Work on the Crafting Table

UPDATE: I've been spending a good amount of time on the Crafting Table as of late, and tinkering with how it can leverage the Modifier Effects. Currently, I have it creating Modifier Effects on the Item based on the bonuses selected using the bonuses listed in the Fantasy Companion Tables. I've hit some challenges and limitations.

First, as noted in the previous version of this post (see below), I was intending to heavily rely on premade Modifier Effects and pulling a listing from Compendia. Here are a few limitations I discovered with that approach:

• A Compendium index does not include EmbeddedDocuments like Active Effects. That means there's no way to pull up a list of Modifier Effects stored on Items that are stored in a Compendium without getting the entire parent Item. This is an incredibly slow process and takes up memory. If you load up the Actor Listing app, you'll see exactly what that looks like in terms of performance and resource consumption.

• Premade Modifier Effects are limited in what they can affect. Some examples:

  • Weapons typically add a modifier to the attack skill or damage die. Items often have a primary Trait rolled on the Item's properties tab and the damage rolled in the left sidebar of the Item sheet, which are easy to target in Modifier Effects. However, they also potentially have additional actions on the actions tab that can include alternative Trait and damage rolls. It's not possible to create a Modifier Effect in advance that can target those additional actions without knowing their keys, which are randomly generated when created and are part of the property path to that additional action's data field.

  • Damage dice and Min. Str. die types cannot be increased or decreased a step because the damage value is a string, not a number. Adjusting them requires a script that uses some regex black magic to manipulate the string. I've submitted a feature request for damage dice and Min. Str. to be migrated to die steps like Traits and skills are. I don't know if that will be implemented or when, but that's the only reliable way that to be able to use a premade Modifier Effect to adjust those values with a premade Modifier Effect.

So as of right now, because of how much heavy lifting Modifier Effects can do now, I'm keeping the scope of the Crafting Table limited to handling the Fantasy Companion bonuses as a convenient shortcut tool for handling creating a masterwork item and creating bonuses that can adjust Min. Str. for armor and shields and damage dice for weapons. (I'll also soon post a preview video of the changes I've made to it.) For most use cases, using the new Modifier Effect feature in the SWADE system does the majority of the work.

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I've been head down lately on a massive web site rebuild and redesign project at the day job, as of late (having to work nights to hit our deadline), so that's put me behind a bit with SIT. However, I have made some progress on updates to the Crafting Table. The first step was migrating it to ApplicationV2, which is done. The second step was playing around with the Modifier Active Effect feature for modifying Items. Experiments were a complete success, so now it's just a matter of defining those Modifiers for each of the types of Items and their respective bonuses. However, there are a few key decisions I think I'm going to make in how to approach this.

I'm likely going to make the changes to masterwork Items be a permanent data change as that's typically just a product of the physical characteristics of the Item and immutable. Additionally, masterwork will not be added by default anymore since not every setting uses masterwork items as a concept. Magical bonuses, however, will be Active Effects so that if there are any external effects that neutralize magical properties of magic items, they can be toggled off.

That brings me to how to present a list of premade Modifiers. I'm considering adding a new app opened from the Crafting Table that presents a list of Modifiers extracted from Items across Compendia. This list could be curated just like the Item Tables are. If your setting has a custom Modifier you'd like to add, you could either create a new module with a Compendium of Actions, for example, that store Modifier Active Effects or do the same with a World Compendium. The app would then crawl the Items and fetch the AEs with a Modifier type, and present them all, ready to drag and drop onto the Item. I'm also considering having it display Action Items that have Modifiers so that if the enhancement or Enchantment includes Actions like rolls for extra fire damage, special attacks, or whatever, those could be added to the Item as well.

Let me know your thoughts, and feel free to open up a discussion in the Patreon community chat, too.