Author Topic: ERA Customization: skills  (Read 1447 times)

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Offline Voriig Kye

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ERA Customization: skills
« on: April 29, 2021, 01:36:21 PM »
For all those using ERA with custom skills/categories:
Would you find it useful if instead of a single file with all skills, another with categories, etc. as it is now, each concept would have its own directory (like for professions, races, etc.)?
This would mean there would be something like "Skills/main.skills.XML" and some of the book modules could add skills (RMFRP Essence Companion has quite a few). Then each installation could have custom files there, which would not be overwritten when updating after a new release.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #1 on: April 30, 2021, 09:15:58 AM »
How would you then handle costs for each profession for each skill if they were collected in the one file? 

For me, I'd need backward compatibility for any such change (if I understand you rightly) after all the effort I've put in to add RM2CII skills to 79 professions from RM2CI to RM2CVII, including costs and level category progression.

Offline Voriig Kye

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2021, 12:38:15 PM »
All skill files would be read first, before considering professions.

So IF this idea is added, before installing the new version, you'd need to move all the skills you added to something like "Skills/RM2CII.skills.xml". That would only be the first time, afterwards new updates would not require you to do anything since your skills would be on a separate file.

Based on ideas mentioned on Discord, there would also be a "Skills/ignored.skills.XML" and there you could mention skills that you don't want to be added to new characters, so as to remove skills you are not using that are mentioned in the Core files included with ERA or some package you have installed.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #3 on: April 30, 2021, 10:08:00 PM »
Would that mean I would need to remove all the skill cost statements from each of the profession files across to the new structure in skills?  Note too that I had to edit Categories.xml and Groups.xml to meld the RM2CII skill categories with the RMC ones, which are slightly different.  A total change to RM2 was not possible because some categories/groups in RMC clearly have special handling in ERA.

To the general audience here: Does anyone have any appetite for creating a forum for sharing tailored profession files based off RM2?

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #4 on: April 30, 2021, 10:37:38 PM »
OK, I get what you are proposing now.  Your suggested change then would only apply to my modified skills.xml file.  I am listing my current changes in another post.  In an update, there is still the risk that the provided sample professions,e.g., Fighter.xml, would overwrite my modified version.

Offline Voriig Kye

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #5 on: April 30, 2021, 11:48:45 PM »
Note too that I had to edit Categories.xml and Groups.xml to meld the RM2CII skill categories with the RMC ones, which are slightly different.
This change would also imply having a Groups directory and Categories directory, so that any customization for them can be handled as well.

A total change to RM2 was not possible because some categories/groups in RMC clearly have special handling in ERA.
Let us know which skills you mean so that we can check if there is a way to handle your changes.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #6 on: May 01, 2021, 02:11:10 AM »
I'll try and put the info back together.  Took a lot of spreadsheet work and testing in ERA to assemble the skills and categories, and looking back on the spreadsheets, it doesn't make as much sense as it did when I worked through it.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #7 on: May 01, 2021, 02:59:13 AM »
Ok, let's consider the Groups first.  In RMC, they are:
Code: [Select]
Armor
Artistic
Athletic
Awareness
Body Development
Combat Maneuvers
Communications
Crafts
Directed Spells
Influence
Lore
Martial Arts
Outdoor
Power Awareness / Manipulation
Power Point Development
Science/Analytic
Self Control
Special Attacks
Special Defenses
Spells
Subterfuge
Technical/Trade
Urban
Weapon

But in RM2CII, the skills are:
Code: [Select]
Academic
Athletic
Base Spell Casting
Body Development
Combat
Concentration
Deadly
Directed Spell Skills
General
Linguistic
Magical
Medical
Outdoor
Perception
Social
Subterfuge
(Ignore the differences between Groups and Categories that ERA inherits from its RMFRP support for the moment)

Take for example the key skills for Maneuvering in Armor:  in RMC they are in Armor, but in RM2CII they fit in to Combat.  Likewise for Weapons skills are in a different category in RMC.  But if I changed the skill to be back in just Combat, the special handling for 1st, 2nd etc weapons skills costs I bet would break (note I didn't actually test that change).  There are about 30 or so skills (from memory) with some sort of conflict.

These categories / groups are of course important to have level bonuses defined for professions. 

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #8 on: May 01, 2021, 03:17:06 AM »
OK, this is too detailed to describe concisely, so let's use a worked example for the Fighter, which is part of the base install.  You can see in this example how I've tried to retain the RMC groups/categories for compatibility with ERA on special skills, and added the RM2CII categories with non-special skills moved to match them.  We end up with a few extra skills that only occur in RMC, like "Lore:General" that have no analogue in RM2CII; these are retained for compatibility.

I have added three attachments:  my modified Groups.xml, Categories.xml, and Fighter.prof.xml.  I had to change the file extension to get them to upload here.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #9 on: May 01, 2021, 04:42:11 AM »
So the attached files above shows what I needed to do to meld RMC in ERA with the RM2CII skills.  If you go skill-by-skill through the Fighter example you can see that I moved some skills in the Category / Group, and added many others in to new Category / Groups.

Here are a few changes in Group, Category, Skill-Name as the columns:
Code: [Select]
Perception Perception Tracking CHANGE TO Awareness Awareness Tracking
Subterfuge Subterfuge Trap Building CHANGE TO Crafts Crafts Trap-Building
Deadly Deadly Use/Remove Poison CHANGE TO Subterfuge Subterfuge Use/Remove Poison
General General Wood-Crafts CHANGE TO Crafts Crafts Wood-Carving


Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #10 on: May 01, 2021, 05:18:51 AM »
Here's my (mostly complete) workbook of translations, as an attached file.  It gives far more details of my translations between RM2CII and RMC skills to match the ERA usage.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #11 on: May 01, 2021, 10:58:36 PM »
The summary of all this is that I merged the RM2CII skills with RMC skills, prioritizing ERA RMC names.  That way a character created without the change will still work.

Offline Voriig Kye

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #12 on: May 02, 2021, 06:58:43 AM »
I'm not sure who has permissions to allow attachments in the forum, haven't seen any approved in a while.
With so many changes, your best bet is to have a separate RM2 ruleset...
You can have a separate, different directory to prevent any collisions.
- Copy ERA/RMC and rename it to RM2
- Edit ERA/RM2/ERA-RMC-Settings.conf to point to the RM2 directory instead of RMC, and for clarity rename it to ERA-RM2-Settings.conf
- Create a new file called ERA/ERA-RM2.bat with the following content:
Server\ERA-Server.exe "..\RM2\ERA-RM2-Settings.conf"
- Now, just start ERA by double-clicking on ERA-RM2.bat and done. I'm assuming a Windows installation but let us know if that's not the case.

Offline Boromir

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #13 on: May 03, 2021, 02:51:05 AM »
That's a nice suggestion too, but I think I like your idea for a future release to have supplementary skill files more.  I want to retain compatibility with standard RMC characters.

I've created a github repo with the files in it at https://github.com/code-moth/Rolemaster-ERA-mods  https://github.com/code-moth/Rolemaster-ERA-mods

Go to that link and download the 4 files I tried to attach.  Perhaps I should release more mods that way if folks are interested.  At the moment, there's just this one example with the fighter.

Offline Twistor

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Re: ERA Customization: skills
« Reply #14 on: May 04, 2021, 07:03:48 AM »
From the perspective of RMFRP and varied settings / house rules, I'd find this quite useful. As I like alternating my settings so tend to change it from time to time (having run games in Privateers, Shades of Darkness, Dark Space, Shadow World, and Middle Earth, and some homebrew as well even if not lately), it would be handy that I could keep the setting-exclusive skills in their own files and only put them in the ERA directory (of a given game) when I need them.

Currently I instead keep a massive master skills file and try to curb it when I need to make a setting-specific skills list. For the first few iterations, I'd easily end up with a few extra skills that should not be in the setting-specific list.

A note however: if some skills came from various Companion books, I'd like those files to be editable. ERA expansions tend to be in un-editable format, so, changing e.g. a race or a culture means I have to entirely recreate it as its own race or culture file*. If this happened to skills, too, that would have the added inconvenience of not being able to remove the skills that I'm not using, so they would uselessly stick around on the character sheets.

* I recently noticed that the professions can be edit-overwritten using the new variant profession feature, that's rather cool and convenient!
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