Implement button hooks, to deal with button-level skills

[blackshadowshade]

Similar to die hooks, we'll need button hooks to deal with button-level skills.

[blackshadowshade]

This is relevant to:

262 Slow/Giant

369 Flying Squirrel

370 Socrates

359 Japanese Beetle

213 Echo

[ManvilleFog]

372 I think rounds out the list of all button-level skills from sets that were at least partially implemented on the old site.

[irilyth]

One random suggestion: Call the button-level abilities something other than "Skills", so that Skill always means a button-level feature.

Perhaps "Abilities"? :^) (Did the old site, or does the FTF game, have a term for this?)

[ManvilleFog]

I've been referring to them as Button Specials. The Sailor Moon and Tenchi Muyou! sets refer to them as Iconic Abilities, because there's an icon to represent each on the button images, so I don't know if it would be appropriate to use that term with other buttons.

Speaking of terminology, it's been remarked that Dice Skills isn't always appropriate, such as in the case of Twin or Wildcard which don't have any type of special attack or effect, but simply represent die sizes. I guess Die Types is a more appropriate generic term. IMO it doesn't make much of a difference - calling Twin a Skill makes it apparent that it does more than give even odds of representing a number between 1 and it's number of sides.

[irilyth]

Yeah, in my mind Twin and Wildcard are sizes, not skills. But I don't know what a button object actually looks like, so maybe it makes sense to call them skills for whatever reason.

("Size" itself is sort of a misnomer, because what you've really got is a sorted list of possible showing-values, and a captured-value, which is the highest showing-value by default. But anyway. :^)

[ManvilleFog]

One thing I think worth considering is: do we want these button special available for future fanatics and vanity sets? The Socrates die, for example, would be a good way to represent how Jackie Chan uses his opponent's weapons against themselves.

[irilyth]

I think it'd be nice for button abilities to be applicable to multiple buttons, like future sets or Fanatics. (So it probably makes sense to call the abilities things like Slow Button (or whatever) rather than Giant.)

(What's the Socrates ability? Jujutsu? :^)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujutsu: "Jujutsu is a Japanese martial art and a method of close combat for defeating an armed and armored opponent in which one uses no weapon or only a short weapon.")

[ManvilleFog]

Nice. I can code it as j and free up a coveted S, perhaps for Sidebar. (For some reason High School Drama has become my favorite of the unimplemented button sets, even though I had no clue of its existence a month ago)

[blackshadowshade]

For the moment, I'd like these button specials to not be present in the recipe. I will fire off button hooks based on button name for the time being.

[irilyth]

Hmm: Do you need button Abilities to have letters? And either way, do you need them not to overlap with the die Skill letters?

(Or is the idea that there would also be individual Jujutsu dice? I suppose so, if the Ability is defined as "All of this button's dice have the Jujutsu skill" or some such.)

[ManvilleFog]

Sorry, irilyth - I was kinda thinking out loud. No. Button-level skills don't need letters. Socrates is currently in the database with Socrates Dice in his recipe (that needs to be fixed), and I guess my mind is still thinking of the problem of finding codes for new die types. The fact were going with button hooks makes this easier. I was going through some older discussions and found that James had told me much earlier not to bother turning button-specific skills into die types. I don't know how I missed that. : (

[blackshadowshade]

So, we implemented button specials a long time ago, and most of these specials listed here are implemented. The only one that isn't is Socrates, and that has its own issue. I'm closing this one.