My comments below are just suggestions, your mileage may very
Can a combatant switch back and forth between unengaged and engaged making them have different initiatve based on that state? If so, I am thinking that you might want to assign a wait state to show unengaged units. I currently don't have an exit that would change init order on a state change, but that would be easy to do. The hard part is telling it what needs to be done when that happens. Most likely you would have to wait for scripting support to be able to take full advantage of this, but I'm sure we can work out some early adopter support .Phergus wrote:I'll send you a more complete set of info but the gist of it is that there are two types of initiative: Unengaged and Engaged.
I'm using figure generically for both PCs, NPCs and monsters.
Unengaged is for those figures that aren't in melee combat with each other. Each side has a designated leader and the leader rolls initiative with the winning side choosing whether they will go first or last. The roll is D10 + Perception + Mil. Scientist Rank. I could live without having this in an Initiative Tool. To implement this the tool would need to have some notion of whether or not a figure was in actual melee combat or not and then would have to know which group a figure belonged to. Spellcasters and archers are considered unengaged unless they are in an opponents melee zone.
Currently there is no way to goup combatants. After init tool has been released you and I can talk about this again and get some requirments together. This sounds like functionality that could be useful to all sorts of games. Until then you would have to manually position the combatants together.Phergus wrote: Engaged initiative is skill based for each participant in melee combat. It is a fixed value based on Agility + Rank w/Weapon + Perception. Those with a higher Initiative Value (IV) get to go first. Combat is normally resolved in melee groups. If a PC is fighting two Orcs then within that group the attacks would be resolved in Initiative Value order before moving to another melee group. If the tool could support the notion of which figures were engaged with which that would be really cool.
Initially there will be no tracking of any sort of damage, since there is currently no way to keep state with a combatant. When the character tool provides that type of data I can integrate displaying any data from character tool into init tool.Phergus wrote:Engaged combatants act first and unengaged go last.
If you really want to make it flexible enough to handle DQ combat then it also needs to allow for two different damage types: Endurance and Fatigue. These are like Killing and Stun damage in other games.
This is supported. But if I add a way so that the inititiative 'roll' was turned off you could enter the IVs as init modifiers. This would allow you to save them off in an init tool group and not be modified when you start the encounter.Phergus wrote: Minimum Features
- Ability to enter IVs for each combatant
This is supported, but there is no way to resort the list after the encounter has been started. We can add this as a feature later if it is still needed.Phergus wrote:
- Ability to order them manually or by IV
If this means traverse the list in initiative order, then it will do that. It tracks the number of full rounds that have been played. There is also a stopwatch feature to track the amount of time that a player spends making their move if that is what you meant by track time.Phergus wrote:
- Ability to step through the list one by one and track time
The init tool has a way to track lists of combatants as a set before the encounter begins (they are called groups in init tool). Once the group is in the encounter, they are not related in any way by init tool.Phergus wrote:
- Load/Save Party Lists
You can load and save encounters.Phergus wrote:
- Load/Save Encounter Lists
This will have to wait for character tool.Phergus wrote:
Bonus Features:
- Tracking of both Endurance & Fatigue
This will also have to wait for character tool.Phergus wrote:
- One or more user-defined rolls such as the Spot/Listen/Will rolls in TurnWatcher
This will also have to wait for character tool.Phergus wrote:
- One or more user-defined stat/ability columns
I think you should be able to define your own wait state that can show that.Phergus wrote:
- Being able to designate a figure as Engaged/Unengaged
You can do this now by creating a type for each group, if this feature is just for viewing the groups.Phergus wrote:
- Being able to apply a group designation to each figure
We will need to work out the requirements and add this as an enhancement.Phergus wrote:
- Being able to designate which figures were engaged with which and use that to sort by combat group
This sounds like a good idea. What would you like to see logged? Right now the init tool can only keep track of who goes next, but when it has more data from character tool it may be able to do more.Phergus wrote:Super Bonus Features
- Logging of combats
It can do this. I have added the concept of a timer that can expire after a set number of rounds.Phergus wrote:
- Track spell or other event durations
Yes I didPhergus wrote:Well, you asked.
Thanks for the information.