Practical Example: Making Certain Skills Genre-Dependent

Let's say you wanted to design a very broad-use TTRPG. Something like a game whose general framework could be used on everything from Sci-Fi to Fantasy to Gritty.

On Hedron, you can leverage the power of Conditionals to make this process extremely smooth for creators working in your system (and yourself)!

Refresher: What are Conditionals?

If you've read some guides like our 5E Set-up Example, you may have seen Conditionals be used to create Entity Fields that appear and disappear in certain conditions.

If you haven't, then take a look at this screenshot of a typical Entity Field:

Notice the field called "Conditional". This field basically can be used to control when the field appears and when it does not.

Today, let's use this example to create Skills that vary from campaign to campaign based on the campaign's genre.

Setting Up for Genre-Specific Skills

Let's aim to have 3 skills:

• Knowledge: Your knowledge of the world around you
• Spellcasting: Your ability to cast magical spells
• Hacking: Your ability to hack into computers

Now, these are pretty different skills. Knowledge is probably applicable to games, whereas Spellcasting only should be a part of Fantasy games and Hacking should only be a part of Sci-Fi games.

Likewise, let's assume our system is meant to handle exclusively Fantasy or Sci-Fi games.

Given that, let's set this system up.

Character Fields

In your Rule System editor, head to the "Character Fields" Tab.

Create a "New Campaign Field" and name it "Genre". This is going to be used to denote what kind of campaigns this character was built for.

Make it an Alphanumeric Field and give it only 2 possible values: Fantasy and Sci-Fi.

With this set-up, Characters, at character creation, will have to assign themselves a genre for which they're building a character.

Now, to make Skills that depend on Genre.

Skills

Head over to the "Character Derivations" Tab.

We assume your system already has some sort of Skills system set-up as a Derivations group. If you're not sure how to do that, consider taking a look at our 5E Set-up Example.

We also assume you've set up some basic Derivations for your skills:

Now, let's use our Genre to automatically hide skills when they aren't relevant.

Knowledge will always be present, so let's open Spellcasting.

Check the box next to "Conditional" and click the pencil icon. Click "Add Condition" and add a condition for the Genre being equal to Fantasy, like this:

Save your result and you'll see something like this:

What this means is that your Spellcasting Skill will only appear if the Genre is equal to "Fantasy".

Similarly, let's set-up Hacking to only appear if the Genre is Sci-Fi:

And that's it!

By setting up these conditionals, these skills will only appear if a Character's genre is set to the relevant Genre for a particular Skill.

Character Building

When a player builds a Character in a system set-up like above, they'll see this during character creation:

Then, if they select "Fantasy", they'll see this in their skill section:

And if they select "Hacking":

Perfect. Looks like our Skills change by Genre as we expect.