Working with Things?

I thought I would add a thread which will serve, I hope, as a useful reference going forward.

What can you do with a Thing when trying to reference it from a pick with an “foreach thing” loop? I’ve tried assigning and deleting tags, and even adjusting a field on the thing with no luck. I’m trying to set up so a list of things in a table_dynamic get sorted with particular ones at the top, followed by all others. The ones at the top should be determined by another pick that will have already been made…

Any suggestions?
Thanks!
TC

A thing is just an entry in the database of potential options for the game - it's just what you entered in the editor, converted into end-use form. In effect, foreach thing is read-only.

What you are asking for is not an option as far as I know, because the tags and fields on the things are fixed, and each table has a fixed sort set.

The closest I can come up with would be to have three (if it's more than that, then skip this) nearly identical tables, differing only in the sort set, and the one that becomes visible is determined by your base pick.

If you're flagging "options X and Y are highly recommended based on your other choice", what we've done in the past is to make use of the thing template for that table - find a way of highlighting those recommended options, with colors, badging icons, or a column that doesn't have any entries, except for those recommended options. An example of this would be the blue color on class skills in d20/PF1.

After all this time, I think it really did finally click. Thank you very much Mathias for that complete explanation.

I took a closer look at the Thing Context and Target References on the wiki, and that plus the bit about "foreach thing as read-only" makes a lot more sense. all of the targets of eachthing would be for reading the tags or field values already present on the "DB definition". The only exeption to this would be the thing.amendthing[target,string] target which can only affect the name or description field, and it makes the change for ALL of the copies of that thing.

Am I understanding correctly?

And I agree that I think the simplest way to handle the "Recommended Selection" would be to change the color of the text in the table as it's being presented.

Yes, amendthing is capable of papering over the name or description. And there's only a single copy of each thing in the database, so if you amend the name or description, any time anything looks up that info, they'll get the amended version, so no matter how many picks are created from that one thing, they'll all share that name or description.