Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
The application does not currently support creating Klingon or Romulan PCs for campaigns centered on those empires, and honestly, that’s not a priority. At this point, I have only three things I need to do immediately: Create the capacity to save the character to an external file; create the capacity to advance to the character as it competes adventures, and the customary clean up of bugs and such that are inevitably found during the use of the application. The first two will be relatively quick, and the third one is always an ongoing process.
I have to spend the next couple weeks focusing on a Response to a Motion for Summary Judgment. After that, I’ll finish this up and start my next project. Or so I hope. The next project will involve a modern game system still in print. I know the author of the game and need to discuss it with him before starting the project. If he gives me the thumbs up, that one will be a bear.
By the time I’m finished, I will be known as the “Character Builder Guy.”
Last weekend, my 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“1e“) gaming group discussed expanding our horizons. To some extent, 1e has run its course for us, so after the other Rob takes over as DM and runs us through the Village of Hommlet, we’ll probably be trying out new game systems. (Technically, we haven’t heard from Rob on the matter, so there’s more to discuss.) This discussion was prompted by a discussion I had with another member of the group a couple of weeks prior, and that prompted me to create my Gamma World 7e character builder (which is complete and should be on GitHub soon). This latest conversation with the group discussed different game systems we may run. One of my favorite is the FASA Star Trek Role-Playing Game (“FASA ST“) from the 1980s. When I was no longer allowed to play D&D, I shifted over to FASA ST for as long as I could. Surprisingly, I still have absolutely everything I bought related to that game except for the ship models that my older brother destroyed. (He’s an asshole.) I couldn’t possibly tell you how I managed to retain all of those items, but I have them.
Anyway, since Saturday, I was inspired to start another character builder, this time for FASA ST (2nd edition). I already created and published a Gamemaster’s application to manage various aspects of a FASA ST campaign, but I never got around to putting a character builder into it. Because I didn’t want to relearn my old code, I left that GM’s application be and started a new one. I imported a lot of the underlying data, then started building. In just four days, I’ve made an incredible amount of progress considering three of those days were workdays. 🙂
Like with the Gamma World character builder, I offer you some screenshots. For those of you with at least a vague recollection of the game system, I offer commentary to explain what’s going on. Most of you might want to ignore that commentary.
In the first screen, you choose your heritages (called “race” in the game). The red arrow points out a house rule I created. Each race has a specific set of bonuses and penalties to certain abilities. For characters of mixed heritage, those bonuses and penalties are averaged. My house rule is that, much like me, a typical American mutt of European ancestry, I allow characters to have as many as four distinct lines. My primary lineages are Scottish, Irish, German, and Italian, with a little Dutch sprinkled into the first three. Your character can be Vulcan, Romulan, Klingon, and Human. Star Trek canon seems to contemplate a mixing of the races, so my game does as well.
This next screen shows what you learned growing up. There are limited options, but they’re all useful for different types of characters. Another red arrow means something to point out. As you’re going through the character-building process, the same skills can be chosen multiple times to jack up a chosen specialty, but to make sure you can audit your work (and my software), I keep all the skill rolls separate. That creates a problem. In no event can a score exceed 99, but you might accidentally do so. In the end, I’ll force a cap of 99 on the final scores, but then you’re throwing away points you could have used elsewhere. Moreover, if you ever go backwards in the process, it erases everything that comes after it. It must because later steps are often dependent on the decisions you make in earlier steps. If your Computer Operation score gets too high, you may lose a lot of your work when you go back to fix it. The button at the top allows you to see your character’s current status (as far as points allocation) without taking the time to add up individual rolls. You’ll see a screen shot of this a little later in this post.
Nothing to discuss here. This is just the basic curriculum that all PCs learn at Star Fleet Academy.
This is also basic information you learn at Star Fleet Academy, but it couldn’t fit on the prior screen, so I gave it its own. Pay no attention to the fact that all the skills seem to be the same. I was running some testing.
Now you get to Branch School, which is where you start to really specialize. Navigators go to navigation school, medical professionals go to medical school, etc. Above, you see the helm Branch School, which is the simplest of all of them. There are no electives. You simply get what you see above.
If, however, you choose any other school, you get a pop-up window that allows you make your elective choices. For communications, you get to spend 30 points in various languages any way you want, whether 30 points in one language or 3 points in ten languages. The rest of your skills are non-elective, so when you push the Accept button, it loads not only the choices you made here, but also the choices that are set by your choice of Branch School.
As promised, here’s what happens when you hit the Current Status button at the top right. You get an alphabetized and consolidated list of your skills so far. This image was taken for a different set of data than the others, so these numbers don’t correspond to what you saw in the images above. But this is, for example, all of your Carousing scores added together and listed just once. At this point, there’s no danger of wasting points by assigning scores above 99, but for the data in the prior images, I had a Carousing score of 115 just getting to this point. That’s why this exists.
That’s it for now. I’ve got only one more pop-up screen to create (Medical), and then it’s on to the characters’ past duty assignments on starships (or wherever they were assigned before the campaign begins).
Side Note: I’m Getting Better
The 1e character builder took years to create. I’m not relying on a technicality to say “years.” It’s more than just two. I think it’s been at least five years because I started it before I bought my current home in 2022. If you go through my posts, you might find and exact number, but I’m too lazy to figure it out. Even now, the damn thing has very little of a user interface, and I’m only part way through the Monster Manual II data entry. I haven’t even started Oriental Adventures or Deities and Demigods, and the latter would require some new data structure to implement. More importantly, because it was developed over years without any formal requirements analysis, it’s not put together very well. (Requirements analysis is important. Think about building a mutlistory building and halfway through the process being told it needed a basement.) Some of this can be explained by the fact that I included a campaign management tool, with the massive monster data entry that required. Moreover, I can blame this to some extent on the fact that it’s difficult to produce software for a game system that’s so convoluted.
Grognards are going to get angry with that statement, but it’s absolutely true. Every 1e rule is an exception to every other one. There’s no consistency at all. I’ve written extensively on how some of what’s in 1e should never have been abandoned by modern game designers. But be realistic. Taken as a whole, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a first-of-its-kind effort undertaken by a cobbler/insurance salesman. There was plenty of room for improvement. That doesn’t in any way condemn the efforts of the old gods of RPGs. We as a community owe them everything.
I was able to finish the Gamma World character builder in under three weeks. and it looks like I won’t even need that much time to finish this one (at least for the Federation PCs; Klingons and Romulans will take longer). I say all of this to make the point that I’m getting better as I relearn the skill of software development. In fact, I have an extra week of vacation time I’m taking in August, and I’ll be using that time to take a course towards C# certification. (C# is a programming language.) I may be able to launch these character builders via the web, opening them up to Mac users as well, though if that’s in my future, it’s a little ways off. There’s at least one more game for which I’d like to produce a character builder, and if the designer gives me his permission, a desktop application would be my next priority.
How Can I Get a Hold of This?
Gamma World should hit GitHub as soon as I figure that out. The FASA ST character builder will follow suit.
Maybe I’ll be known as the “Character Builder Guy.”
Play What You Want 