Not A Rant

[RPMiller]

Dan (and others),

I don't want this to degenerate into a rant against Dan.

I was wondering about the format of your various Template Entries. (If that is the right name for them)
I have been fighting with HD for many, many hours now trying to get everything to export per the Writer's Guidelines from Steve. I know that you worked very closely with him when you created HD so I'm a little surprised at how far off from the Guidelines your Character Templates are. I'm finding that I have to edit almost 75% of the items I add. For some I have no idea how to bring it within the Guidelines. That doesn't mean HD is bad because it isn't. It has saved me a lot of time entering the characters in the first place. It's just that now that saved time is beginning to wash with the post editing that I am having to do.

My question is this: Is Steve going to rework the Guidelines to accept the Exports from HD as it now stands, or are you going to rework HD in version 2 (or sooner... please? :D) to follow the Guidelines. I recall you mentioning the next version is going to have changes to the Export capabilities. This is all stemming from a certain level of frustration at the end of a deadline so I'm trying not to come across in a demanding or hateful way. The work you have done and will do is truly awesome as far as I'm concerned and I appreciate all your time and effort.

[zornwil]

There are writer's guideline templates under the Hero Designer free stuff, are you using those? This is probably an ignorant point but I figured I should go ahead and just in case go for the obvious answer.

[Simon]

I have no idea if Steve is intending to re-work the Writers Guidelines or not....for that, you'll have to ask Steve ;)

As for the deviations between HD's output and the WG, you're right: I did work very closely with Steve during the development of HD.

The Writers Guidelines are very explicity and "rigid" in their formatting. They do not allow for variations in the way abilities are defined. It is primarily for this reason that the output from HD differs from the formal WG: people wanted (insisted, even) that HD be customizable.

There is a price to customization: I could not rely on anything being "fixed". As much as possible, I had to allow for a "generalized" output of abilities....so that people could customize abilities within the template and still have the output appear "correct".

Steve has actually stated that he's quite happy with how closely HD does manage to follow the WG, even given the fact that it needs to account for customization.

I made HD come as close as I could given the constraints that I had to operate under.

As far as export templates are concerned, I'm always willing to create new tags for the export process if that will help folks at all.....

[RPMiller]

I can totally appreciate the customization issues. Like you said that was pretty huge.
The majority of the "issues" that I'm running into have been fairly insignificant as far as getting the information across. It is really the fine points in the WG that is causing me grief. For instance all the Disadvantages are supposed to display level, rolls, frequency, etc. within Parentheses. This can be added, but is just a pain.
The big one I ran into that caused me to start this thread was Vulnerability. The WG says the Dice have to come first than the condition. I have no idea how to make that happen with an Export template. The only thing I can do is post edits. ANy ideas????
Also, did you see my other thread that mentioned the language formatting? I'm not sure how that could be affected using XML tags. Any ideas???

I'm going to ask Steve about just how stringent he is going to be regarding the WG and Exports from HD. Something tells me he is going to stick to the WG, but maybe he'll meet me half way or something.

Thank you again Dan!