[Adonthell-devel] Thoughts on character implementation

[Kai Sterker]

So far we mainly thought about members of the four races when talking
about characters. All the rules are written with those in mind. However,
those only cover the races the player may chose from at the beginning.
There will obviously be other type of creatures too, like monsters and
beasts.

Many of those additional creatures won't have/need all the stats that a
Dwarf or Elf might need. A wolf for example has little use for a pick
pocket or drinking skill.

With that in mind, I had the following thought: for each type of
creature in the game, we'd define which stats it has plus the maximum
rank it can gain in each of these stats. As said in my earlier mail, the
maximum rank could be increased or decreased for individual creatures at
runtime via a modifier. So it wouldn't be something that would limit us
anyhow.

With this data available, the python character script no longer needs to
contain explicit attributes. Instead, it can dynamically determine which
attributes a character has once it knows the type or race (dwarf or
wolf, etc). That way, the same script can be used for all kinds of
creatures. And it needs only the most basic properties that all
characters have in common. Like name, type/race, gender, level,
experience points and maybe a few basic stats needed for combat
calculations.

As a direct result, the race is no longer specified by an integer, but
is an actual string, which makes it very easy to add or modify races.
The race would also be the key when determining the max rank a character
can gain in a certain stat.


All of this would of course be implemented on Python side. In fact, if
you have no complains, I might do this over the weekend. That would be
the first step towards the v0.4 character implementation.

So please tell me what you think.

Kai