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Stefouch / sebedius-yearzero-discord-bot

A bot companion for running Year Zero roleplaying games over Discord.
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YZE Character Sheets #206

Open YourGmChandler opened 10 months ago

YourGmChandler commented 10 months ago

Feature

Particularly for play by post games, where players are often participating on their mobile devices away from their resources (PCs, rulebooks, etc.) players need an easy way to reference their own character sheet.

Ideal solution or implementation

Ideally, the player can type a cmd like /myPC and a side window appears with a character sheet with fields defined by the GM. A flexible approach would enable the use across all the YZE games rather than one fixed sheet for each. the mRPG does this is acceptable for an MVP.

Alternative solutions or implementations

No response

Other context

Down the road, having the character sheet be able to send cmds to Sebedius such as dice rolls would be ideal. That might work against the idea of a GM defined character sheet. If so, perhaps it's better to have a field picker for the custom character sheet where the GM selects the fields from a list and each field is game specific ala vaesen.physique and alien.wits and custom..

Stefouch commented 10 months ago

This is feasible. I know that the popular Avrae bot for D&D can do that.

The best way is to have the bot fetch data from a character sheet made on Google Sheet.

The work required is huge:

  1. Create bot interactions and commands for registering sheets
  2. Create a database support to store the location of the player's sheets
  3. Create standardized character sheets on Google Sheet or else (for each game)
  4. Create a data fetcher and parser (for each game)
  5. Create roll commands compatible with character data (for each game)
  6. And more.

⚠ But...

Actually, I already tried this in 2020.

In the past, I tested to make the bot work with an online character sheet. I first tested with Lasse's https://www.forbidden-sheets.com/

The bot was able to fetch the data from a character sheet, and parse the attributes/skills values. Basically, I made steps 1, 2 and 4 for forbidden-sheets (step 3 was done by Lasse).

Then I dumped all the code in archives.

Why ??

It was too much work. My free time shrank at that time and I decided it was not worth it for a free bot. I considered to put that functionality behind a paywall (e.g. for Patreon supporters), but I decided against it : Still a lot of work for a single developer, not enough interest from users, too much competition with VTT, and against the "spirit" of the bot (a free service for the community).

So I am afraid this feature request is not for plan any time soon.