Deathwatch XP system

[Mathias]

When the user adds a rank to their career, or adds their race, or adds anything else that contains advancement information about the Awareness skill, a new copy of the awareness skill is bootstrapped from that pick. This copy has a tag that means "set activated = 0 so any scripts on us don't run, and hide us in all tables."

This copy of awareness also has an autotag added to it that means 1st advance costs 200, or it has a field that means the same, and stores that cost value. Or, if this is one of the character's later advances, it might list the cost of the second or third advance instead.

Now, when you're adding the "Add New Skill" advancement, the advancement scripts will look for copies of themselves that are already on the hero and have the "we're an advancement helper" tag on them. They will foreach through all the existing copies, find the cheapest version, and set that as the cost of this advancement. So, when the user chooses Awareness as the skill they're adding, yet another copy of that skill is added to the character, but this one's a real copy, and is shown on the tables. Or, if it's the second or third time this character has selected Awareness, it adds +10 to the value of the main copy of Awareness.

[RavenX]

Originally Posted by Mathias

When the user adds a rank to their career, or adds their race, or adds anything else that contains advancement information about the Awareness skill, a new copy of the awareness skill is bootstrapped from that pick. This copy has a tag that means "set activated = 0 so any scripts on us don't run, and hide us in all tables."

This copy of awareness also has an autotag added to it that means 1st advance costs 200, or it has a field that means the same, and stores that cost value. Or, if this is one of the character's later advances, it might list the cost of the second or third advance instead.

Now, when you're adding the "Add New Skill" advancement, the advancement scripts will look for copies of themselves that are already on the hero and have the "we're an advancement helper" tag on them. They will foreach through all the existing copies, find the cheapest version, and set that as the cost of this advancement. So, when the user chooses Awareness as the skill they're adding, yet another copy of that skill is added to the character, but this one's a real copy, and is shown on the tables. Or, if it's the second or third time this character has selected Awareness, it adds +10 to the value of the main copy of Awareness.

I'm thinking of using a Field since the user will need to be able to specify the value of the XP on Elite versions of the advance. Would you recommend using tags instead?

[Mathias]

Originally Posted by RavenX

I'm thinking of using a Field since the user will need to be able to specify the value of the XP on Elite versions of the advance. Would you recommend using tags instead?

The cost actually paid is stored on the advancement itself. The base cost is looked up from the "advancement helper" copy of the skill. So, since they're in different places, whether the base cost is stored as a tag or as a field doesn't impact how the cost paid is stored.

[RavenX]

Originally Posted by Mathias

The cost actually paid is stored on the advancement itself. The base cost is looked up from the "advancement helper" copy of the skill. So, since they're in different places, whether the base cost is stored as a tag or as a field doesn't impact how the cost paid is stored.

so what you're saying is I can repurpose the existing field advCost field to store the XP paid instead of slots. And I need to basically build advancement helpers to store XP costs. now this is starting to make sense to me. I have the XP cost of psychic powers stored on the powers themselves since those are a flat rate and don't change.

[RavenX]

Mathias,

I've started to build these XP helper items that will store the costs. Should I use a tag system for handling skill and talent costs? Like a tag choice for (Trained, +10, +20)?