Fate Core?

Yup forgot about Stunts. First&only tech tab is starting to have exponential pixel real estate prices… as far as I can see it's either blow it up into two tabs, or maybe moving Fate Points to the left column (in a part of the space liberated by a shorter name and a single aspect zone), and place those Stunts where Fate Points are now. But even with that, it's going to be quite small.

Could gain some space on the bottom too, that huge bottom margin doesn't need to be.

Or do what a few ruleset have done, increase the whole window's width.

As for the the skill list sorting, yes it helps with pyramid, but the day-to-day use would benefits from alphabetical sorting. Maybe a small button (like on the top left corner, for symmetry with the edit list button) to toggle between different type of sorting?

For the note, yes some organization on the character background/historic/description. But maybe not too much. Not two characters are alike. Some may need as little as a 5 words description, other two paragraphs. Some have zero contacts and the like, other have a full page. Some have a two lines historic, some have 20 pages. Albeit a detail, the Note name of the tab is wrong. Notes have a dedicated tool. This is probably more like a Background tab, or Description tab, or something along those lines.

Just my 2 cents.

Well you're guaranteed to have each player have at minimum two other "contacts" in the form of the other PCs; and I wholeheartedly agree that notes have there own tool. But seeing that they are being used as "Post-It" Notes for Setting Aspects (see below). Then We need another tool to take down adventuring notes. Oh, the horrors. It'll cascade into note tools for note tools & they'll take over the world! :D

I think I need more sleep.

Seriously, the window width and height could easily be altered to include the major stuff on the first page but there's the price of the real estate for the rest of the screen. Right now I'm having visions of notes and a character sheet all over my screen so I can't even see the chat box. And I agree; the tab shouldn't be called "Notes" unless the shared notes turns into an index card machine. This, I see as inevitable. Perhaps it should be split into two tools, a notes tool for taking notes (which I believe they were intended for) and maybe a separate "Setting Aspect" tool that just has a header for, say, the location and then a few lines to write out the aspect(s) on and make them be able to be public. A small rectangular region could be used. I don't know. It gets a little out of hand with the index cards in my face-to-face games.

Regards,
SF

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Originally Posted by S Ferguson

Seriously, the window width and height could easily be altered to include the major stuff on the first page

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Not its height, it will change the screen requirements and may create issues with some small screens (like netbooks).

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Originally Posted by Blacky

Not its height, it will change the screen requirements and may create issues with some small screens (like netbooks).

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Yeah, rulesets should really be coded to be usable with 1024x768 screen sizes (for those using 4:3 aspect ratio) so that people playing on netbooks and similar small screen resolutions will still be able to view full windows without having to drag them around the screen. Yes, it is very hard to use FG at this resolution (basically the chat window and one or two windows are viewable) but the sizing of the interface should be designed with this minimum size in mind.

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Originally Posted by Blacky

Not its height, it will change the screen requirements and may create issues with some small screens (like netbooks).

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I was just making note that both options could be altered. I'm not really restricted for screen space, but I do have a 15" screen attached as a side monitor (to make sure everything is going well with the perspective). Increasing it's width lowers screen real estate just as badly IMHO. The current size seems to be the lesser of two evils. It'll just be a matter (hopefully) of organizing the data efficiently and tersely on each page of the character sheet, It's really Valarian's choice here.

Having picked up a hardcopy of the Fate Freeport Companion at Gamestorm, it reminded me that the Fate Core engine is hacked so frequently that you will always want to do things in your specific game that differ from everybody else's campaigns. In Freeport, you use Skills that represent the D20 Characteristics, modified by gear and Stunts, to do things. It won't play like d20, but it does give you the tools to use almost everything published for d20 with the game style of Fate.

The problem is that to use all that flavorful goodness from specific hacks you need to find ways to alter the ruleset, or at the very least the character sheets, to manage them. Fate Freeport might be a different thing entirely from standard Fate Core for FG purposes.

I have considered leaving the skills list blank, as with the current (Dresden Files) ruleset, with the player doing the addition of skills during character creation. This is a more generic approach. I think, with the CoreRPG setup, that an extension to tailor the skills list and text labels will make customisation fairly easy. I intend to produce some customisation extensions for common Fate games as part of this project.

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Originally Posted by Valarian

I have considered leaving the skills list blank, as with the current (Dresden Files) ruleset, with the player doing the addition of skills during character creation. This is a more generic approach. I think, with the CoreRPG setup, that an extension to tailor the skills list and text labels will make customisation fairly easy. I intend to produce some customisation extensions for common Fate games as part of this project.

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It is feasible to combine the two goals -- have a user-definable set of skills (you make the list when entering your PC) while still enabling you to roll your dice by clicking on the number on the sheet (say I have a skill at +3 -- I click on the +3 and the program automatically rolls 4dF+3)?

I'm reading the Fate Freeport Companion, which is exceedingly useful if you want to run Fate in a d20 setting -- there's no way it's going to play the same, but it does let you use a literal abundance of settings and source material while taking a new approach to it. The Freeport hack transforms the six core Characteristics of d20 into the six core Skills for a Fate game. It even provides a handy conversion chart, intended for creatures but still useful for people. That made a Slayers hack occur to me that might combine the Approaches of FAE with these six Skills in some way, so that you could do things like use your Intelligence Forcefully to hurl a powerful attack spell, while using it Sneakily if you want to use a spell to affect someone more subtly.

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Originally Posted by Valarian

I have considered leaving the skills list blank, as with the current (Dresden Files) ruleset, with the player doing the addition of skills during character creation. This is a more generic approach. I think, with the CoreRPG setup, that an extension to tailor the skills list and text labels will make customisation fairly easy. I intend to produce some customisation extensions for common Fate games as part of this project.

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I tend to agree with the notion of auto-rolling 4F. Mods can be placed in the modifiers box if you want to keep it simple (although taking the skill rank into consideration would be cool). What extensions are you planning to support?

Cheers,
SF

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Originally Posted by Michael Hopcroft

It is feasible to combine the two goals -- have a user-definable set of skills (you make the list when entering your PC) while still enabling you to roll your dice by clicking on the number on the sheet (say I have a skill at +3 -- I click on the +3 and the program automatically rolls 4dF+3)?

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Originally Posted by S Ferguson

I tend to agree with the notion of auto-rolling 4F. Mods can be placed in the modifiers box if you want to keep it simple (although taking the skill rank into consideration would be cool).

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It already does this ... look at the Dresden Files ruleset. That will do pretty much all you're looking for already, apart from renaming stress tracks (which would involve a quick hack to the character_main.xml file). All I'm doing is updating the ruleset to CoreRPG, so that we get all the goodies from that, and trying to make it more flexible.

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Originally Posted by S Ferguson

What extensions are you planning to support?

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Probably: Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files, Bulldogs!, Age of Arthur.