Participants Section

[DarnellHayes]

As a new user, I'd like to examine the Participants Section of an Event Topic (I believe my terminology is correct).

When I look at this section:



I understand that the snippet with the "beaker" is for a Hero Lab Portfolio. Brand Synergy; makes perfect sense. The snippet with the silhouette below the Hero Lab icon is used to display something else, like a text file that has NPC info in it, which is fine.

But I find that I what I instinctively want to do I can't. Quite honestly, when I look at the silhouette, my mind and fingers want to do something that the UI doesn't allow. I want to click on the "person" silhouette to select a character that I've created that I want to..."participate" in the scene. I can't do that. (At least I don't think I can.)

I've seen other examples where the user simply makes a text snippet and writes the character name in the text field to create a link to the NPC. While serviceable, this seems...weak.

To be clear, I can create an NPC with a picture and a character sheet/stat block as an Individual topic. I would think that I could/should tell my Scene Event that this person is Participating in this event, and it would import the picture and associated statblock that I could access via a mouse-click.

Can I do this today?
Should I be able to do this?
Will I be able to do this?

Are others doing anything similar to this?

 

[Parody]

As you noted, the setup is related to how Hero Lab works. The first Snippet is for a Hero Lab portfolio for the entire encounter. The second is for statblock text for the entire encounter; in Hero Lab you can get that from File/Output (Whatever) Statblock..., but you could get it from any character generator or create it yourself.

What you want to do isn't possible at present. The closest feature suggestions I can recall are linking to or including part of another Topic/Article in this Topic/Article. You may want to try searching for those to see other people's ideas.

Whether to create a portfolio/statblock/etc. or not for an encounter is highly dependent on what is happening in the encounter and how your system works. My custom Paranoia Scenes have a PDF snippet for this purpose but do not add it by default, as most of my Scenes don't need custom statblocks. They do link to named and generic character Topics, but even for those the statblocks aren't usually needed.