Development Update (Patreon)

Hi,

I just wanted to give you an update on what I've been working on the last couple of weeks. I tried adding the party integration to GMG but I couldn't get the UI right and had to go back to the drawing board. This was a little frustrating because I felt I was already quite far but it was no use, in the end I didn't want to end up having some half baked solution.

Because I didn't want to start over right away and rather wait for a good idea on how to approach this, I decided to start with something completely different but very exiting: Tabletop Almanac 2.0.

What's that?

I knew since a few months ago that I had to redo parts of the backend and started taking notes of features I wanted to support. And it felt right to finally start with the integration. To be clear this will still be a few months away from release and some features that I intend to add might not make it into the final version it is still very exiting.

First of all why is this necessary? Because when I first developed TA I decided to use a framework that since then has been deprecated. While I could still work with it, in the past few months I felt its limitations a lot and as they will never be fixed I was looking for something more stable and with long term support.

Also when I started with TA I just wanted to have my own backend for statblocks that was heavily typed so it would be easier to integrate it into GMG. But the initial data was lacking support for some rules that since then have been requested a lot. While working on TA 1.0 i was able to add support for upcasting, spell slots, limited actions, items and equipment but still some things where to difficult to add to this data structure.

What will be new?

So with all that I made the decision that the biggest benefit for users would be to have a more thought out datastructure that would make it easier to add more and better features. Two of my favorite ideas are "Action Targets" and "Action Rolls". TA will allow you to define how many targets an action can have (or if the target is self) and if all goes to plan GMG will then allow you to select targets directly to apply the roll result to them. The roll result is based on the defined Action Rolls, which allows you to define different types of rolls an action can have, like "hit", "damage", or "healing". These rolls can be grouped together e.g. if you have a damage roll consisting of 1d8 fire and 1d6 lightning damage.

But even better Actions, Spells, Traits, Feats, Items and much more can now have "Modifiers/Effects". This means an Spell/Action can have a modifier which defines that the target will receive a bonus dice when rolling, e.g. when you cast Guidance the target will receive a temporary modifier that allows them to add a d4 to their roll. There is a lot more like adding Advantage and Disadvantage to rolls automatically based on modifiers. I basically tried to design the system as flexible as possible to make a lot of those difficult to remember situations easier to handle.

Ok but when?

Well not too soon. I currently only have the datastructure for the new system. I need to implement the logic to create, update, delete these things next and then create migrations to port over all the current statblocks, items, actions,... to not lose anything when moving to the new system. Also I need to develop the TA UI to support these new possibilities and I will need to update GMG to work with it. This is a lot but I think in the end it will be worth it, as this will also be the basis for real Character Sheets in TA.

I will also still update the current version of TA and GMG and I really want to add the party integration in Q1. So much to do and many ideas. I definitely won't get board in 2026

If you have specific questions let me know in the commentsJosh