Monday, April 16, 2007

More Power and Shifting Responsibilities

I have been working on a little game related project using HTML. The game is Rifts®; the project is to make a more powerful character sheet for one specific character type in the main book of the game. That class is called the Shifter. It's a re-imagining of the classic Summoner from PFRPG®, which is a pretty easily imagined type of character just from the name and the fact it exists in a fantasy game.

Throughout the span of time that Rifts® has been out there the Shifter class has undergone some changes. The most important of these changes has been the addition of the Minion rules. From the outset the Shifter has always been able to, and meant to, summon up creatures and put them to use for whatever task the Shifter had in mind when deciding upon what to summon. However these helpers were fleeting and finding the time to summon things could be an issue, especially with some unhelpful GMs.

The Minion rules, and this is just a name I've given them to easily reference them, allow the Shifter to collect "permanent" helpers at select levels. I won't speculate on where the idea did or did not come from because I don't care. The importance is this addition gave the Shifter a leg up as the Rifts® world became tougher and more dangerous. As a matter of personal preference my first choice for a Shifter character's minions is entities. Two imp-like beings, or two entities count as one minion.

My project then was to include as much information about the Shifter's minions on the HTML character sheet as possible. To that end I built in an inline frame to contain the list of minions and linked to that IFRAME (for those knowledgeable about HTML) a second one where descriptions of the powers can be read. It's quite excellent. Of course this is a purely personal resource, because any distribution of that level of information would be a breach of Palladium Books®'s copyrights. However this is a good exercise in co-ordinating information and using higher level HTML and similar coding. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up.

Mood: exhausted.
Music: Wicker Man (1997) by Bruce Dickinson and Obsolete by Fear Factory.

The Best of Bruce Dickinson
Buy these at Amazon.ca
Click Images to Buy
Fear Factory: Obsolete

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home