Castles & Crusades - Updates for the new printings???

[TheMetal1]

Hey C&C Team,

Thanks for setting up C&C for Fantasy Grounds 2! Have gotten great use out of it over the years and thanks to steam, I've managed to log quite a few number of hours on the system, and bring in new VTT players into the fold.

Just got the kickstarter PDF version of the new printing for the Castle Keepers Guide, which - along with the 3rd printing of Monsters & Treasure and 6th printing of the Players Handbook - is now in full color, and incorporated errata.

With the new functionality offered by D&D 5e, like the drag drop class & race stuff, parcels & encounters, etc. When will we see an update to the C&C ruleset with this stuff in it? The current M&T has tables, but they are simply organized blocks - not rollable tables like you all did with the CKG. Would really like to see the new art incorporated as well, along with having actual items for M&T like you did for all the items in the PHB. That way I can drop & drag potions, weapons, etc. right into a parcel or character sheet.

Finally, and maybe there is a way to do this already that I simply missed, can I drop and drag XP from an encounter in the Party Sheet right to an individual PC? Or is the only way to do that the auto division thing? Thanks.

[Moon Wizard]

For 5E, there is a huge push for this material and features as this is the biggest RPG my market share. Additionally, we manage the D&D rulesets internally, and have to pay license fees for the right to offer data. Also, because it's the biggest market share, it is also the flagship ruleset which gets the most features. We try to incorporate general features across all of the rulesets sold through our store when possible, but game system specific features are handled differently.

For all of the non-D&D material in our store, all of those products are created and maintained by community ruleset/module developers who have agreed to work with us to offer these products. Since making lots of ruleset changes takes quite a bit of time, it is up to each developer whether they will take on new feature support. However, either they or the SmiteWorks team will handle bug fixes going forward. Also, the availability and interest of our community ruleset developers changes over time, so they may no longer be available or have time.

Given all that, if a community member creates a custom ruleset extension to add features that we agree should be added to the core product and they agree to allow us to include in the base product, we will incorporate and maintain long term.

Regards,
JPG

[damned]

D&D and Pathfinder account for more than 70% of all RPG game sessions played.
The next 10 rulesets account for more than 20% of the remaining pie.
It doesnt leave a lot of room for the 3000+ other RPGs out there.

I use and love C&C but its probably never gonna get a serious rewrite update unless the number of C&C users grows in a big way.
Also the new Editions of C&C do cost - they arent usually a free upgrade.
I think I have every edition of PHB except 1, every edition of M&T and every edition of CKG.

[Moon Wizard]

Also, my guess from the last C&C printing/update is that the changes were pretty minor on the automation side. So, if someone provides the rules changes in detail for me, I can adjust for minor changes easily.

However, updating the rulebooks themselves is a completely different task that is much bigger, since it involves formatting the text of the new printing within an FG module. Let me know if anyone is up to the task, and we'll reach out to Troll Lord Games.

Regards,
JPG

[dr_venture]

On the bright side, Moon Wizard spend quite a large effort about a year ago porting the C&C ruleset over to be based on CoreRPG, so any changes to that ruleset will become available to C&C. So on that note, I'm curious how likely updates of any magnitude are for CoreRPG (after the current push for 5e implementation, of course). Is there much likelihood of seeing any juicy upgrades on that front, beyond Dulux-Oz's much anticipated upgrade to his eco-political extension?

A big FWIW here, YMMV, etc.: honestly, the current ruleset really does the lion's share of what I need it to do very conveniently, conveniently enough to not bother me. I don't personally care so much about the drag and drop classes, as I just don't roll enough new characters to be annoyed by it... it just takes a few moments to drag the abilities to character sheets, and it's pretty much done for good on that character.

There are a very few things that are consistently irritating that I'd love to see a fix for... things like having an easy way to indicate an inventory item is magical or otherwise noteworthy (just a checkbox for the item that would make it appear with blue text in the inventory would be *fantastic* to hilite important items), or having a GM-only field that contains an ongoing list of each time an item is dropped into an "inventory" field (allowing the GM to see whose 'hands' an item has passed between... at least to some degree anyway... keeping track of inventory and what belongs or used to belong to whom has popped up as a pain point a few times for me).

Blah blah blah... I know, put it on the list... I will Mainly, I just wanted to illustrate my point rather than start a long thread about everyone's wish list. There is a wish list for C&C specifically, but nobody seems to use it.

Also, another question: is there an active developer for the C&C ruleset, or is it kinda floating right now?

[damned]

Moon_Wizard is the ruleset owner currently

For CoreRPG have you tried the MoreCore extension? It adds some good functionality to the base ruleset - an extra Character Sheet Tab with some fields linked to the Combat Tracker which can have up to 5 extra columns and the NPC sheet has about 3 extra fields. Attacks will play out their descriptions including the Attacker and Defenders names. It cant auto-calc successes because that is ruleset specific.

[Moon Wizard]

Phantomwhale and SFerguson also did some work on C&C, but they've been busy outside of FG.

Cheers,
JPG

[TheMetal1]

Understand the market will drive the what is going to get the love. Happy with C&C, so we'll see. Making modules I get, working on converting Rappan Athuk to C&C, but since I don't understood code, updating the core rules is a bit out of my league right now.

[dr_venture]

In my experience working on the previous C&C release, the changes between versions were not enumerated anywhere: it was up to the devs to manually compare the texts and try to figure out what changed, and how it affected the ruleset. I'm sure we missed things, because 2 books of material is not easy to manually compare, and there was still the issue of actually developing the ruleset itself.

The key is whether or not the new printings change the game mechanics that are automated or semi-automated by the FG ruleset. Those changes are not as easily adjusted by the CK during gameplay, nor are they as easy for the average FG user to implement on their own. The changes we found at the time were mostly not of that variety: they were changes that a CK using FG could fairly easily adopt by just changing the way they made their rulings outside of the FG software.

I would suggest that the C&C community here should have a thread to talk about and document the changes made in new printings of the C&C source material -- I, for one, didn't even realize there *was* a new printing. By pooling our resources to document the changes in the core printed C&C rules, we can identify what has changed, and how to implement those changes in our FG games. If changes are needed to the ruleset itself, there are some of us with varying degrees of ability to create ruleset extensions to implement new game mechanics. Where we run into difficulties, me may be able to bring in help from the more code-savvy guys in the community. Extensions that the community adopts can then be rolled into the core ruleset by Smiteworks if they are found to be useful and well coded.

Anyone know if Troll Lords publishes a list of changes when a new ruleset is published?

[JohnD]

I don't think there's much in the way of changes that would impact a C&C game in FG. Maybe a few more charts and tables, but the big thing was I think this time around going to full colour printing when the Kickstarter reached the stretch goals.