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<blockquote data-quote="PeterDonis" data-source="post: 342835" data-attributes="member: 6906">I agree, the rules definition would have to contain all the dependencies. The question is, how? Dependency information is often not explicit when rules are defined. Example: the Timeless Body feature of monks and druids in d20/3E. Say you have a monk who is already middle-aged (and hence has suffered aging penalties) when he reaches high enough level to gain this feature. All three of his physical ability scores are affected, but only indirectly, because the feature doesn't change the ability scores themselves, it just changes the way ability scores are changed by aging; the program has to be smart enough to spot this and go back and re-calculate the new aging effects (or non-effects, in this case) without an explicit dependency on the item that was just added. (This example is interesting to me because it's one of the bugs I've observed in E-Tools, and I'm wondering if the above is the reason why it wasn't caught.) Again, nothing here that isn't do-able, but it does add complexity.I was talking about more or less what Dee was talking about--deleting an item from a character (her example was deleting the elf race after having made other changes that are triggered by the character being an elf). The program would have to be able to spot that deleting &quot;elf&quot; should undo everything that was done when &quot;elf&quot; was added, or else the character becomes potentially inconsistent with the rules.Peter Donis</blockquote>

[QUOTE="PeterDonis, post: 342835, member: 6906"] I agree, the rules definition would have to contain all the dependencies. The question is, how? Dependency information is often not explicit when rules are defined. Example: the Timeless Body feature of monks and druids in d20/3E. Say you have a monk who is already middle-aged (and hence has suffered aging penalties) when he reaches high enough level to gain this feature. All three of his physical ability scores are affected, but only indirectly, because the feature doesn't change the ability scores themselves, it just changes the way ability scores are changed by aging; the program has to be smart enough to spot this and go back and re-calculate the new aging effects (or non-effects, in this case) without an explicit dependency on the item that was just added. (This example is interesting to me because it's one of the bugs I've observed in E-Tools, and I'm wondering if the above is the reason why it wasn't caught.) Again, nothing here that isn't do-able, but it does add complexity. I was talking about more or less what Dee was talking about--deleting an item from a character (her example was deleting the elf race after having made other changes that are triggered by the character being an elf). The program would have to be able to spot that deleting "elf" should undo everything that was done when "elf" was added, or else the character becomes potentially inconsistent with the rules. Peter Donis [/QUOTE]

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