An option to track boosts as being owned by a character, to be used against another character.
johnhelmuth opened this issue · comments
🚩 Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe
To me, boosts in Fate are short term floating free invokes that are not named. They represent fleeting advantages between two characters. Often creating a description of a boost can be too taxing when the players' creative energy can be better spent on other things.
The important thing to me about boosts are the characters involved: the character that created the boost from a roll, and the character against which that boost applies. It may be not too difficult to remember this, but I think that very often boosts go unused because of the number of things that the GM and players are already keeping in their heads.
In in-person games some tables might use a sticky note with the owner or the target of the boost written on it, or some other token placed on the board near the owner or the target.
In Fari, when you add a boost to the tabletop, the amount of space it takes up is more than an aspect! I feel they should be tracked and displayed in a different way than Index cards, Aspects, NPCs, and Bad Guys.
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✅ Describe the solution you'd like
I think we can do better in a VTT like Fari, where it would be easy to turn a roll with a boost result into a data structure that contains the owner and the target characters. The boosts a PC owns could be represented by a number on the character list, similar to the fate point number, and maybe in a new field on the character sheet. The same type of thing could be on the NPC or Bad Guy displays in the Tabletop.
Hovering or clicking on the boosts number would pop up a list of the targets you have boosts against, and allow you to spend the boosts (basically deleting it if you don't want to have it add automatically to the roll.)
Finally, because not everyone feels the way I do about playing with boosts, (the infidels,) I think this behavior should be controlled by a setting tied to the game creator, a checkbox that controls how boosts are handled.
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✏️ Describe alternatives you've considered
- Just remember boosts in everyones heads.
- Just drop the name, notes, and invoke track on the existing boosts card so it does not take up space; use the existing controls on the 3-dot menu to add them back in. Maybe make this behavior controlled by a configuration option tied to the game creator.
- Probably others.
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📄 Additional context
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I think assigning an index card to a player could be a very nice idea. I'm not sure about "using it against" someone else but I think a low-hanging fruit would be to be able to assign a player/character to an index card.
Thanks for opening this (and sorry for not having written a comment sooner!)
I'll tinker about this a bit and come back with some ideas