REQUESTING - Second Edition Charm Cards

They aren't too hard to make. I made a set of 1E Lunars ones with only a couple hours of work. Once you get the charms in an XML format, its pretty trivial to make a card set.


Making 2E isn't that hard either, most of the data is already out there in Anathema. It's just a question of WW copyright, of course.
 
This is one of the features I'd planned for Lore 5.  Just need to find some more time to work on it again.
 
Well, the system I use basically is just XSLT and FOP, if you can generate XML from Lore 5, then you can generate a PDF charm card from it. Assuming you have shell access to the host and it lets you run Java (for FOP), you could probably even automate it. I'll see if xmlroff works, that requires less overhead than Java to automate. Though, one charm per PDF is pretty tedious to download.


On the other hand, letting someone select a bunch of charms, then generate a single PDF of all the charms would be cool.
 
dmoonfire said:
On the other hand, letting someone select a bunch of charms, then generate a single PDF of all the charms would be cool.
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Yes, this is pretty much the idea.


Until then...


http://lore5.patternspider.net/charm/to_xml


Note - prerequisites don't yet work because of a quirk in Active Record's treatment of attributes vs. associations.  I'll do some work on this.
 
I live in the southern parts of Brasil, and most of my players do not speak english. I've been trying to translate to portuguese some parts of the book, first and foremost the rules and charms, for my group could grasp it more easily. I do not intend to let this go online, 'couse I think the WW deserve they're bucks, but if you have the charm cards for 2ed, my job would be easyer. I trully don't know if its ok (since is just for my group and all) but helps to have these cards and to organize them. Does anyone of you can help me out?


P.S.: sorry for the bad grammar
 
If you know at least what your charms do, then you'll find Anathema helpful; it displays and prints on the sheet the charm type, duration and cost etc etc., making it comparable to the basic function of a charm card.
 
Bah, I keep meaning to do all the lore5 and come up with a semi-generic parser for Anathema, but I kept getting distracted. Sorry.
 
Now, this isn't perfect, but I think I got a reasonable charm card setup for lore5 charms using the XML I got from the link above. It doesn't include prerequisite charms or keywords, they seem to be missing from the XML. There is also some bad formatting with the <li> stuff which I haven't fixed.


One major bug is the description text. Since no OSS XSL:FO appears to support overflow='hidden', long descriptions really screw up the height of the charm cards. To get around that, I cap the descriptions at 400 characters which seems to work in most cases. It's entirely arbitrary, but I can't really get around it using XSL:FO until I get an OSS formatter to handle overflow. However, I do use the <rules/> tag if there is one, otherwise the <description/> tag.


http://mfgames.com/exalted/lore5charms.pdf


And, if I could get XML that represented the prerequisites, I'd be glad to add them there. Most of the work was taking the lore5 XML into my own XML, since I'm trying to do a slightly more flexible approach to handle various types (such as Alchemical's installation costs), formula-based requirements, and formulas for stuff like Ox-Body both in maximum times it can be taken and the various types of Ox-Body.


Naturally, these aren't my charms and at some point, I'll pull them off my site, but until I get it all cleaned up and ironed out, I'll keep them up.


Right now, the process is to use an XSLT to transform the above Lore5 XML into my format, then my format into XSL:FO and that into PDF which is the lore5charms.pdf link. It's pretty flexible and could probably be played with to get it into a front-end of some sort.


If you want to see the source documents, use this link:


http://mfgames.com/svn/exalted/charm-cards/


I'm using FOP 0.93, but FOP 0.20 seems to also work.


Feedback is always appreciated.
 
Nice work. The only thing I'd say is that the charms are pretty much helter skelter - there's no discernible pattern to their listing. Sometimes it looks like they're arranged alphabetically by ability, but then that's kind of thrown out the window and an out of place charm is listed.


And I'm assuming those charms that have no flavor text are because there's none on the XML. I'm not sure if the pdf is just a formatting of the XML file that's on Lore5 or if you've done anything more with it.


Regardless, they look good so far.


:)
 
Vanman said:
Sometimes it looks like they're arranged alphabetically by ability, but then that's kind of thrown out the window and an out of place charm is listed.
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This is probably an artifact of the to_xml conversion routine I use - it doesn't perform any sorting, so if you just process the records in order, this is what you'd expect to get.

Vanman said:
And I'm assuming those charms that have no flavor text are because there's none on the XML. I'm not sure if the pdf is just a formatting of the XML file that's on Lore5 or if you've done anything more with it.
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If you look at the XSL, what he's doing is using the "rules" block of the Charms if one exists, and falling back on the "description" if none is available.  So basically you get the crunch if it exists, and you get the first sequential block of text if someone for some reason omitted it.
 
Thread jack


I started to think about requesting weapon cards, then perhaps artifact cards.  Now I have a vague notion about a character sheet designed to use cards for tracking things.  


Your Attributes and Abilities would be printed out, except for Lunars who would have a replaceable Attribute section.  As you use Charms and Spells, you put the card in the 'magic' section to show that they were used this tick, or are still active for scene length Charms.  When you attack, you place the weapon card in the 'action' section.  For miscellaneous actions like jumping, dashing, etc. their can be cards for them to place in the 'action' section also.


At the beginning of your next tick, you remove cards that are not in affect and update your DV counter.


I know it makes it seem like a collectible card game, but I know some players that could really benefit from this simplified system.  I also like the visual aspect of it, very easy to tell at a glance what you did and why your DV is 0 this tick.  It could also lead to a GUI design for on-line games.  :wink:
 
I'm using the natural order of the charm cards. Actually, if you look at the id field, that is the order (#1 is first, #2 second, etc). I wanted to get the basics done and then see where to go from there. I could sort it, but I don't know the "proper" sort order to use.


And yep, using <rules/> first, if there are no <rules/>, I'm using the first 400 characters of <description/>.


I didn't do any additional processing on it, because I'm lazy and I was trying to set up a tool chain that could potentially be included in lore5 (among other things) as an output.
 
dmoonfire said:
I didn't do any additional processing on it, because I'm lazy and I was trying to set up a tool chain that could potentially be included in lore5 (among other things) as an output.
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What you have here should work fine.  I disagree with some of your decisions (for example, Alchemical Charms will PROBABLY have additional fields, but making a premature generalization for this case before we even HAVE solid 2E data seems troublesome to me), but I'm glad of the work - my XSLFO-fu is weak.  I'll roll some of this into the build when I have time and credit you, if you're okay with that.
 
memesis said:
dmoonfire said:
I didn't do any additional processing on it, because I'm lazy and I was trying to set up a tool chain that could potentially be included in lore5 (among other things) as an output.
Click to expand...
What you have here should work fine.  I disagree with some of your decisions (for example, Alchemical Charms will PROBABLY have additional fields, but making a premature generalization for this case before we even HAVE solid 2E data seems troublesome to me), but I'm glad of the work - my XSLFO-fu is weak.  I'll roll some of this into the build when I have time and credit you, if you're okay with that.
Click to expand...
True, we have no clue what Alchemicals 2E will have, or even if they have them. However, I want my Alchemicals now, so I'm putzing with a potential replacement until WW comes up with the real answer. That, and even if they do, its going to be a few years before we see the Alchemical Goodness.


However, I can write the XML to handle potential costs. For example, in my XML there is a <costs type='Activation'/> tag which handles the costs for using the charm. For Alchemicals 1E, there is also 'Installation' and 'Selection'. If they don't put them in there, then its still there for some other charm that has an additional cost, impacts Willpower, Virtues, Essence, or Clarity. It doesn't add much and I figured if I can handle all of 1E and 2E rules for charms, I probably have a base enough system to work with. Plus, I tried to write it to be flexible for things I can't think of.


One thing I notice in some structures is a single trait, but I've seen quite a few charms that require a minimum virtue and a trait, or two traits. Also, I noticed that a lot of XML storage doesn't handle "no more than Resistance times" (Ox-body) or the Alchemical sub-options. Actually I wanted to also get something in to distinguish which type of Ox-body is taken, so I want a selector that lets you say "Ox-Body/1x0" or something to that effect.


Yeah, it isn't perfect, but I figured I can see if the idea works and when it breaks. Its not like there is an official Exalted charm XML format that I can find. :) Plus, I like trying trying to come up with a good, flexible and comprehensive format. It's like a puzzle.


Oops, forgot. Go right ahead and add it. If you give me the rules you change to make it fit, it should be easier for me to keep it up to date as I add new things or try to refine them.
 
Hello. I've made a web application that lets you select Charms and print them on cards. I recently updated them for 2e in an attempt to see if I others find it useful. It sounds a bit like what you're talking about here.


http://www.miketilly.com/cc/


Web printing is tricky, but I've tried to make my cards a bit more pretty than the very basic cards I've seen so far. Here's an example of how they look:


http://www.miketilly.com/stuff/docs/Charm_Cards_Solar.pdf


If I finish it, the idea is to make it available for everyone and also to release the PHP and MySQL source. It could quite easily be made compatible with XML data as well.


If anyone thinks this is useful or if you want to help finish it, let me know.
 
That's pretty sweet there. I'll probably recommend it to my group too.


Now, if we could just get a nice consistent way of storing charms so everyone was happy and we could all steal it for our own programs. :)
 
dmoonfire said:
That's pretty sweet there. I'll probably recommend it to my group too.
Now, if we could just get a nice consistent way of storing charms so everyone was happy and we could all steal it for our own programs. :)
Click to expand...
Glad you like it. Charm data in a MySQL table is very easy to export to any XML format, so I think it would be a good place to start. I could easily add an XML export option.
 
HertzaHaeon said:
I've made a web application that lets you select Charms and print them on cards.
Click to expand...
Could you add something to the style sheet, please? For the header styles, after "Pterra", could you add "Missive" to the font list? It's the actual font used in the books.
 
wordman said:
HertzaHaeon said:
I've made a web application that lets you select Charms and print them on cards.
Click to expand...
Could you add something to the style sheet, please? For the header styles, after "Pterra", could you add "Missive" to the font list? It's the actual font used in the books.
Click to expand...
Done. If I release the source, people can of course tweak everything as they like.
 
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