TORG Eternity Card feedback

[Norc]

Viriato139ac — Yesterday at 5:31 AM Hi, these are my thoughts about Card Support and Torg, and improvements; these are just improvement ideas, please, share yours! Probably there are other ways of implementing this, but @Norc might find it useful for the project: Hi, I just wanted to share my thoughts on how to improve Card Support to make it usable not only for Torg, but also for other games that use cards. I think that dropping cards to the layout might be cool, but if you are running a combat scene and players has to move tokens on a map, to fill the canvas with cards maybe it is not a good idea. The implementation is difficult optimizing the vtt space, and these are my thoughts on how to do it effectively:

1. Card’s layer, this has been already told, cards need a layer for players to interact with it. Maybe it is not necessary, if cards are managed outside canvas.
2. Each players have a hand, each hand might have categories, that are configured in the world by the GM. Configuration might be: name of the category, max number of cards in that category, if the cards are visible or hidden for other players and a different colour to distinguish between different card types (or a marker over the card showing the category). Torg example: categories might be: destiny-pool (hidden), destiny-action (visible) and cosm (hidden, only 1 card).
3. There is another hand called common hand that all users are able to see, this is the hand of the currently active cards, the one we usually place in the canvas (laid up or down). This also has categories. Torg example: drama (visible, only 1), and one category per player, showing the cards each player has used (placed in the canvas).
4. GM can deal cards to any category and player.
5. Players can move cards between categories (from reserve to action, and from action to common hand) and between players.
6. Common hand is shown using a button to the left, ‘cards’, this will show a autohide menu showing that hand, one row per category, so clicking that button you will see: first row: drama card, second row: destiny cards of player 1 that have been placed on the canvas, third row: destiny cards of player 2… Common hand will be also great if it can be a window with option to open/close/minimize.
7. Player’s visible cards might be in the same button, or in another one, “players hands”. If in the same button as common hand, then subcategories (new rows) for each player.
8. Player’s hand is shown as it is currently, in the lower menu. Different categories is shown with different colours in the frame of the card or with a marker "Pool", "Action", "Cosm".
9. Option to replace a card by another from the deck, this is useful to replace a drama card directly with another card.
10. When a card is placed in the common hand, a chat message showing that a card (image) has been dealt to the common hand.
11. GM option to see remaining cards in each deck.
12. GM option to deal specific card to player.
13. GM option to change card from discarded pile to active pile.
14. Option to mark the corner of a card with a color, marking cards might be useful for different games.
15. Currently Card Support allows you to duplicate cards, an option to mark cards as “duplicated”, in order to remove them. With is scheme players can see his hand with different colours for different card types, and players can see cards in play (drama and other players destiny cards) clicking a button on the left menu and then close that window to move his token around the map. If anyone has something to add, just comment, probably I've not covered all cases in Torg for the use of cards

[Norc]

My response:

Hello, thanks for the detailed feedback. I'll move this entire text to the Card Support Repo for further investigation when I get around to thinking about further feature requests again. Some quick thoughts:

Existing solutions:

1) One solution that I've recommended to other Torg Eternity players is to create a dedicated "Cards" scene that the player always has access to. This should help greatly with a number of issues you mention, including the amount of space available on the canvas, and having a "common hand" that all players can see.

Note that there is currently an issue where if a player drops a card onto the canvas, it drops on the scene the GM is looking at, not the player, which is a pain. I'm hoping to adress this today.

2) Another solution that Torg folks have recommended is creating "divider" card decks and deal with replacement to each player, for instance a card that says <pool | hand> to "categorize" cards.

Three planned features for the rewrite:

1) "multiple hands of cards" which should resolve a lot of the "category" type things 2) GMs being able to see other player's hands, and player's also in certain circumstances (perhaps getting "permission" from the player and/or GM). 3) Card layer that players can interact with.