Monday, June 16, 2014

Elthos RPG Weapons Skills Selection Update

My play testers have consistently identified areas that need further genericization in order to make a truly generic RPG game system that allows GMs to configure their worlds in whatever way they want. This is of course one of my primary objectives, and I'm grateful to my Play Testers for pointing out areas that need improvement.

One of those areas was the Edit Weapons feature. Previously I had no way to associate weapons directly with skills. However, since having learned skills for weapons usage affects the Attack Level calculations, it was necessary to include some code that associates certain weapons with certain Skills. An example was "Ranged Weapons". When the Character is using a "Missile" Weapon the code would go and look to see if that Character had learned "Ranged Weapons", and if so they got the correct Attack Level calculated. The problem was that this was quite brittle, and requires every GM to have a "Ranged Weapons" skill in their world, or missile weapons would not get calculated correctly. As long as the GM kept "Ranged Weapons" then everything was ok. But what if they want to change the name, or split it into alternative sets of Ranged Weapons, such as "Hand Guns" vs "Bows", which if you think about it, are two completely different skills.

Therefore I modified the site to allow GMs to associate Weapons with whatever "Combat" skills are in their World. Did you add a Combat Skill for "Butterfly Knives"? Ok, so now you can add a Weapon named Butterfly Knives and associate those to the Skill. Thus, when the Character purchases their Butterfly Knives and learns the Skill, he will have the correctly calculated Attack Level.

This was a very solid advance as it allows GMs much greater flexibility to define their Worlds the way they want.

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