Armor and Weapon Qualities - Tags or Things?

[Duggan]

I have a number of "Qualities" that can apply to weapons and armor. They're basically your usual "Does extra damage to this type of armor" or "Needs to be reloaded if you roll double 1s" with a name, the effects, and a cost (for when you're doing custom items). I know that I can do these as a string field (and, in fact, that's how I did it when I entered the armor into the system), but eventually, I'll want to separate it out for when I have the gizmos to customize individual pieces (not to mention to make it easy for people using the editor to specify specific qualities). My first impulse is tags, but those just have a name and a value. Things could work too, bootstrapped onto the weapon or armor.

Is there a benefit to doing it one way or the other? Does that answer change if one is programming for the eventuality of customized weapons and armor?

[Mathias]

How customizable are these? Starfinder, for example, has a critical hit effect called Burn that can be on weapons, but on each weapon, it has to be paired with a damage - Burn 1d4, Burn 2d6, etc. So because of the need to customize, we implemented them as picks within the gizmo, so only a single Burn pick exists, and it's bootstrapped with the damage tag that applies to that weapon when it's added to a weapon. But if there hadn't been any need to customize them, we'd have entered them as tags. Pathfinder, for example, uses just tags for its weapon properties.

[Duggan]

Tags may be the easiest way to go. I suppose I could embed the cost as a "value" on the id?

[Mathias]

Cost? Are these things you can buy in the game? If so, they'll need to be picks (although the picks can assign tags, if your main tracking is handled through tags).

[Duggan]

Eventually, they're buyable (or can be added via skill checks). So the base case is that, for example, you can purchase a Phubar 10^2 Tensquare 10 mm, which is a somewhat unreliable gunfoam pistol that is Failure Prone (rolling triples results in the pistol exploding) but legal for general carry, for 2 Supplies. Or, if you were creating a customized pistol, you could get an Urtheep Industries manufacturer (+1 to Attack, +1 to Damage, gains the Unlucky quality, which makes it more likely that "interesting" things happen when you successfully shoot something, like over-penetrating and hitting the fuel tank) for a cost of 3, use Gunfoam to bring it down to 2 (chemical propellants are cheap), Pistol chassis (no cost), and add the Variable Ammunition quality for +1, bringing you to a cost of 2.

^_^ I'm not at the level for creating custom weapons yet, but I'm trying to make my code ready to modify for the next level.

[Mathias]

Okay, if you don't have a need to customize the individual qualities, then you can just use tags. When you get to customization, adding a tag can be done by purchasing a pick in the gizmo that then adds the right tag to its parent weapon.