Misc. Design Elements

[toconnell]

From @loganogden

• cursed items How does these come into play? How are we currently representing them? What negative effects do they have to the survivor [outside of the gear itself]

For simplicity's sake, I invented a meta data element that, when added to a survivor, basically functions like an A&I and causes other things to automatically happen to that survivor.

For instance, if you add the "Sleeping Virus Flower" curse to a survivor, we automatically give them the "Sleeping Virus Flower" A&I which then gives them +1 luck.

Other ones work similarly: the Belt of Gender Swap gives you "Gender Swap" and then changes your effective sex (which is not the same as your base sex, etc.).

At any rate, go toggle a couple on in the Legacy Webapp to see how I approached it and determine if you want to carry it forward to The Watcher.

• fighting art levels (will be needed to support some of the expansions) Can we just handle this through dropdown by adding a level to the name, so instead of "____" it's "___ Lvl 1" and whatnot?

Perhaps. That's down to @Chibird12 and @CalebKester to determine whether it's do-able.

From the API perspective, the way things work now, it would be two POST calls: one to set the FA, and then one to set its level.

• epithets (I think this is just tim’s fan made achievements) Is this something we plan on including as it doesn't appear to be tied to the game officially? That's not to say we don't work in some achievement system down the road. Could actually be kind of fun to do so for sharing purposes."

Correct. They're more like tags than achievements, at this point, and they don't maintain data, e.g. what LY they were applied, what IRL datetime they were applied or anything else.

Achievements is a cool idea (that is not implemented in any way API-side), but this is less than that. Really just think of it like tags.

• Special Attributes (the example was purified from PotSun. Not sure what else) How often are these referred to? If we built in an additional tab for the survivor sheets could it live there?

So far, there are six and they are all expansion-specific and they are supposed to be recorded on the Survivor Sheet.

In PotStars campaigns, I use them to render The Constellations (because they figure into that).

Another thing to keep in mind is "once per lifetime" things. Other than the SotF re-roll, I haven't really implemented anything for tracking those, but I've got a ticket open to remind myself to handle it soon: https://github.com/toconnell/kdm-manager/issues/353

Maybe fire up the legacy webapp, start a PotStars and take a look at how it works there, to give a sense of how you might want it to look.

• Weapon proficiencies/mastery (i know we account for some of this but i’m not doing anything other then logging progress. We should figure out how to make this more functional. Weapon proficiency should be listed under "abilities" once acquired. Once someone 'masters' a weapon it should appear under everyone's 'abilities'

The API does this automatically: once you select a weapon type and increment your WP to three, it applies the A&I for the specialization; at eight points, it auto-applies the mastery, adds the mastery to settlement innovations and then auto-applies the specialization to all living survivors in the settlement.

• affinities (there are ways to get permanent affinities attached to your survivor) Plan on having it on an additional tab or maybe we just add to abilities. Looking for input on this one along the same lines as the "Special Attributes"

I just dropped them at the top of the Survivor Sheet as three different-colored squares.

• constellation (potstars) Same questions as above

Same answer as above?

Haha--seriously though, The Cosntellations are a major feature of PotStars (some would argue the main event of the campaign) and I expect future expansions to have similar things going on.

Having placeholders or hooks for how to represent totally arbitrary, campaign-specific tables, attributes, etc. is kind of mission critical, if the scope of The Watcher is going to include support for all expansions.

(Don't even get me started on A:KDM. I have a real strong sense that we might end up having to draw a line around The Watcher and just say, "it only supports KDM--period", or else we'll be working on this until we're old people.)

• reroll (survival of the fittest) This is one I have no idea how to handle. Isn't this done when the survivor is created? Wouldn't the character sheet be easy enough to edit to accomodate rerolls? We're not proposing this as a built-in to the app, correct?

I've got it in the legacy webapp and I plan to expand it (see above).

I think people expect to have a place to record it. I made it a part of the survivor search in the legacy app too, after I got a couple of emails from people asking for it.

[CalebKester]

@toconnell @loganogden for reroll, what do you guys think about just making this an ability that they have? It will show up in their abilities. Then when they are done with it they just remove it. One downside i could see is they don't trust the system and don't remember removing it. A checkbox is more of a reminder that they did check it.

[toconnell]

@CalebKester I do it as a checkbox that stays checked on the Survivor Sheet in the legacy webapp. I also include it in Survivor Search (e.g. in case you want to rapidly look for a good Intimacy candidate haha).