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Seeking Advice: Careers 2 ways

B

barrelv

Well-known member
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
Mathias said:
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.
Click to expand...

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

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

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?
 
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)
 
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.
 
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.
 
okay, I thought I understood this, could get the count to work for debug scripts, but I'm getting errors for this code:

Code: 
  <bootstrap thing="armAlchLtr">
    <containerreq phase="Initialize" priority="2000">
      count:hero#Career.cr? < 3
      </containerreq>
  </bootstrap>

I get "Encountered unknown element tag '3' "
 
Code: 
  <bootstrap thing="armAlchLtr">
     <containerreq phase="Initialize" priority="2000"><![CDATA[
       count:hero#Career.cr? < 3
       ]]></containerreq>
   </bootstrap>
Without a CDATA wrapper, you're only allowed a limited character set. < is one of the forbidden characters without a CDATA wrapper.
 
Thanks! that got it! Now I'm stuck in timing hell, trying to get this to take place after the Careers get added (and stick their tags on the hero) but somehow not pissing off the:

"Thing 'careerthing' - Condition phase/priority (PreTraits/2000)for bootstrap thing 'addedthing' occurs after the earliest rule/script (Initialize/4000)"
 
Can you move the relevant parts of the script on the careers that comes rather late to very early? You don't need to move the rest of that script - just the tag or tags that matter here.
 
Now I need to figure out how the heck I'm getting the Career tag on the Hero... I seem to have forgotten where I did that in the months of this project :confused:

Ha! by the magic of Find In Files, I got it and it works now. Sweet!
 
Last edited:
well I suddenly found a huge bug in this approach. I'm evaling the count of careers on each career with each pass. So when you hit the 3rd career, everything loses its mind. :(

I was really hoping I could avoid character creation versus advancement approach, but I think that's going to be necessary for this part.
 
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