NPC Engineer - seeking some feedback on an option

[Maasq]

Hi folks.

I am looking at adding dropdown menu support for other areas such as reactions, other actions, traits and maybe legendary/lair actions. There are issues though, and i'd like the opinion of people who are using the program (or who are likely to).

I've explained in more detain in my blog post : https://www.masq.net/2017/11/a-difficult-decision.html

Hope to hear from some of you.
Maasq

[LordEntrails]

What about re-using the creatures name and making it possessive?

Your examples would then be:

"Nimble escape: The goblin can take the Disengage or Hide action as a bonus action on each of the goblin's turns."

"The drow is a 10th-level spellcaster. The drow's spellcasting ability is....."

This wouldn't quiet follow WotC convention, and I don't know if it would breaking any parsing FG does, but it's easily readable and could be modified to pronouns if the person wanted.

[Maasq]

That would be a usable fallback, and might be better than option 3. Thank you for the suggestion. No votes either way, yet, so it might come down to what is easiest to program haha

Maasq

[BubbaGrim]

The only time I care about gender pronouns is if the NPC in question is unique and has a name. Otherwise I'm fine with LordEntrail's examples (providing it doesn't break FG).

[Thegroo]

I would go with LordEntrail's suggestion

[Zacchaeus]

I’m not sure you need this at all. There must be hundreds of actions and very few monsters have the same ones even amongst the same type of monster. Your drop down list I fear might be longer than you can fit into a page.

[Maasq]

Hi folks, and thanks for the feedback.

Firstly, when I tried to program this, I quickly realised that asking for feedback was pointless. I can put in the option and people can use it or not as they see fit. I don't know why it took a week to realise this, but there you go!
Zacch - I agree, but it was asked for and I am going to put it in for traits (where there are a few that are reused) and reactions (ditto I think, from memory). Once the code is there, reusing it is easy enough.

My solution was to build a right-click menu to allow people to insert <NU> for 'name of NPC, with a capital letter'. When the trait/action/reaction is used, that <NU> will be replaced with 'goblin gongfermor' (look it up) or 'Demogorgon'. The same applies for the pronouns. Users can ignore this of course, and use LE's method for ease.

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Maasq

New version on the website later tonight I hope. Maybe tomorrow at the latest.

[kp9911]

Another thing you could do and is what I have done (I really need to get back to my parser lol) is have the data load into the text boxes on selection and then once you are done with that the user can then make changes as required.

And then ta da you can save them now as a fresh new skin for a new NPC with just a couple of clicks and edits!