Veggiesama wrote:
Heh heh, a reasonable question. Keep in mind that the "modal" states mentioned 2-3 posts ago only appear on a mouse-over, so the only ones you will see the majority of the time are the 9 boxes for "regular states." Even then, you probably won't see more than a few of those at a time (no more than a normal D&D token's group of states, at least).
Still, I *do* realize that most of these states would work just as well as text in the stat-sheet or on some kind of dashboard, like you mention, but... well... I'd like to see if I can get some pretty states before I resort to text-only. =P I'm aiming for a very visually-appealing framework this time around, so I might be setting the bar a little high (especially since my GIMP fu is kind of atrocious).
My philosophy real quick: SR has so many cool little bits built into it, but it's difficult to keep track of them all. For instance, let's say you're a DM and you have an enemy hacker. I think it'd be awesome to quickly mouse-over the players' tokens and look for a "weak link" (i.e., someone forgot to set their PAN to Hidden mode) instead of asking each player in turn about that setting. There's all sorts of little things like that to keep track of, and if it's visually represented, it might be more intuitive and understandable to more people.
You make a good point about mousing over the tokens - that's a cool idea about the hacking thing, for instance. Of course, the dashboard doesn't need to be text-only - a row of icons (fire mode, movement mode, PAN mode, etc) could be done. What's more, there could be a DM utility macro "show me all the states on all the PC tokens." Pop up a window, look for unprotected PANs, and hack the HECK out of them.
In any case, it sounds like you've got it planned out, so that's cool. Just a thought!