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Sterno
April 27th, 2020, 13:34
I'm very new to Fantasy Grounds, and have only used the 2E ruleset. I've been trying to understand how identified vs unidentified items work.

It seems to work great if you want to give players something like gems or jewels. I can grab from the DMG items something like "Gem [500 gp]", slap it into my parcel, and then give it an unidentified name of something like "tiger's eye gem" and mark it as unidentified. Players will see the type of gem, but not the value. Great!

This same sort of thing doesn't seem to work for weapons, though, unless I'm missing a step for those. I can give them an unidentified Axe +2 and it will show up in the parcel as "axe", for instance, but they can click on it to bring up details and see that it has the "Magic" subtype, and then click on the "Weapons" tab of the item to see the unidentified name.

Similarly, you can go to the character's "actions" tabs, and there it does at least mask the name of the item, though it can still be pretty clear from the stats what kind of bonus (or penalty) the weapon has. Furthermore, on that screen, if you click the gear icon to edit the action, you can see the unidentified name of the weapon.

Are these bugs with the ruleset, limitations of Fantasy Grounds (I imagine hiding the stats but still letting them roll isn't trivial), or just something I'm not understanding and haven't enabled on the item about the "id" system?

celestian
April 27th, 2020, 15:29
There is no real easy way to do it without blocking a lot of ability of the PC to look/tweak the item which in-itself would tell them it's magic or stops them from actual functionality they might need. I can hide the "name" field in the gear view (from actions) and all the types/rarity values more than likely and will look into it. I recently blocked the "powers" tab section on items but looks like I missed the weapons tab directly on the item. I'll look at that as well.

Right now it "hides" things from a cursory view. If they dig deeply they'll figure it out.

The best way to do this would mean reworking some of the item structure with something like a "to hit" and "to damage" field and then a "magic" flag. Then I could hide the damage type and only add it when attacks are made. It would also let me "remove" the to hit/damage mods if the weapon wasn't identified but that really doesn't seem to fit the AD&D style ... since a lot of times thats how you figured it out.

Sterno
April 27th, 2020, 15:59
In the ideal world (with the realities of coding and interface design issues aside), I think rolling an attack or damage with an unidentified weapon would report one total to the player but another total to the GM. That seems like it would most closely mimic a real tabletop experience... it would basically be removing the need for the GM to remember to modify the roll every time without telling the player.

That seems like a lot of effort, though. I think I can manage to do it in my head like I would for a tabletop game. My workaround will probably be giving them a normal axe, marking it as unidentified, and adding notes they can't see about what it really is. If they identify it, I can swap in the "real" item.

celestian
April 27th, 2020, 16:56
In the ideal world (with the realities of coding and interface design issues aside), I think rolling an attack or damage with an unidentified weapon would report one total to the player but another total to the GM. That seems like it would most closely mimic a real tabletop experience... it would basically be removing the need for the GM to remember to modify the roll every time without telling the player.

That seems like a lot of effort, though. I think I can manage to do it in my head like I would for a tabletop game. My workaround will probably be giving them a normal axe, marking it as unidentified, and adding notes they can't see about what it really is. If they identify it, I can swap in the "real" item.

I agree with your first paragraph there and someday I want to get it there. It requires a lot of jiggery pokery that didn't exist in the base code I started with and will require some changes to existing content.

That said, I've updated the bits I mentioned in my first reply and those changes will show up in the next update I release. Tho, it might be a while as I am also in the middle of some UI updates that I'd like to hammer out first. I'll see if I can put it on the "Test" channel this week tho.