Parent & child in template

[Murezor]

Hey there.. I created a template using the "save as" method. The template contained parent advantages and disadvantages, but after I saved it and then used it for character creation, the children were removed from the parents. What's more, when I tried recreate the relationship in the new character, I get this error: "No usable traits were selected. None were made children."

Any solutions?

[Armin]

I'm sorry about that, but there are things you can do on a character for which there is no corresponding structure in a data file - in this case, parent/child relationships. And, as you saw, those are not really supported inside templates, anyway.

If you really want something of that structure, I think you can get closer by using smaller templates for the intended parent/child items, that are owned by the more complete template. That can get tricky if you want a lot of nesting, though. Unfortunately, GCA won't save the relationships if you use the Save As... method to save the full template to the file (all parts, even parts of other templates, will be part of the saved template; no older relationships are preserved), so you'd need to edit the data file to do the adding of the sub-templates, to keep the nesting apparent.

[Murezor]

Originally Posted by Armin

I'm sorry about that, ... you'd need to edit the data file to do the adding of the sub-templates, to keep the nesting apparent.

It's ok, Armin. I have been playing around with the data file and haven't had much success reverse engineering how to use the parent/child keys. Can you shed a little more light on how this works?

Since I don't have many players, I'm thinking that I can just recreate the parent/child relationships after I add the template. Per my original post, it won't let me do this. Is it possible to change one of the settings (lock/own/etc) to allow for post template application editing??

Thanks!

[Armin]

Originally Posted by Murezor

It's ok, Armin. I have been playing around with the data file and haven't had much success reverse engineering how to use the parent/child keys. Can you shed a little more light on how this works?

That's one of the things that you can't do in a data file right now--parent and child keys are the unique ID keys used within a character structure, and there's no such thing in a data file.

Originally Posted by Murezor

Since I don't have many players, I'm thinking that I can just recreate the parent/child relationships after I add the template. Per my original post, it won't let me do this. Is it possible to change one of the settings (lock/own/etc) to allow for post template application editing??

Thanks!

Sorry, I apparently missed the bit in your original post about trying to re-create the children.

Locks() is the tag that prevents you from modifying the template components when you apply a template to the character. If you save a template without checking the Locks box, or if you remove the locks() tag from the template in the data file, then the various bits will be editable and modifiable after being added to the character.

Armin

[Murezor]

Originally Posted by Armin

Locks() is the tag that prevents you from modifying the template components when you apply a template to the character. If you save a template without checking the Locks box, or if you remove the locks() tag from the template in the data file, then the various bits will be editable and modifiable after being added to the character.

Doesn't seem to work, Armin. When I tried recreate the relationship in the new character, I get this error: "No usable traits were selected. None were made children." This is even the case when i do not check the "Locks" tag.

[Armin]

Originally Posted by Murezor

Doesn't seem to work, Armin. When I tried recreate the relationship in the new character, I get this error: "No usable traits were selected. None were made children." This is even the case when i do not check the "Locks" tag.

Sorry about that, I apparently wasn't all there when I replied last time.

GCA won't let you make children out of template components, because they're already part of a parent-child structure in the template. I'm really sorry I wasted your time on that front.

I think the only way to get a nested structure is to use sub-templates--that is, a template for each grouping you want, each added by the main template. That'll look weird inside GCA's available lists, because you'll have templates you don't want people to actually take. I don't have a test case available right now, so I'm not positive that'll do it, but I think it will.

Edit: Okay, looking at Dragons, yes, sub-templates can be displayed as components in the tree structure under the owning template. That may still look a bit weird, because if you have Show Hidden and Show Components both on, you'll see the sub-templates listed separately, as they're hidden traits, and also listed under the owning template, as they're components. Edit Edit: You can see this by loading up Dragons, and adding a template like Western Dragon - Old Adult/Large; it'll add that, and as a component you'll get the Western Dragon template.

But, if you made templates such as My X Advantages and My X Disadvantages, and then included those in your My X template, they'd be included in the tree structure. That may accomplish what you want, I think, but note as mentioned above these sub-templates need to be in the Available list, so may confuse players, if that's a concern.

Sorry for the trouble.

Armin

[Murezor]

I understand, Armin. No worries. The reason I wanted to make parent advantages is to make the templates less confusing to my players. For example, my "Blood Potency" advantage is a parent for Magic Resistance and Energy Reserve (Blood Pool). This allows for them to act like a meta-trait.

I tried the adult dragon template but it is set to hidden so I couldn't immediately see the effects. I'll need to experiment with that later.

I just noticed another problem with the template. In the example above, I have the "Blood Potency" advantage which does an Adds() to uplift Energy Reserve (Blood Pool) and Magic Resistance which are set to level 0 by default. Thus, Blood Potency of level 3 grants Magic Resistance of 3. It also increases Energy Reserve using an @indexedvalue metric.

After adding the template to the character, both the Energy Reserve and Magic Resistance are set back to level 1. They should be 0.

At this point, I think I'm just going to give my players the template as a character file and have them build their characters from it.

[Armin]

There are some things that are just difficult to get right with templates and meta-traits. Certain assumptions or systems that are difficult to deal with or work around.

As for Dragons being hidden, if you click over to the Templates tab, click inside the Character Templates list, right-click, and from the right-click menu, select Show > Show Hidden Items and then Show > Show Components, then you'll see what I was talking about above with the dragons.

As for having your players start from a base character, GCA has a system you can use for that, too, and that will help to protect against the base character file being over-written accidentally.

Create the base character to the point you want it to serve as the basis for future characters. Use File > Save As... to get the Save dialog, then change Save as type: to Character Base Files (*.GCA4Base). Then click Save. That will save the character as a Base file, so that when the file is loaded by another user in the future, GCA will not retain the file name, so that the user will be prompted as if they'd selected Save As... themselves when they try to save the character. Also, all the .GCA4Base file are shown in the Load Character dialog, so they're easy to see and choose when needing to start a new character.

I hope this helps.

Armin