Adding new Skills, Legedary Feats, etc. ro RuneQuest

[MPHopcroft]

One of the things people using the RuneQuest data set when it is released will want to be able to do si expand it -- in many cases, expand it to alarming degrees. In addition to the obvious new spells, people are going to want to add skills -- possibly boatloads of the things -- and Legendary abilities.

So, once the kits is out and tinkerers get their hands on it, how easy would it be to add these things? And -- just as importantly -- how would one go about setting things up so that some of these new additions are usable in some campaign but not others (you obviously can't have players buying firearms-related skills in worlds where firearms don't exist even as a concept).

 

[rob]

At 12:25 PM 6/15/2007, you wrote:

One of the things people using the RuneQuest data set when it is released will want to be able to do si expand it -- in many cases, expand it to alarming degrees. In addition to the obvious new spells, people are going to want to add skills -- possibly boatloads of the things -- and Legendary abilities.

So, once the kits is out and tinkerers get their hands on it, how easy would it be to add these things? And -- just as importantly -- how would one go about setting things up so that some of these new additions are usable in some campaign but not others (you obviously can't have players buying firearms-related skills in worlds where firearms don't exist even as a concept).

The Editor within HL is completely generalized and fully driven by data files. Consequently, users will be able to all their own custom stuff for Runequest (and any other game system) using the Editor. Obviously, the types of objects will be different across game systems, as will the information associated with those objects. But it will be easy to add custom stuff.

Different material will be tied to different settings. One of the things we've mapped out is the handling for that stuff, but we haven't added it yet. It should be added over the summer, at which point controlling what material is/isn't enabled will become easy to manage for users. Currently, it's only accessible to us internally, and you can see how it's controlled by the user via the Configure Hero form.

 

[MPHopcroft]

This is probably going to go into related questions involving systems that are similar to but not identical to MRQ, but would it be advisable to make extra copies of the dataset and relabel them (much as people do with the currently-available d20 set) to match specific settings or styles (One creates a character for lankhmar or the Eternal Champions series differently than one does for Glorantha).

 

[rob]

> This is probably going to go into related questions involving systems that
> are similar to but not identical to MRQ, but would it be advisable to make
> extra copies of the dataset and relabel them (much as people do with the
> currently-available d20 set) to match specific settings or styles (One
> creates a character for lankhmar or the Eternal Champions series
> differently than one does for Glorantha).

I would recommend against doing that. We will be adding a "source"
mechanism relatively soon that will solve this quite nicely. Basically,
the author will be able to define separate "sources" that effectively
correlate to different settings or rulebooks. Then users will be able to
select which sources are active for a given character. The net effect is
that a d20 user could turn on/off the material for Eberron (or potentially
a specific Eberron book). The same would apply to Greyhawk, FR, etc. The
author would simply tie each database entry to a corresponding source and
the HL engine would make the governed material available or not, as
selected by the user. For RQ, this mechanism would work the same way for
Lankhmar, Glorantha, etc. It's a much cleaner approach, since all of the
data lives in one database, and the user can control the subsets enabled
very easily for each character.