Not rethinking what I’m doing, so much as how I’m doing it.
When I started on rewriting, I picked evasion, and rewriting evasion was easy. Then I tried rewriting weapon and armor proficiencies, and it’s more involved than I expected.
Evasion was simple because it is narrow scope and has specific effect.
Proficiency rules are scattered between feats and equipment rules… but they’re simple enough I’m not sure they justify their own section.
They’re getting their own section. I might change my mind later, but for now proficiency rules will get their own section. Then feats and class features will make use of these rules.
This brought another thing to my attention. As shown when rewriting evasion, I want the ability to pull the ability definition into the feature that grants it. While this works fine for evasion, some abilities will be too long to do this. I feel there should be a ‘long version’ and a ‘short version’ for each rule or ability.
Happily, my workflow has a place for this. Or rather, my workflow has the ability to have a place for this. There are several types of markup that create text entities specifically to be incorporated elsewhere. Looking over the workflow markup, I see Word styles that might work here. Going through all the entity-level styles, I see
- d20#Object was my original expectation, and a good fallback, but I want to be able to not use these objects.
- d20#Override is out, that’s to override formatting instructions.
- d20#RefCopy is out, that’s to copy entities.
- d20#RefLink is out, that’s to connect to another entity.
- d20#Section is out, that’s for a section heading within an entity (such as ‘Class Features’ in a class).
- d20#Sidebar is a good possibility. It is intended for use with The Alexandrian’s Sidebar Reference System. These entities are to be copied as needed, as a reminder of what a rule or game item is. That sounds like almost exactly what I’m looking for.
- d20#StatBlock is out, it’s to supplement the stat block of an item. Not used yet, but not intended for what I need.
- d20#Supplement is out, even though it’s intended to provide content that is added to an entity when appropriate. This seems appropriate but it’s for value-add material, not actually for game entities. For instance, a cleric domain can have supplemental tables showing the differences in the domain’s subdomains.
- d20#Tags is out, it’s for adding metadata, not game entities.
- d20#TLDR is out. This entity type is to be added to object headings to summarize what a game entity is and does. It’s aggressively summarized, down to bullet points and incomplete sentences. I almost chose this as my winner. The generic TLDR plus the specific TLDR do almost exactly what I want. It fails because the generic TLDR would be redundant on the entity it’s attached to.
Right now, Sidebar is a good choice. It’s a simplified summary of what the ability does, regardless of where it comes from. That’s exactly what I want. However, it is intended as a sidebar, an optional bit of text included as and when specifically linked. This is contrary to what I want.
I think a new entity type is a better option. SIdebar’s close, TLDR looked promising but isn’t a perfect fit. An entity type made to purpose seems the best way to go.
What type, though? I thought of ‘Definition’ or ‘Description’, but those seem a little too generic.
After a bit of discussion, Nik gave me the word I needed: ‘Mechanics’. This is the barest of bones English description of the ability, and can be copied into other entities as needed. TLDR and Sidebar are fragments, this will often be a couple of complete sentences that can cover the critical bits.
Done!