Some suggestions for VCC
Submitted by chaos_star on Fri, 2009-02-27 15:10.
Hello,
I downloaded VCC and used it at my home game earlier this week and wanted to post with some comments and suggestions for future enhancements.
I like this program quite a bit, I believe it has some very good potential. Kudos to you for a job well done.
On to my suggestions, in no particular order of importance:
Healing: the characters in my game are currently 7th level, and they already have a plethora of healing powers and modifiers to their healing powers available to them. This makes it extremely difficult for me to keep track of their hit points accurately.
For my own use, I think it would be good to have a button for PCs that you can click to mark them as bloody or not bloody and dying or not dying. Possibly this could be worked into the conditions enh. you are working on now.
For those that do prefer to keep track of their PCs hit points, you are missing two crucial pieces of data, healing surge value and # of healing surges. You should be able to enter these for each PC.
When my players heal one another, they typically just call out, for example, "7 points plus your healing surge value". A button that would add whatever amount you typed in the box, plus the characters listed healing surge value, would be great for this. Further, a button where you could click it and it would automatically decrease the players # of healing surges remaining by 1 would be very helpful as well (since not all healing uses a characters healing surges).
Further, some way to manually reset a players hit points to a specific number would probably be helpful, like for when the PCs rest and heal, many times they are down only a couple of hit points because it wasn't worth spending a surge on.
Action Points: Some sort of tracking mechanisms for each PC's action points remaining, and Daily magic item uses remaining would be helpful.
Perception: a way to track each PCs Passive Perception and Passive Insight scores, plus a way to see a table of these scores quickly, possibly sorted in order from highest to lowest would be invaluable.
Thanks again for your hard work on this program, I very much appreciate it!
Ed
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Definitely worth doing
Thanks for the feedback I really appreciate the input.
Your comments on healing make a lot of sense. I started running into them. The simplified PC tracking makes a lot of sense.
As for tracking surges and surge value it is something that is on my mental to do list. I have run into the exact problem in my game. As I track more and more info, players start to loose track of some of their powers and surges (which is a pain).
My plan was a simple button “Spend a Surge”. Resting should reset the values. I think you idea of adding the surge value to what is in the box a good one. I just have to make sure there will be enough space and it makes sense.
I also want to add the perception attributes. Actually I hand to have everything from the D&D Insider Character Builder character card on VCC. It should be reasonably easy to do that.
You said:
Further, some way to manually reset a players hit points to a specific number would probably be helpful, like for when the PCs rest and heal, many times they are down only a couple of hit points because it wasn't worth spending a surge on.
I assume you are referring to “loading” the characters on a new battle where they don’t have all the hit points and surges. I have considered adding a save state and reload. But I have to give some thought on what is the best way to do this.
Action Points: Some sort of tracking mechanisms for each PC's action points remaining, and Daily magic item uses remaining would be helpful.
I actually want to track stuff like action point, daily powers, and monster encounter and rechargeable power. For the character I’m actually using physical power cards for the daily powers of items and PC. However this requires a major rework on the Encounter Editor and saving.
I really need to put a feature tracker on the site. I wanted to have release 0.40 with Condition tracking, but I have been a bit slow. The condition tracking features is taking more effort than I expected. However all your suggestions make a lot of sense, and I'll try to add in a future release.
Health Change Ideas
I have done some quick testing and I think that the HP field could be changed to a formula fields.
For example, 2 * s + 7 implies healing (or damaging) two times the surge value plus seven. The s would be replaced by each combatant specific value.
Another idea is to keep the last value on the field. So if you have to apply the same value formula to several combatants you don't have to retyping the formula.
I'd like feedback on theses ideas.