Quote:
Originally Posted by thaX
Instead of having Feats and class abilities be stacked like they were in HLC, they need the tree/chosen field to click into the HLO database.
Not a programmer, just looking at the differences between the two in how they interface between program and App browser clicks.
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I'm not sure I understand what you're asking here. It SOUNDS like you're requesting that we make the presentation of Feat choices more of an RPG video game-like "skill tree", and less of the linear list it is right now. We've discussed doing something like that internally multiple times, but the TLDR is "it's complicated." We still want to improve the overall way you make selections for your character, including making prereqs and feat chains easier to navigate (in fact, we'll be rolling out some small quality-of-life improvements to the "Choose Form" in the near future, with more improvements to come later.) But unfortunately it's not as easy as just using a tree.
The problem is that the typical video game RPG skill tree is typically fundamentally designed to be displayed entirely in 2 dimensions. Also, the progression is typically fairly straightforward: you must select the nodes early in the tree to get to nodes adjacent in the tree. Occasionally there are deviations, but they usually apply to the whole tree in a uniform way (e.g. choose X tier 1 perks to unlock tier 2, choose Y tier 2 perks to unlock tier 3, etc). Tabletop RPGs typically throw that kind of consistency and ease of presentation out the window because of the medium (print books) and the publishing model (game mechanics spread across many books and game designers, evolving over time).
Feat/ability/etc (I'll just use Feat as a stand-in for all kinds of different abilities) prerequisites get messy. Some feats have a choice from among multiple prereqs, and this can happen at multiple levels in the chain, effectively creating multiple parallel trees that ALSO interlink with one another. Sometimes prereqs are of a different kind altogether (e.g. take feat X first, OR have 20+ STR). A great many feats have no prereqs at all, or have extremely short "trees" (only A linked to B, with no branches), meaning the presentation has to scale in a useful way from trivial trees to complex ones. This is all just scratching the surface, as it all gets way more complicated given that any given user could have any subset set of books, and the tree needs to be dynamically built/pruned at a moment's notice when they make purchases or switch off certain content for a character.
All of these are
surmountable problems, but they are not
easy. That said, we know that our current system is lacking, and definitely has room for improvement before we hit this particular wall. Now that Campaign Theater is in beta, keep an eye out for us circling back to some of these older, more foundational systems in HLO to give them some love.