Oh Game Master, thou shalt be the gatekeeper! Lock and unlock all your players' character sheets at once with just one click. May you never ever again watch them accidentally delete that beloved item from their inventory ("Uuuugh... NOOOOO!")... or let those nasty cheaters among them mess around secretly with their hitpoints ("AAAAArrrrgh!"). |
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With this nice little helper module the Game Master can block and unblock any edits to character sheets by the players. This helps, for instance, to protect them from accidental changes. And of course, if you're of the paranoid type, it prevents cheating.
Toggling on/off works in various ways:
In default settings, lock status is indicated by overlay icons, both in the scene and in the sidebar's actors list:
These icons can be configured and also switched off in the module settings!
Lock ON:
Lock OFF:
And it is even indicated in the Combat Tracker (thus reminding you that it should always bee green there, naturally):
Let's see what happens if players try to manipulate their hitpoints:
But apart from cheating prevention, let's see what happens if a player accidentally happens to delete an inventory item:
Even more, the GM receives alerts about it (optional, can be turned off):
No, I did not create this out of paranoia towards my players! IMO, role-playing is and has always been (since the Pen & Paper era) based on trust!
So it is not about cheating prevention (though it may serve for it as well!).
Instead, I am usually running hybrid, in-person game sessions with children of age 10+, who are permanently at risk of messing around with their character sheets. I just wanted to protect them against arbitrary havok clicks.
Even more, it turned out that locking character sheets from time to time can bring even much more focus and relaxedness into the more narrative parts of role-playing (which I love more than combat action). So the regular calls to order, like ...
"Everybody now, get your hands off your sheets, stop clicking, lean back, listen and watch!"
... are now replaced by a single, convenient button click. How I love it!
See CHANGELOG.md
This screenshot shows the default values.
You (gamemasters only) can assign a custom hotkey in the game settings (by default it is empty to prevent unwanted key collisions). My personal preference is SHIFT + L:
A ready-to-use macro button for doing the toggle is already included as a compendium pack:
Use it as it is, or have a look inside how it works - it uses the exposed class LockTheSheets
- it's a no-brainer:
// Toggle (pretty obvious)
LockTheSheets.toggle();
// ON and OFF-only
LockTheSheets.switchOn();
LockTheSheets.switchOff();
The cute, beloved badass goblins used in my screenshots have thankfully been published by David Wilson and Hammertheshark for free use on https://tools.2minutetabletop.com under the CC BY 4.0 License. I have grown so fond of them that they've become my special module demo'ing pets.
The banner image with the dark fantasy portal was AI-created by myself.