zelannii
March 16th, 2023, 17:17
Desperately needed I think in the FGU UI. On the nav bar under camping, we need a LORE option, as well as connectors that rise (or hide) items seen in other places like class/race/etc tied to world building elements.
We have the story, which is the campaign and useful elements, but its structure is tied to that of your module. it's a pain to develop good content in a structured way using this system (possible but a pain) but more so hard to share those elements with your party as the story elements are heavily designed for the DM.
What I propose is this:
Create a lore category. Allow content creators to specify story element pages as lore (a checkbox is great, better still a dropdown associating it to a world/plane/universe. Items added to lore would be visible to players without having to be specifically shared. ( share a world and general information tied to that world is all shared at once).
Divide the Lore UI into subsections by lore type as well. include cross references to public maps, cities, history/events, people (add a lore subtab on NPCs where DMs can add player-known info), DEITIES (this is a great place to store them, they barely exist in FGU at all atm), etc. Similar to how the items panel has sub-panels for armor, weapons, etc, these lore components tied to world building should have a similar design, views specific to the type of lore making listing three easy. Objects from here should be available to players once shared by the DM with some items being "general knowledge" as intended by the designer which would be default shared. Lore should be able to be shared to specific players, not just the party as a whole.
Then go a step further and tie races, NPCs, dieties, etc to top level worlds/planes. Filter other views (optionally) based on the DM selected planes that are in play. Let some items be specified as "all" while others could be available only to a selection of planes or just a single one. For any item tied to a lore, be able to specify if that item is "general info" (auto shard to all in the world), "event linked" (the DM shares it on demands, say when they encounter that element in a story, but linked items go with it at once), history check required (player rolls to see what they know, content is revealed by level like a table structure but all items below their roll are revealed).
Players should be able to add their notes to lore as well. They also should be able to drag items from lore to their notes pages (like the diety field). Add a "places I've been" and "NPCs I've met" area on the character sheet as well allowing characters to drag in lore bullets. Once a character knows lore, they should be able to share it with other characters themselves. Once it's in lore, it's essentially copied to the campaign file, so even if the module that information came from is unloaded, the lore components would stay in the campaign. This would make it a lot easier to load and unload modules on a long arching campaign keeping only the content necessary players experienced without having to keep a dozen modules loaded using up resources.
Yea, this is big, complicated, requires a lot of new data fields, huge dev effort. but for those of us who play long term campaigns across dozens of module stories, such a tool is becoming essential. Even just simplified to have a good place to log dieties to tie them to characters, and city/region and history lore that's not buried inside the story element pages would be a huge plus.
Thoughts?
We have the story, which is the campaign and useful elements, but its structure is tied to that of your module. it's a pain to develop good content in a structured way using this system (possible but a pain) but more so hard to share those elements with your party as the story elements are heavily designed for the DM.
What I propose is this:
Create a lore category. Allow content creators to specify story element pages as lore (a checkbox is great, better still a dropdown associating it to a world/plane/universe. Items added to lore would be visible to players without having to be specifically shared. ( share a world and general information tied to that world is all shared at once).
Divide the Lore UI into subsections by lore type as well. include cross references to public maps, cities, history/events, people (add a lore subtab on NPCs where DMs can add player-known info), DEITIES (this is a great place to store them, they barely exist in FGU at all atm), etc. Similar to how the items panel has sub-panels for armor, weapons, etc, these lore components tied to world building should have a similar design, views specific to the type of lore making listing three easy. Objects from here should be available to players once shared by the DM with some items being "general knowledge" as intended by the designer which would be default shared. Lore should be able to be shared to specific players, not just the party as a whole.
Then go a step further and tie races, NPCs, dieties, etc to top level worlds/planes. Filter other views (optionally) based on the DM selected planes that are in play. Let some items be specified as "all" while others could be available only to a selection of planes or just a single one. For any item tied to a lore, be able to specify if that item is "general info" (auto shard to all in the world), "event linked" (the DM shares it on demands, say when they encounter that element in a story, but linked items go with it at once), history check required (player rolls to see what they know, content is revealed by level like a table structure but all items below their roll are revealed).
Players should be able to add their notes to lore as well. They also should be able to drag items from lore to their notes pages (like the diety field). Add a "places I've been" and "NPCs I've met" area on the character sheet as well allowing characters to drag in lore bullets. Once a character knows lore, they should be able to share it with other characters themselves. Once it's in lore, it's essentially copied to the campaign file, so even if the module that information came from is unloaded, the lore components would stay in the campaign. This would make it a lot easier to load and unload modules on a long arching campaign keeping only the content necessary players experienced without having to keep a dozen modules loaded using up resources.
Yea, this is big, complicated, requires a lot of new data fields, huge dev effort. but for those of us who play long term campaigns across dozens of module stories, such a tool is becoming essential. Even just simplified to have a good place to log dieties to tie them to characters, and city/region and history lore that's not buried inside the story element pages would be a huge plus.
Thoughts?