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*The* perfect utility for the game master handling multiple tokens as one party. Easily collapse arbitrary groups of scene tokens (representing parties) into an easy-to-use single "party token", and vice versa. Manage up to 5 separate parties with up to 25 members each!
"Once there were three little goblins ... |
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Crunch My Party! - Video Howto
- What it does ...
- Changelog
- How it works ...
- Known restrictions
- Find and toggle by hotkeys
- Control it by macro
- Adjustable module settings
- Recommended modules in combination with this one
- Compatibility and Dependencies
- Upcoming features
- Credits
Table of contents generated with markdown-toc
Are you a game master who frequently needs to control a hole bunch of scene actors at once?
- Maybe you like remote controlling your players' tokens while they're travelling through a dungeon in between encounters?
- Or you need to handle larger groups of foes?
Then you might know the tediousness of having to micromanage all those tokens... aaaargh! It simply ends up in stressful slapstick, breaking your game flow.
This module of mine is meant as a comfortable solution to it: Easily collapse arbitrary groups of scene tokens (representing parties) into an easy-to-use single "party token", and vice versa. Manage up to 5 separate parties with up to 25 members each!
Has been moved to CHANGELOG.md
At first, before experimenting by yourself, please have a look at the Video demo on youtube
The main functions, briefly explained:
- Create a custom token representing your party in "crunched" state
- Add that party token to the scene and disable it (remember its name in correct spelling)
- Select any tokens in the scene that should join your party
- Run the related "Group Party #x" macro (see section Control it by macro)
- Enter the name of the party token from step 1.
=> You're done. Your party is defined! HURRAY!!
- Optional: If you want to control exactly where the party token should appear, select one (exactly ONE!) of your member tokens as the target.
- Run the related "Toggle Party #x" macro (see section Control it by macro)
That's it:
- Your party members will be automatically rendered invisible and moved (secretly) out of the way to the top-left corner of your scene
- Your predefined / preassigned party token will be moved from its "hiding place" in the top left corner to the previous location of your members and rendered visible.
- If you should have selected ONE member in step 1., this will be the position of the party token. Otherwise, the party token will appear at the location of one arbitrary member.
- Run the related "Toggle Party #x" macro (see section Control it by macro)
That's it:
- Your single party token will be automatically rendered invisible and moved (secretly) out of the way to the top-left corner of your scene
- The related member tokens will be moved from their "hiding place" in the top left corner to the previous location of your party token and rendered visible.
- Run the related "Find Party #x" macro (see section Control it by macro)
That's it. Your canvas view moves automatically to the scene location of that party and automatically selects its tokens (be it in crunched or exploded state).
- Token names may not (currently) have commas (comma is used as delimiter for the token names list stored in user prefs). If many people should comply about it, I'll try to make the delimiter char configurable (see Upcoming features)
- The "EXPLODE" animation of large groups appears somewhat clumsy and slow. That is known and by design. I had to build in a 200 msec timeout between every two tokens, to improve stability (no better solution found yet). If you are eager to contribute, have a look at the related disussion on Discord
You (gamemasters only) can assign custom hotkeys for finding and toggling groups in the game settings (by default it is empty to prevent unwanted key collisions). My personal preference is SHIFT + 1/2/3/4/5 for finding and CTRL + SHIFT + 1/2/3/4/5 for toggling.
Use the exposed class PartyCruncher - just like this, it's a no-brainer:
PartyCruncher.group(<partyNumber); // Assigns the selected list of tokens to another party tokens identified by a name you type in
PartyCruncher.toogle(<partyNumber); // toggles the specified party between a single "party token" (crunched) and separate "member tokens" (explode)
PartyCruncher.find(<partyNumber); // autoselect the specified party in the scene, moving focus and canvas you to it
The module comes already bundled with a predefined set of 5 macros per action (for up to 5 configurable parties of tokens), recognizable by their icons:
- Hot Pan & Zoom! by coffiarts: Keeps your players' canvas position and zoom in sync with your GM screen, especially useful when toggling and finding groups
- Use the following THREE mods together to pimp the whole thing to a new level!
- Animated Assets (JB2A) (aka "JBA") by Jules&Ben
- Automated Animations by otigon
- Sequencer by fantasycalendar
Make sure that you're using ALL THREE of them in combination, otherwise it won't work!
This allows autoplaying of animations on toggling. A default animation from JB2A is already preconfigured in the settings, but can be changed to your liking.
Presence of these modules is optional! If installed, Crunch my Party! will automatically detect and handle them. Just lean back and enjoy. However, note the additional options that derive from it: ...
If Hot Pan & Zoom! is installed and active, TOGGLE and FIND functions will, by default, make use of it: I.e. both the GM's and the player's views will be automatically panned and zoomed to the location of the related party.
If you do NOT want players' views to be synchronized (e.g. if you don't want them to see what you are doing), you can bypass Hot Pan & Zoom! with an additional macro parameter, like this:
PartyCruncher.toggleParty(<partyNumber>, false); // false means: useHotPanIfAvailable = false (default is true)
PartyCruncher.findParty(<partyNumber>, false); // false means: useHotPanIfAvailable = false (default is true)
Installing these 3 optional mods (strongly recommended!) will play atmospheric animations on crunch and explode. All 3 mods are used in combination (simply installing one or two of them won't work!).
You may choose to override the default animation with another one of your choice by adjusting the game setting "Explode animation (optional)". See Adjustable module settings.
- Tested on Foundry VTT 11.2xx and higher (including v12) in world system "dsa5" / "tde5" (The Dark Eye). But I consider it system-agnostic.
- No hard dependencies, but some warmly recommended optional 3rd-party modules are listed further above (see there to understand why I recommend them).
Things I am considering to do in the future (given proper demand for it - feedback welcome!):
small:Allow for missing tokens in the scene to make toggling more tolerant=> RELEASED with v11.0.4medium: auto-generate the group icon's image from its member tokens by generating overlay images. I assume by now that this should be doable in a similar same way as I've managed to generate overlay icons in my Lock The Sheets! module. But it will require some research and experimenting! => See Feature Request #4smallto?: find a robust solution for the token movement on EXPLODE, which is currently still potentially unreliable (tokens stacking onto each other erratically). If you're eager to contribute, feel free to have a look at the related discussion on Discord.
Feel free to follow the "dev" branch on GitHub to stay tuned: https://github.com/coffiarts/FoundryVTT-crunch-my-party/tree/dev
- David Wilson and Hammertheshark for various cute goblin images used in the videos. They were published and licensed thankfully on https://tools.2minutetabletop.com under CC BY 4.0 License
- Jules & Ben, otigon and fantasycalendar for their 3 magnificient mods that work sooo tightly together in animating my crunch & explode transitions (see Recommended modules in combination with this one):
- Navadaux for the "explode" sound provided via freesound.org, released under CCO 1.0 license
- Glaneur de sons for the "crunch" sound provided via freesound.org, released under CC BY 3.0 license
- Syrious for providing the patch for the JB2A Patreon version support
- Video background music: "Marty Gots a Plan", "Circus of Freaks", "Sneaky Snitch" and "Investigations" by the incredible, unbelievable, most-famous, soo-much-beloved Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), released under CC BY 4.0 License
- All those fantastic discord guys for helping me patiently in turning my worst nightmare code into something evolvingly decent. Two of them, who were super-helpful: honeybadger and mxzf