Weird Science Gizmos (Savage)

Context: HL Kit … Authoring Examples … Savage Worlds Walk-Through 

Overview

We're going to dedicate a full section to this topic. The actual changes are not complex, but there are a variety of issues that need to be considered. This results in a series of steps that we'll address one at a time.

How Gizmos Differ

Gizmos are a special variety of arcane power. In addition to the power itself, gizmos need to be controlled. In general, the use of a gizmo entails use of the "Weird Science" skill. However, a "ray gun" gizmo might use the "Shooting" skill instead. We need to track the associated skill for each gizmo and allow the user to specify that skill.

Gizmos are devices, so they each have their own pool of power points. This pool needs to be tracked independently for each gizmo. That means we need to integrate the proper handling for trackers into gizmos and display them on the "In-Play" tab so that user can manage them.

The final wrinkle with gizmos is that they can be shared. This means that a character with no arcane background can possess a gizmo. We therefore have to allow all characters to possess gizmos, and gizmos from other characters must allow the player to specify the number of power points available to each gizmo. We even have to handle the case where a weird scientist has both his own gizmos and gizmos created by others.

Differentiating a Gizmo

The first thing we need to resolve is how we're going to differentiate a gizmo from a normal power. One option would be to handle gizmos and powers much like we do weapons. We could define a new "base" component that has all the common behaviors of the two, then have separate "Power" and "Gizmo" components with the distinct behaviors. This would entail adding a new component set for gizmos as well. While this approach would definitely work, it's a non-trivial amount of work, so we should only go that route if it's truly necessary.

Gizmos are a proper superset of powers (i.e. they add behaviors but don't change any behaviors). In addition, there are only two pieces of new information that need to be tracked for powers. This means that the various new components we're considering would each be relatively small. An easier solution might be to just add the gizmo behaviors to the "Power" component and then use a tag to indicate whether a power is actually a gizmo. Since the changes we need to make aren't very complicated, using a tag ought to be more than adequate, so we'll give this approach a try.

We're actually going to have two different types of gizmos when we're finished. We need to identify gizmos in general, which can be handled via one tag. We also need to differentiate between gizmos created by the character and gizmos borrowed from another character. We'll refer to borrowed gizmos as "foreign" gizmos, and we can handle this distinction via a second tag. For simplicity, we'll just define these tags within the "Helper" tag group, and the new tags should look like below.

<value id="Foreign"/>
<value id="Gizmo"/>

Validation

-define and assign "Gizmo" tag via script -create new tab panel that shares the template -differentiate shared gizmo via "Foreign" tag -new table portal only shows foreign gizmos and old one only shows native gizmos -add fields for linked skill and power points -add Tracker component to Power compset -add portals to template for specifying skill and power points -determine whether menu and edit portals are visible - impacts height of template -position menu and edit portals -add tag to reset trackers to maximum -add script to setup power points -hide non-gizmos from list of trackers on in-play tab -verify gizmos have linked skill assigned -verify foreign gizmos have non-zero power points assigned -highlight menu in red if no selection is chosen