Today I hammered together three rather long encounters about the arrival of a Greek merchant from Byzantium come to trade for British tin. But I got stuck on specifying Arthur’s options for the third encounter, in which he specifies exactly what goods he wants for his tin.
I’m struggling with the realization that I need to make changes in the Encounter Editor. Some of the changes I am contemplating:
Dump False_Honest
So far, I have not used the personality trait False_Honest for anything. I know that I might need it in the future to allow Arthur to make promises, but there are so many complexities involved with this that I have not yet attempted to tackle the possibility. Should I delete that trait from the set? It would free up some screen space, but I’m not hurting for screen space.
Dump multiple reactions
The original Encounter Editor allows up to five reactions to each option, but this storyworld uses only one Reaction (so far). Therefore, it seems economical to dispense with the unused four. This would free up a lot of screen space.
Add alphabetical sorting of encounters
Currently encounters are shown in the Encounter list in the order in which they were created, which is pretty much meaningless. It would be nice to be able to sort them alphabetically, the better to find any particular encounter. The sorting itself would be trivial to implement, but it will have to be part of a set of radio buttons.
Add date window sorting of encounters
Right now there’s no way to get any idea of the time sequencing of encounters. It would certainly be useful to see how they line up temporally. But if I do this, shouldn't I include Prerequisite information in the sorting process?
Other sorting?
There are plenty of other ways of looking at the database of encounters. What about encounters with a target character? How about a system for showing which encounters any given character (including non-active characters) is mentioned? Perhaps I should generalize this to a search feature that allows me to show all the encounters containing any specified search phrase.
At this point I’m trying to decide whether I should work on the Encounter database, the Encounter Editor, or the JavaScript display code.