I love the pronoun field and upgrades to the creator system. I was curious if a Trait text field can be added to the final touches section for creating characters like we have for Starship creation. This would make it easier when building for the Trait field to be updated for the Symbiont name for Joined Trill and for other traits.
I noticed for the ships that the custom ships (GREAT ADDITION BTW) is limited to 12 for the stats which makes it awkward to build a ship that like the Defiant class starts with 13 or greater stats.
Hm. Allied Military. There seems to be some overlap between the Klingon Core book and the Player’s Guide where the KDF is concerned.
I’m gonna assume that if a user has selected both the Klingon Core source and the Player’s Guide source, then “Klingon Warrior” becomes its own character type, but if they’ve selected only the Player’s Guide, then the Klingon option gets subsumed into the “Allied Military” option.
I’m also gonna assume that it we’re not building a Starfleet or Klingon Core character, the new alternative Environment/Upbringing tables come in to play.
Since the Player’s Guide explicitly states that the GM has to approve rolling on the new tables and that they may not be appropriate for every campaign, I think the easiest solution would be to offer a third variant besides Starfleet and Klingon. Maybe Civilian or Alternate.
I second the civillian option, an alternative or additional option would be to add checkboxes for additional tables like what we have for cross-species talents. A “click to enable alternative upbringing at GM discretion” as some of them can apply to making Enlisted or Officer characters.
There’s a somewhat weird rule for the “Advanced Team Dynamics” Talent in that it’s only available to Commanding Officers and Executive Officers. Choosing a Role happens in the last step of character creation but choosing the Talents happens earlier. We don’t know that they’re gonna have that Role at the time that we select our final Talent.
In the current system, we filter the lists of Talents available based on a number of prerequisites (it’s how we enforce the Talent prerequisites like “Requires Command 4+”). Hm.
At the moment, I’m entertaining enforcing a backwards rule: if they select “Advanced Team Dynamics”, then I’ll automatically winnow the list of available Roles down to Commanding Officer and Executive Officer.
Option should be there to get the talent during character generation, so that one could create an experienced XO or captain with the talent, or pick it up later as their character evolves over time.
Related question–what would be involved in adding the ability for the builder to allow for character improvements after chargen?
At the moment, character creation goes through the entire lifepath creation and then stops. That means that characters created are “as at first creation”.
It’s not terribly hard to give people an option to say “now I want to add additional milestones” at the end of that process. But that doesn’t help folks who’ve been playing the game for a year and now want to upgrade their characters. They’d have to start at the beginning again and make the same selections all over again just to get access to the upgrade options.
Characters (and also Starships) aren’t “saved” in any sense (in truth, the only place a character’s data exists is either in the user’s browser or on the PDF file that they generate. None of that data goes to a server, so there’s no place to save the data). Having said that, I’ve had some thoughts about creating a “magic url” that people could use to re-constitute their character, or giving people an option to download a special “character file” that they could re-use. (This sort of idea seems interesting when one thinks about, for example, integration with tools like Roll20.) If one can re-constitute a previously-made character, then one could update the character.
There are downsides to (3). Most notably, if I want to change the way something works, I have a lot of flexibility. Once I need to start thinking about “previously ‘saved’ character”, I need to always be mindful of backward compatibility.
But there are upsides, as well. I’ve often thought about cool tools, like creating some GM aids that summarize data about a bunch of characters. Being attacked by a group of Nausicaans and their Gorn buddy (who’s a Major NPC)? Great that I have a single sheet that lists all their stats.
Anyway, that’s probably a much more involved answer than you were expecting (and probably only half of it makes sense).
The shorter version is “adding milestone extras at the end of character creation is probably straight-forward-ish” but “giving people the ability to change a character some time after they first created it is probably harder (but not impossible).”
That landscape style character sheet is wonderful, I love it.
As a player/GM I would be fine with having to remake the characters myself to get to the milestones as it also gives a chance to implement retcons that can happen during play for those who might do them. Definitely helps for seeing how your character grows, like making a child character, aging them through the milestones, going through the junior and senior cadet system, and then coming out on the other side as a young officer followed by experienced, gives much more depth and backstory as you grow with the character instead of pumping out the end result of their growth (obviously like… that’s a LOT so not everyone would do that, but I’d love to).
Having a pdf to import file converter does sound nice.
Thanks! It’s based on a custom sheet I created for one of my own characters. I like fiddling with character sheets. I’m a big fan of having the full Talent text available on my sheet, 'cause it’s easy to forget what my character can do.
It’s also interesting that – because all the gaming I’ve done in the last two years has been via video chat – landscape just tends to be more convenient for me these days when I have the character sheet on screen. I tend to have my important character sheets available on one screen, while I’m in the video chat on the other screen.
Actually, I would not opt for “adding additional milestones”, but for “adding additional attribute/discipline points/foci/talents”. It’s much more straight-forward.
One of the (many, many) great things about STA is that it a) allows “horizontal” character development and b) that there is more “horizontal” development than “vertical” development. By “horizontal” development I mean a change of the character’s stats while the stats’ sum stays the same (i.e. points are interchanged/shifted, not added) and by “vertical” development I mean a change of the character’s stats that also changes the stats’ sum (i.e. points are added).
It is, in principle, possible for every even number of milestones to “return” to your original character. First milestone change a focus, second milestone change it back. Third milestone change a talent, fourth milestone, change it back. etc.
This might not appear often in the wild, but it will appear that instead of going through three “milestones” simply changing one focus will do the trick.
The feature could be phrased “If you have earned any Arc milestones, please fill in how many here.”
Then you put in how many, it runs through what Arc Milestones do (+1 Att, +1 Dis, add talent, add focus, add value) and let the player choose. If it’s a ship you can do something similar (how many Arc milestones are being spent on the ship) (+1 system, +1 department, 1 talent)
Then the player chooses how many talents, focuses, values, etc they want to spend the milestones on and the leftovers go to attributes or disciplines based on player selection.
