I can't stop playing with this - it's such fun!
This warms the cockles of my heart to hear! It was really fulfilling to actually complete this program. My previous project was a simple program to roll random worlds using the Stars Without Number world generation tables--nothing nearly as fleshed out as this.
Quick thing I noticed: speeds should round up when halving, not round down.
Thanks for catching this. I'll put this in the issue tracker and correct it.
Do you plan to add the combat derived stats (INITIATVE, PERCEPTION, DEFENSES)? Maybe roll the HEALTH, or use an average score?
I held off on those because they were a little more intricate than the other derived statistics. The category that concerns me is MELEE DEFENSE
only because the skill system is open-ended. I couldn't feasibly take into account every possible weapon skill or unarmed skill, so generating it with no further input seems out of the question. Thinking about it, I could add an option in the Edit Character section for the user to select their preferred melee/unarmed skill for the purposes of MELEE DEFENSE. That could work! Sometimes talking it out really helps.
Regarding HEALTH, I might go with an average value for now.
One minor interface thing I noticed is that sometimes you press 0 to go back and sometimes you press enter. Not a big deal, obviously, but I've caught myself doing the wrong thing from time to time.
This is absolutely correct and something I've been cognizant of as well. Inconsistency is a big UX no-no and I'm guilty of that with this program. It comes down to how I've chosen to handle the situations where the user is given a more open-ended prompt (selecting and removing skills, choosing a name, writing out a hook, etc.).
Honestly there's nothing stopping me from having both 0 and empty/blank input aborting and returning to the previous menu for those instances, now that I think about it. I was just concerned that I might run into some unintentional behavior if I kept the 0 thing.
Another interface thing - as I go through careers and edit them to add skills and whatnot, I forget which I've done. I wonder if noting which have skills and/or exploits already selected would be useful?
This is a problem I have as well, but I wouldn't mind some suggestions on how to handle this. If you have the time, could you give me a mock-up output of what would be more clear to you? That would be awesome!
Hopefully some of these user experience quirks will be squashed when I can get a proper GUI built. After I correct these issues I'm going to take another shot at throwing something together.
Thanks again for your time and support, Morrus!