Seeking Advice: Careers 2 ways

[barrelv]

I'm getting to the Advancement portion of my project (\o/) and I'm asking for some advice how best to model this one aspect.

For this rule system, your first 2 careers give you a host of things (money, weapons, starting skills, and abilities), plus access to future skills and abilities your can purchase as you level up.

As you get experience points, you can later purchase new careers. They don't give you anything immediately like your first two, but instead just open up skills and abilities you can purchase later.

How do I best model this on the Career things? I have ideas for certain things that aren't bootstrapped, like skill points or money, but I have no clue how to do this with bootstrapped elements, such as abilities or weapons.

I think I need to figure out conditional bootstrapping for this. if that's so, anywhere I can see a good example? Or is there some other way I should do this?

I don't think it would be good to create two sets of careers - one for the starting careers and then another set for everything after that. I mean, that seems possible, but a lot of duplicate work.

Ideas?

[Mathias]

Yeah, conditional bootstraps are probably what's needed in order to not get an ability later on.

As a note, are you sure you want to bootstrap weapons? If you do so, the character can never give up, sell, or lose that weapon, and can never store it on his horse or loan it to another character in the party.

[Mathias]

As another option, add a script to the ability component - for those abilities that are bootstrapped, have them look at what bootstrapped them, and check whether that item was added during character creation or advancement - if it was added during advancement, then if this is one of the abilities that's not gained later on, the ability disables and hides itself.

[barrelv]

Originally Posted by Mathias

As a note, are you sure you want to bootstrap weapons? If you do so, the character can never give up, sell, or lose that weapon, and can never store it on his horse or loan it to another character in the party.

Yeah, not the best solution. What's another method to auto-add a piece of equipment that wouldn't be a bootstrap?

[Mathias]

The problem is that you have to account for the user changing their mind about their careers a couple of times, which changes the free weapons.

I'd add an eval rule that complains if they don't have a weapon of that type, and tell the user to buy it for free.

Maybe a drop-down that lets them select the weapon they want to make free.

[barrelv]

Originally Posted by Mathias

As another option, add a script to the ability component - for those abilities that are bootstrapped, have them look at what bootstrapped them, and check whether that item was added during character creation or advancement - if it was added during advancement, then if this is one of the abilities that's not gained later on, the ability disables and hides itself.

"the ability disables and hides itself." I feel like this has something to do with live state? Am I completely off?

[barrelv]

Originally Posted by Mathias

The problem is that you have to account for the user changing their mind about their careers a couple of times, which changes the free weapons.

I'd add an eval rule that complains if they don't have a weapon of that type, and tell the user to buy it for free.

Maybe a drop-down that lets them select the weapon they want to make free.

Bootstrapping does take care of that part at least - you remove the Soldier career and his free gear goes with it.

There isn't any other method to automatically add Things to a Hero besides Bootstrapping, is there?

[Mathias]

Hiding means to add a tag that's then looked for by the list expressions on the tables where you're showing this item - if the tag is present, don't show this item.

Disabling means record a status on that item, and then, in the item's script, look up that status and make sure it's not disabled before applying any effects.

There's a built-in mechanic for this:

To mark something as disabled:

activated = 0

(by default, activated = 1 for all things in HL, so you disable/deactivate that item by changing its value).

In each script, to check if it's disabled, use this as your first line:

doneif (activated = 0)

[Mathias]

The other thing that's like bootstrapping is called auto-adds, but there, if you change your mind about careers, the initial weapon will stick around, and you'll get a new weapon from each new career you try.

[barrelv]

Are there any examples of conditional bootstrapping? either in the skeleton or the savage world rules? or can anyone post one?

I've read over the wiki page for it and can't get my head around it.