Raistlin

Well, I’ve already done more than I thought I’d be able to do.

I’ve added an Action Panel for players and a Referee panel for Referees.

Anyone in the scene can be made the referee. So if you only have two players and they want to throw down, they could. This is what the designated referee would see when they call up the panel. Non-referees would only see who was set as the Referee. Technically, they’d have the option to override that, but I’m going on the assumption that all players are here to have fun.

The Referee can override just about everything in the scene, including when a new Turn begins(which resets all maneuver selections).

This is what a player would see. They can select their maneuver and target and lock it in for the turn.

When maneuvers are locked in, or if the referee changes anything, emit a generic message to everyone in the scene (just letting them know what the action was, not the specifics of that action).

My plan now is to give the referee an “Execute Maneuver” button that does exactly that: executes the maneuver and emits the results to the scene. It would also tabulate and apply any damage or whatever. All of this is scene-specific, so in theory, a fighter could be in multiple fights in multiple scenes, and everything would be okay.

I wasn’t sure I’d make it this far but I think it’s all coming together nicely.

@Faraday Oooh, yeah. That’s slick. I loved this game in High School and college.

I’m always pushing myself with Ares to see how far I can take it and how complicated a system I can actually code. For the past week or so, I’ve been working on something for the old Street Fighter RPG from White Wolf. Character creation isn’t really the main goal. What I want to see is whether I can build some kind of combat system around it, obviously without the hexes and movement.

To get there, though, I still needed to build character creation first.

For debugging, I set up Maneuvers the way you see below, with every available move for the character’s style listed on the page and selected with checkboxes. My original plan was to replace that with an “Add” button once everything was working, so you’d only see the maneuvers your character had actually selected.

My wife actually prefers the current setup because you can see all the possible moves for your style in one place, so now I’m curious what other people think.

Would you rather see all available maneuvers on the page and select them with checkboxes, or only see the maneuvers you’ve chosen and add new ones with an “Add” button?

@Nynrose Ohhhh. I’ve heard of the game and the people behind it, I just didn’t know their names. Thanks.

@InkGolem ???

This isn’t really a discussion post. It’s more of a musing post for myself. I’m finally coming out of a pretty bad stretch involving health issues, losing my dog, and some other things, and I’m thinking I want to open a game again. I’m still on the fence, but there are two ideas calling to me that won’t stop.

1. Invincible MUSH. Comic games are my wheelhouse, but for various reasons, most of them don’t appeal to me anymore. I have nothing against them; I just no longer find appeal in the blended-universe-style games. And while I love comics, I haven’t really read them in the last 20 or so years, save for a few storylines here and there. So a canon game wouldn’t work for me, unless I set the cutoff in, say, the 1990s, which I’d been tempted to do for an X-Men game. I’m a big fan of Invincible, though. If I set it right after the fight with Omni-Man, there wouldn’t be a ton of continuity to contend with, and I think it’s much more open to original characters than a Marvel or DC game. I’ve also been playing the crap out of the new RPG since it came out. I love it.

2. Game of Thrones. I’m really shocked there aren’t more of these games out there. A lore-rich, low-fantasy, lords-and-ladies world with giant heaps of sex and violence. I’d probably set it just after the Blackfyre Rebellion, so a bit before the time of Dunk and Egg. I’ve become a big fan of the Year Zero Engine, so I’d likely take the SRD and hack it for the game.

Invincible would be the easiest. I actually already have it running privately for a few friends. Game of Thrones wouldn’t be much more work, since I could use the YZE base from Invincible as the core for that system, code-wise anyway. There’d still be building out the theme, the world, and whatnot.

Anyway, I don’t have any other real outlet for these kinds of musings, so I threw it on here. LOL

Whew. This almost broke me, but I got there. Being able to create a Battlesuit(powers, including arrays, nested inside a device container).

This was one of the toughest coding projects I’ve ever done. It’s not entirely finished, but it’s done to the point I can make characters and whatnot. I’ve tested it with a few archetypes, and it all seems to be working as it should. So far, anyway.

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of M&M, but 4th Edition seems to fix some of the issues I had with 3E. It did give me some interesting code challenges, but I got there. I’m pretty proud of it, so I thought I’d share it here. For those who might appreciate it. LOL

Just a coder rant being put here because I have nowhere else to do it. LOL

Kind of related to this, I wanted to see if I could create a web-based character generation system based on the upcoming Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition, mostly just for fun. When you look at a character sheet, everything seems manageable. You think, “Yeah, I should be able to do this.”

Then you get hit with all the little niggly things.

Specializations and focuses for skills took me hours to sort out. I’ve been working on powers and their modifiers for going on two days now. Some are flat, which is easy. Some are ranked, which is also easy. Some are flat in certain situations but ranked in others. Some are extras in some cases and flaws in others. Some depend on the overall cost of the power and apply after all the other modifiers.

Several times I’ve sat back, pinched the bridge of my nose, and thought, “If I really wanted to do this, it would be easier just to use PDF sheets.” But then I think about how cool it would be to have this as an actual working system, so I press on.

I’m taking a break now after sorting out what I hope are most of the various modifiers. When, or if, I come back to it, I need to go through each power individually and deal with the specific modifiers that only apply to them.

Then I need to figure out how to do arrays…

RE: Hidden Sheets

I’ve never done it, but I don’t think it’d be that hard to make the character sheet tab on the Ares web portal visible only to the character and staff.

That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.