miss playing on paper, because I could have done all of the NPCs by hand by the time I finished the first one, mostly, as he still lacks equipment. And then had the fun of finding a mini for it, rather than the chore of making an icon. This could just be old gamer griping, except that additional layers of work isn't really much fun for anyone that I know of.
I could allow the players to make their own guys, but I generally do not, because then they end up as min-maxed guys exactly as their employer would like (especially when it comes to disadvantages), and because they also end up less interesting to me as NPCs.
It's probably only 1% of the work, but you could save yourself from finding an icon. Players don't get to stat their hireling but you could insist they provide you the icon (if the system just imports images of a specific size) rather than you digging through all the preloaded icons and finding one you want to use. Or you could use a set of generic images for each template and add the NPC's initials to them. So all 125 point hireling scouts have the same picture, all 125pt hireling clerics have the same picture, etc.
ReplyDeleteAre there any shortcuts you can take to creating hirelings? Semi-random generation methods with defaults based on template and just roll for 33% that vary from the norm (since it is point buy you'd pair up traits and just swap, be it strength for dexterity or intelligence for minor perks). I assume that 62.5pt hirelings are all identical, 125pt hirelings are trimmed templates with a few low point customizations available, and 250pt PCs are normal templates with many points to assign as desired.
For tokens, for non-unique NPCs, they'll share icons. But for unique ones, I need something to distinguish them.
DeleteUnfortunately, generating the NPCs is easy - generating them in GCS is much longer. It takes me a few minutes to do a single NPC from a template, and vastly longer to make them with GCS. I should get fluent with it, but I find the interface maddening and can't sustain too long working on it before I need a break. The real bottleneck is data entry and uploading.