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Shadowchaser
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 223

Old February 7th, 2014, 10:12 PM
I'll first say I've only had a few minutes to play with the generator, so if some of these are indeed covered, I apologize in advance. It's been a crazy week and the weekend is probably not going to be any slower.

Things I need for a Fate Core generator to really work for my games:

Extras (Yup, it's a must). I need to be able to create Custom abilities that may have a number rating, or simply a stunt-like description, and set the cost in Refresh, Stunt, and/or Skill Points. I can kind of do this now, but in some of my campaigns we establish a difference between Stunts and Extras, and Extras often require more than one stunt slot as cost. Some extras replace a Skill (Say "Flight" replacing "Athletics" for example).

The ability to easily set Refresh and Number of Skills- without this, I can't customize my game settings to allow players to build characters in different genres. Skill points and Pyramids of differing heights are probably the two easiest ways to handle skills.

The ability to choose between spending Skill points, restricted to columns or not, and the pyramid scheme. We also need to be able to let players "Break the Columns" rule when advancing their characters with Milestones.

A Custom skill that could be added multiple times, renaming it as necessary (like the Custom advantage in M&M)

The Fate Fractal- Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth. Without this, I'm probably going to need to default to a word processor for many of my NPCs.


Things that would help even more:

A quick "Minor NPC creator" that uses the various levels of mook/NPC from Fate Core pages 215 to 217 as a basis, and a toggle for "Mob" and the number of members in the mob. This will be especially helpful in using the software to track fight scenes.

Campaign Creation tool that sets rules for characters made for that campaign. In other words, a "World" character sheet that is then referenced by other characters when you build them. So you could have a "Default" world for the basic rules, and then change the rules and save them as a new world that would then be selectable when making characters. It would be great if you could keep track of how many Milestones a campaign had hit by recording it on the World character sheet... to make it easy to create new PCs when someone new joins up.

Putting the "Ladder" into the World Character sheet so you could re-name steps on the ladder (for different scales of campaigns) would make it easy for the skill descriptions to match to the various rungs on the ladder. For instance, if you're running a superhero game where +3 is "Superhuman" you put that on the character sheet and all characters referencing that sheet would reflect that instead of "Good" on the skills summary.

Dropping new skills into the World so they'd be accessible to players made for it would also be incredibly useful.

Adding Fate Accelerated Support as a toggle where you could have either Skills or Approaches, or both. Renaming Approaches would also be pretty important.

Hope these are helpful ideas! I invite others to make counter-suggestions or show how I could do any or all of them with the tools already in the software.

-James

James Dawsey

Vigilance Press at DriveThruRPG.com

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Last edited by Shadowchaser; February 7th, 2014 at 10:17 PM.
Shadowchaser is offline   #11
sak0232
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 21

Old February 8th, 2014, 05:13 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by GreyMouser View Post
sak: remember that Extreme Consequences directly overwrite an Aspect. Therefore, there wouldn't be a Consequence slot on the character sheet for it. You simply replace an Aspect with the Extreme Consequence.
Agreed, but it's also a consequence slot that cannot be filled again until the previous extreme consequence is dealt with...

So, if it is not to be listed as an extreme consequence, then something needs to be added to signify its importance. A star, or boldface, or different color, or simply a heading.

I was suggesting an Extreme Consequence slot, that when filled, will give a validation error (or a warning) that says "you need to replace one of your main aspects."

Cheers!
sak0232 is offline   #12
Steev42
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 70

Old February 8th, 2014, 07:54 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadowchaser View Post
The Fate Fractal- Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth. Without this, I'm probably going to need to default to a word processor for many of my NPCs.

A quick "Minor NPC creator" that uses the various levels of mook/NPC from Fate Core pages 215 to 217 as a basis, and a toggle for "Mob" and the number of members in the mob. This will be especially helpful in using the software to track fight scenes.
These two are both things I discovered in my first five minutes using it. The Fractal is practically a must. I need to be able to have sub-"characters" tied to my main character.

And since I started out making an NPC, I discovered that authentication wouldn't let me move on with undeclared skills.

However, in answer to some of Shadowchaser's other questions, I found it quite easy to set up the choices for a campaign. Open up an editor, add a new campaign, and you basically have the game creation worksheet from the Core book in front of you. Skill are likewise pretty easy to handle. I could see a need for a 'choice' option on skill pyramid/columns, though. I'd also like to see the "Stress Tracks" option--creation of new stress tracks other than Physical and Mental. Social, Wealth, Hunger, etc. could all be added. Even better if they could have individual default boxes.

Regarding extras--I think they need to be in there. I'd love to see them as an extra tab in the editor. I can understand some of them would be hard to implement (multi-zone monsters, magic systems, etc.), but if you could at least let the Campaign creator attempt it, that would be awesome.

More thoughts:
I have a stunt on one NPC I have in play that changes his '1' physical stress to a '2', and his '2' to an additional '3'. (Two shifts, folks!) As best as I can tell, you have the stress boxes forced to be equivalent to their position in the list. I'd like to see this changed somehow...because this could have an effect on mobs, too. A mob can have a stress meter of (say) 3 1-shift boxes.

Just discovered:
I created a campaign, and altered the skill list for the campaign. When I create a character using that campaign, no skills show up. It appears that the three 'default' campaigns have skills hard coded in some manner, as none of them have any skills listed in the editor, but they show up when working on characters.

Last edited by Steev42; February 8th, 2014 at 08:41 AM. Reason: Additional Ideas from Continual Playing
Steev42 is offline   #13
TCArknight
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Location: NW Arkansas
Posts: 1,321

Old February 8th, 2014, 08:21 AM
I've been playing around, and I like what I see.

I can think of a couple of things I'd like to see.

I think most important to me at the moment would be the ability to define a Variable field that I can adjust either with a script or a tracker, depending on my needs. For example, I'm creating a campaign based on Mortal Kombat and I'd like each character to have a Fighting Rank value to measure their overall power level. This could be only increased through having a certain number of Stunts or Extras.

Second, I'd like to be able to add an additional stress track I can define. I've seen a lot of instances where something like Wealth or Social Standing would be treated as a Stress track.
TCArknight is offline   #14
Steev42
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Posts: 70

Old February 8th, 2014, 08:51 AM
Continuing to play around with getting my campaign skills to show up, I noticed something.

In "Fate Core" campaign, the campaign skills are tags. When I select skills in my campaign, they're put in the bootstrap category. When I add a skill to the Tags (but leaving it selected), it shows up twice.
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DarkChilde
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Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 10

Old February 8th, 2014, 09:07 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steev42 View Post
Continuing to play around with getting my campaign skills to show up, I noticed something.

In "Fate Core" campaign, the campaign skills are tags. When I select skills in my campaign, they're put in the bootstrap category. When I add a skill to the Tags (but leaving it selected), it shows up twice.
I followed the tutorial included with the package (C:/ProgramData/Hero Lab/data/fatecore/docs/editor.htm on my setup), I created the Skill, Stunt and Campaign. I restarted Hero Lab with a new portfolio and chose my tutorial campaign from the dropdown.

The skill pyramid grew just as it should however there are no skills showing up and the only stunts that show up are the 3 to create custom stunts.

I've never tried this before but it seems that it really is a basic necessity to set up any Fate Core game.

Anyone have any thoughts on what might be wrong or where I can look for help with this?
DarkChilde is offline   #16
MPHopcroft
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Old February 8th, 2014, 09:49 AM
Anyone interested in sharing portfolios for mutual assistance and to see if we can give each other insights on things?
MPHopcroft is offline   #17
mantrasong
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Join Date: Feb 2014
Posts: 11

Old February 8th, 2014, 10:02 AM
So far, I'm a fan. It looks like most of the things I need to create a Dresden Files conversion are available in the editor, which is good.

That being said, I would like to have the starting refresh, and skill level, and possibly pyramid vs. ladder options available at character creation time, rather than creating a custom file for those.

Having the ability to add extras in the main sheet itself would also be pretty nice.

The other (super nitpicky thing), is there are a couple of typos in the add Stunt screen. The custom Stunt 1/Scene explanation text says once per session, instead of scene. The Custom Stunt 1/Session text says it can be "uses" once per session, instead of used.
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sak0232
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 21

Old February 8th, 2014, 11:59 AM
If it hasn't already been mentioned, perhaps something to signify that a consequence is healing?
sak0232 is offline   #19
Sketchpad
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 237

Old February 8th, 2014, 02:51 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Colen View Post
* Not sure what you mean by that; can you give more information?
Thanks for the answers, Colen. For Fate Accelerated, I ask only because it'd be nice to have the sheets full printed and managed. I'd much rather have Extras if I had to choose.

As for the Consequences, I've attached a part of the official Fate sheet to clarify what I mean.
Attached Images
File Type: png HL_FateConsq.png (11.4 KB, 17 views)

DT Butchino | Writer, Illustrator, Designer
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