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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 3297361" data-attributes="member: 114">On topic, I'm not sure that I understand the class diagram which you've provided. Are your arrows showing inheritance or association?If I were to design an object model for a d20 engine, I'd first start with my analysis of what I wanted (I'm not sure whether we are talking about a character/monster generator like e-tools or a more complete generator and campaign management thing like DMGenie at the moment - I presume that that discussion was held in another thread?)So for the purposes of this post I'll make the assumption that we want something that will handle character and creature generation and combat management. I'd normally put a lot more analysis into this, but we're just doing back of an envelope stuff at the moment.Then I might start thinking about a class hierarchy. What are my base classes going to be, and then what specialised variations do I want to create. Are there any good candidates for being an abstract class (i.e. one that isn't instantiated, but is used to carry common inheritable behaviours or properties).As an example, I might have creature as one of my base classes. All creatures have abilities, saves, a collection of feats, a collection of skills, a collection of special abilities yada yada yada. I probably wouldn't bother making subclasses such as PC, monster, npc... that would be handled at a higher level by an object such as 'encounter group', which is a collection of creatures (in use, one encounter group would be called 'PCs', another encounter group would be called 'Room 12' or whatever). There might also be a class called 'character class levels', reference classes which enable me to add 1 or more class levels to any creature, and which supports extensibility for new classes.Do some of these comments help, or move in the direction you are hoping to go in?</blockquote>

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