First of all. I just today found this app and it sure looks superb. Great job! I bought the official RMSS tables right away and I've been simulating some combats with a promising results. We've been playing RMSS for almost 30 years making us RM veterans as well, so it looks this is going to be very refreshing addition for my gaming toolbox as a GM.
Thanks for the kind words and feedback. I'll try to address each point in turn.
Before I do that, I will just advise that this software does NOT enforce any rules. That is not its intended use. It is a play aid which helps do away with pen and paper (to a large extent) and the necessity for the hundreds of hardcopy tables. I'll allude to this in some of the answers below.
- Initiative list does not seem always to refresh when new combatants are added. The only way to make the new combatants to appear was to hit enter to reload the page using browser location url (Latest Chrome on OSX)
At the start of each encounter you should add all combatants that are likely to take part, even if some will only join part way through. Simply skip their initiative (which is not seen by players anyway) until they enter. Alternatively if you forget, simply add the new combatants after the end of a round and start a new encounter. It's only an extra click and the state of all combatants will remain as they were at the end of the previous round. Note that initiative only changes at the whim of the GM, since different play groups will enact initiative differently.
- Keeping record on parrying and spent OB per round per opponent and counting percentages of OB does not show correctly (50% parry just shows -50 or +50 and not 50% of OB).
I agree this is a little ambiguous. It is not a % of OB. It is an absolute amount. So for example if you have OB=140, you can enter a parry of 140. I agree I should remove the % to avoid ambiguity, leaving only the (absolute) value shown within the brackets. And as always with this app, you can override or choose a different value by simply typing in the amount of parry instead.
Not to mention there should appear an extra +5 for full parrying with a weapon.
I'm not aware of that rule. Is that a RMSS-specific rule?
The calculating should work like: Let's say there are 3 opponents, An Elf armed with a broadsword and a shield (OB 80) facing two orcs, one with a short bow and another with a scimitar.
On the first round the Elf decides she uses half of her OB to parry evenly for both of the attackers (making 25% of her OB per orc). Then she should have her DB+20 for parrying melee and her DB+20+shield bonus for missile - leaving her +40 OB in her own melee attack.
On the second round she decides to us the whole OB on parry, making DB+40+shield bonus for parrying missile and for melee DB+40+5(extra for using weapon as a shield). Then she still should have to make a roll with OB 0 for not fumbling. The app does not seem correctly to remember what percentage of parry was used between different combatants.
I'm glad you added this example because it shows how difficult it would be to implement this as a rule (which I would not want to do anyway). In fact you've only shown a simple example. What about PCs with 2 weapons? What about monsters with 4 (or more?) arms each wielding a weapon? What about rules where you can only parry combatants you are actively attacking? You can see that parry soon gets completely out of hand.
Add to this that many play groups house-rule the way they like to do parry (as evidence see the myriad of forum threads here on the topic) and it soon becomes an exercise in futility trying to write software to handle it.
So I defer to my original excuse (which it is) that this software does not try to enforce rules. However you were tracking parry using pen and paper you will need to continue to do, and enter the appropriate parry amounts where appropriate.
Having said that, one thing I could have added to the software is a simple record of how much OB each combatant has "expended" and/or "pre-declared" each round as a visual reminder to the GM as to how much they have left. This would still have the complexity of requiring multiple stats for multiple weapons (perhaps as many as 8 for exotic monsters???). You can probably see why I kept away from parry record-keeping and left it to how the gaming group does it manually.
And then mandatory barrel of wishes:
- Combat round sequence should be visible and possibility to step trough (ie. Missile is before melee)
This is ruleset-specific. There is no such thing in RM Classic for example. And again many play groups will have round sequences with different phases. I have provided a very generic initiative system which should be usable in any ruleset where a particular phase requires combatants to be ordered by initiative. You can scroll through the initiative sequence as many times as you want, for each phase within your round.
- Missile reloading time tracking would be very nice (it's tough for GM to keep track on the missile reloading rounds for number of NPC's)
Agree. There is no inventory within the app. It's a combat/encounter aid.
- Choosing between critical tables (ie. thrusting with a sword makes puncture crits etc)
Just change it! If the app gives 12BS, simply change it to 12BP. That's why every result in the app is shown within a text field you can edit. You can change almost every value the app provides - every bonus, penalty, attack result, crit result, etc. IMO this is absolutely necessary and why I say the app does not enforce any rules, nor should it.
I did not read the whole thread and I bet the obvious has been asked many times, but why not open source licence so all the volunteers would be able to add the features and fix the bugs? I'm a professional programmer, so pulling the code down from github and commiting patches would be easy.
That makes a number of assumptions, like the fact that someone (me) is willing to take the time to merge/commit the 3rd party patches and re-release the software. As much as I'd like to, I have been very up-front about my position. This is purely hobby software, written one weekend, for private use. Only when I saw that it was good enough for others did I release it to the RM community for free use, but with very clear disclaimers that I make no guarantees that I will be able to support the software. Having said that I always try to answer questions here, especially when raised as well as you have done.
I'd be very happy to discuss the possibility of handing over the software for others to manage. I'd need to think about that somewhat, and prefer to wait until the release of RMU to see where Combat Minion fits in.
Again, thanks for the feedback. Cheers.
