Sleeper Island -- Moving your character from game to game in Fantasy Grounds
You've played in your first Fantasy Grounds game, and you'd like to take that character and use it in another DM's campaign. This is a multi-step process.
1) When you've finished playing your game, and possibly updating your character, return to the loading screen. You can accomplish this by right clicking on the FG background (not the chat window or other buttons). This brings up an exit option. After selecting that option, you have the choice to exit game or return to the loading screen -- click on the left arrow option.
2) Choose the "Manage Characters" option. There should be a campaign listed in the window to the right of the button that you clicked. Choose it. Click on "Start."
In the future that window will get full of many different campaigns -- too many. Personally, about every 10 games or so, I use the windows file manager to find the Fantasy Grounds\cache directory and while FG is not running, I delete that directory. That gets rid of most of the campaigns from ages past.
3) Select the "PC" button and look at the PCs. Notice that some of them are "Local" and some of them are "Server." Any local character can be uploaded to any new campaign you join. Server characters can't. So we need to export the server character to a directory, and then import that file as a local character. The character is stored as a file in the *.xml file format. If we then have two local versions of the same character, we should rename the old one so that we will know which one to choose.
You may need to start with the "edit" round button. That will make the "new," "delete," "upload," and "download" buttons appear.
If you need to do this to multiple characters on multiple campaigns, you'll return to launcher, manage characters and choose the next campaign to continue.
I've found that I should import all of the characters that I'm going to import *before* deleting old characters. Sometimes when you import a character, if you've recently deleted a character, some of the characteristics of your deleted character merge with your imported character. If you find that you'd deleted a character and want to import one, I'd exit FG first, and then restart the program before importing the *.xml file.
A note on version control. Some people are gamblers..they resave their new character sheet to the same name as their old character sheet. I risk averse, and so I save every *.xml with a different file name. Yukitaro, then Yukitaro1b, then Yukitaro2, then Yukitaro2b -- where the number is the level of the character, and a,b,c is just my way of figuring out which one came first without looking at the time stamp. This way, if your character sheet becomes fubar, you can go back one version and fix it from there.
4) Every so often, you may want to print out your character sheets. When you do, go to ALOnlinetools.net and click on that big "Character Sheet from Fantasy Grounds XML" button. If you don't want to waste paper, you can print to a *.pdf.
