demonsbane
July 23rd, 2011, 21:33
Hi,
A friend mine wants to make a ruleset modification or an extension for changing the current behavior of the 'd20 based' GURPS ruleset. The desired goal is to display the names of the NPCs from the combat tracker in the chatbox, so by looking at the chatbox contents the players can be automatically aware of who (or what) is about to act.
I commented to her that ideally, that should be switchable since there are many situations in which the GM doesn't want that the players known the exact list of NPCs that is populating the Combat Tracker -like bandits hidden in midst of a skirmish, waiting for a surprise attack.
And then I remembered that the DnD4e ruleset already covers this.
Under 4e, the names of the NPCs do appear in the chatbox, except when their token visibility button is switched to hidden, making the NPC names to be predated by "[GM]" and not being displayed at all in the player's view:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12554407/NPC%20turns%20in%20the%20Chatbox.jpg
The token visibility button in the 4e tracker not only shows-hides the NPC token in maps, but also enables/disables the NPC's turn visibility in the chatbox, which is exactly what we are looking for.
Also, I think that could be interesting to use a different flag graphic for contradistinguish better between PCs and NPCs. Making a different flag graphic is easy, but implementing it in the code for working in the intended way isn't.
We'd like to implement these features to the current GURPS ruleset, and any guidelines for doing it would be very appreciated. This afternoon my friend did grow a bit bored after searching without success what pieces of info should be modified in ruleset files like combattracker.lua, combattracker_active.lua and such.
A friend mine wants to make a ruleset modification or an extension for changing the current behavior of the 'd20 based' GURPS ruleset. The desired goal is to display the names of the NPCs from the combat tracker in the chatbox, so by looking at the chatbox contents the players can be automatically aware of who (or what) is about to act.
I commented to her that ideally, that should be switchable since there are many situations in which the GM doesn't want that the players known the exact list of NPCs that is populating the Combat Tracker -like bandits hidden in midst of a skirmish, waiting for a surprise attack.
And then I remembered that the DnD4e ruleset already covers this.
Under 4e, the names of the NPCs do appear in the chatbox, except when their token visibility button is switched to hidden, making the NPC names to be predated by "[GM]" and not being displayed at all in the player's view:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12554407/NPC%20turns%20in%20the%20Chatbox.jpg
The token visibility button in the 4e tracker not only shows-hides the NPC token in maps, but also enables/disables the NPC's turn visibility in the chatbox, which is exactly what we are looking for.
Also, I think that could be interesting to use a different flag graphic for contradistinguish better between PCs and NPCs. Making a different flag graphic is easy, but implementing it in the code for working in the intended way isn't.
We'd like to implement these features to the current GURPS ruleset, and any guidelines for doing it would be very appreciated. This afternoon my friend did grow a bit bored after searching without success what pieces of info should be modified in ruleset files like combattracker.lua, combattracker_active.lua and such.