VTT Character Builder - vertical slice

[Gearhartlove]

VTT Character Builder - vertical slice

problem

I'm a new player wanting to get into pathfinder. I don't have a printer and I showed up late to my game session. I want to create a character sheet I can reference during the session. I want to be prompted with decisions I need to make and I want it to generate a character sheet for me.

I'm a game master. I want to help my players create their characters. I want it to be fast, accurate, easy to track, and sharable. Passing around a player's paper character sheet is inefficient, error prone, and not guaranteed (some people forget theirs at home). There needs to be an online solution that enables a dungeon master or player to create a character.

appetite

A character builder is the first step towards building an immersive virtual table top experience. This is the foundation which players will interact with the application. Without a character builder, player's will not be able to interface with the app fully.

This project will take any where from three to six weeks to complete and will involve design + programming work. This pitch is not intended to be a releasable solution; it is research and development into making a vertical slice of the character creator. This pitch is focused on creating a character that fit's this persona:

Bhak Silverhand

• ancestry: Dwarf
• heritage: Forge Dwarf
• background: emissary
• class: Cleric

solution

fat marker sketch

real world inspiration - DnD Beyond

The solution is to create a character builder that allows the user to choose elements as they progress through the builder. Their are many options to make when creating a character. This builder will present these options and the permutations that stem from prior decisions.

The categories needed to create a pathfinder character are

Ancestry + Heritage | Background | Class

These tabs will contain a mix of navigation, drop downs, modals, and player choices.

The end result of this RnD phase is to produce JSON of the persona. This information is intended to feed into a future character viewer.

Rabbit Holes

This project is not indened to feel great navigating. It is intended to get something off the ground to start playing with when making a character. Spending a lot of time making transitions and pop ups smooth is a rabbit hole.

When worrying about "which spells should I pick" or "which starting items do we support", specially ingest a couple and roll with that, don't worry about ingesting every item or every spell.

No Gos

When going through the application, users will not be able to pick from every option available. Only options to create a vertical slice will be created. The reason for this is that there really is too much information to ingest at the start. On top of this, certain classes have very different choices to make than others.

The navigation will be linear for now, taking things one step at a time. There will be no going backwards in the builder, only forward to start.

Importing existing characters is not a supported functionality yet.

This character builder will not support building characters past level 1.

The created character will not persist, currently there is no agreed upon data source to store information, meaning it will be best to stub out the endpoints and worry about how we are grabbing and storing user decisions at a later time.