Thanks to everyone who worked on this fabulous resource! I've already referenced it so much, and haven't even started GMing a session yet.

Excellent work on this. You just saved me and another DM a ton of headache as we are working on a new setting conversion for Shadowrun to Genesys. Talents were looming over us like a spectre. Thanks to your hard work, it'll be easier for us to modify the existing ones to fit SR and maybe just add in a few more.

Cheers! If you're in Omaha ever, hit me up and I'll buy you a drink/coffee/cookie.

The last book included was Dawn of the Rebellion, right? So the only talents missing right now (November 2019) would be the new ones from Rise of the Separatists? I want to keep the Excel list up to date for my players.

21 hours ago, Ser Duncan Pennytree said:

The last book included was Dawn of the Rebellion, right? So the only talents missing right now (November 2019) would be the new ones from Rise of the Separatists? I want to keep the Excel list up to date for my players.

Correct

The Expanded Player's Guide has twenty new talents as well, all Magic focused apart from one that improves Animal Companion.

3 hours ago, Cyvaris said:

The Expanded Player's Guide has twenty new talents as well, all Magic focused apart from one that improves Animal Companion.

How do you know that?

46 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

How do you know that?

People have started receiving their pre-ordered copies.

1 hour ago, Richardbuxton said:

How do you know that?

My copy arrived several days ago.

3 hours ago, Cyvaris said:

My copy arrived several days ago.

Have you spilled the beans anywhere? If so I obviously missed the conversation!!!

In the thread discussing the book's pending release date. If you want, I can message you a write up of the new material so it can be added to this document.

Thanks @Cyvaris but the document is currently not being worked on by the original contributors, it’s just kept available as a resource for gm’s to draw inspiration from. I’ll definitely go read the org thread though

11 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

Thanks @Cyvaris but the document is currently not being worked on by the original contributors.

That is rather sad.

On 11/27/2019 at 7:42 AM, Cyvaris said:

That is rather sad.

For what it is worth, for every Talent that gets added the rest of the document has to be examined to see if that new Talent completely replaces, or has significant overlap with, a, existing entry. The feeling was that there is so much material now available to the community that the value/effort proposition of continuing this document wasn't there.

2 hours ago, TheSapient said:

For what it is worth, for every Talent that gets added the rest of the document has to be examined to see if that new Talent completely replaces, or has significant overlap with, a, existing entry. The feeling was that there is so much material now available to the community that the value/effort proposition of continuing this document wasn't there.

What do you mean by "the rest of the document has to be examined"? You compare the title to see if a talent already exist with the same title then validate the details or you read the whole thing searching for similarities for every talent?

24 minutes ago, Ogulrok said:

What do you mean by "the rest of the document has to be examined"? You compare the title to see if a talent already exist with the same title then validate the details or you read the whole thing searching for similarities for every talent?

Both, really, but the latter is what takes more effort. For example, when SotB gave us the Parkour! talent, it replaced Freerunning taken from Star Wars's Endless Vigil. Deep Pockets replaced Utility Belt. Etc.

4 hours ago, TheSapient said:

Both, really, but the latter is what takes more effort.

that is the case, if you gate in a couple of daemons from another universe.

15 hours ago, TheSapient said:

Both, really, but the latter is what takes more effort. For example, when SotB gave us the Parkour! talent, it replaced Freerunning taken from Star Wars's Endless Vigil. Deep Pockets replaced Utility Belt. Etc.

To lower the amount of effort needed to maintain the data, what about giving more power to the users/community like:

• Maintainers add new talents and only compare duplicate name (see below for even more offloading)
• Leave the replacement part to the community; if someone finds that two talents do the same thing, they can always reply here (or somewhere else) and say so
• Add a "Replacing" column to note what is replacing what (leaving both talents, for reference sake, with a clear indication to players that they cannot purchase both).
• If there are multiple version of the same talent, maybe add a "Version" column as well; this way there is no need to analyze anything and users can decide by themself what they want to do with the different versions

I would not mind helping; I'm using a home-made web-based version for my campaign, and my players (and myself) love to have all talents on a single web page; it makes our lives so easier.

• Another idea could be to host the data somewhere where it is easier to contribute to by the community, offloading the burden a bit more.
• Maybe using another data-format like using JSON or YAML instead of Excel would be even easier to contribute to.
• That data could be hosted on GitHub, for example, which could lead to a website displaying that data at 0$ (instead of a PDF).

On 11/29/2019 at 9:23 PM, Ogulrok said:

Maybe using another data-format like using JSON or YAML instead of Excel would be even easier to contribute to.

you forget that some of the rules must be properly formatted (dice, results and some such)

markdown or asciidoc come to mind

spreadsheet seams good enough for editing (although i would prefer sqlite)

your milage may definitely vary

23 minutes ago, Terefang said:

you forget that some of the rules must be properly formatted (dice, results and some such)

markdown or asciidoc come to mind

spreadsheet seams good enough for editing (although i would prefer sqlite)

your milage may definitely vary

I do use markdown indeed when rendering the web page (using Jekyll) that I use for my campaign. For symbols, I use custom markers that get processed as HTML (like [DI] for Difficulty dice, [SE] for Setback dice, etc.); all replacement symbols available on GitHub (symbols.json) if you are interested.

For the talents, I've made a few adjustments, but it's pretty straightforward and easy to maintain; its also available on GitHub (talents.json) if you are curious.

A database sounds overkill, even SQLite, to replace a document of 5k lines of JSON unless you have advanced plans in mind. Even then, for this specific scenario, I would start to look into NoSQL document databases instead of relational databases.

That said, as a developer, I found the following to be very clear and easy to contribute to:

{
  "Name": "Zealous Fire",
  "Tier": 5,
  "Activation": "Passive",
  "Ranked": "No",
  "Text": "Each time your Game Master spends a Story Point, your character heals 2 strain.",
  "Source": "ROT",
  "From": "Zealous Fire",
  "Depreciated": ""
}

I have to agree that for non-developpers, it might be very obscure to open a pull request on GitHub and to work with JSON. Still, they could not contribute to the Excel anyway, which does not impact the end result negatively.

That said, if the idea interest someone, I have part of the groundwork already laid out.

i would make the "Text" value an array (for each paragraph) to make automatic layouting easier, like so:

{
  "Name": "Good Cop",
  "Tier": 2,
  "Activation": "Active (Incidental)",
  "Ranked": "Yes",
  "Text": [
    "Your character may spend aa from a Charm or Negotiation check to use this talent to upgrade the ability of a single ally’s subsequent social skill check a number of times equal to your character’s ranks in Good Cop. The check must target the same character as your character’s initial check, and it must take place during the same encounter. ",
    "Only one character may affect a check with this talent."
  ]
  "Source": "SOTB",
  "From": "",
  "Depreciated": ""
}

also a Replacing and Version field are actually a good suggestion.

maybe a Reference field refining the Source field (eg. "SOTB pg. 123")

this would also allow Community created talents (eg. Source="CCC", Reference="[email protected]" or "http://fan.site/path")

maybe to avoid common non-programmer errors switching to HJSON ?

PS: if having a couple of .json files laying around, they can easily imported to sqlite anyway.

also i miss the Setting information (eg. scifi, fantasy, horror, etc) but that could be folded into a more generic Tags field

eg:

Tags: [ scifi, horror, aliens ]

or:

Tags: [ fantasy, magic, forgotten-realms, wizard, evocation ]

or so:

Tags: [ fantasy, magic, witcher, alchemy ]

12 hours ago, Terefang said:

also i miss the Setting information (eg. scifi, fantasy, horror, etc) but that could be folded into a more generic Tags field

Was there a version with tags before? If yes, that could be merged in easily (well partially at least). While at it, it could be easy to add a setting collection as well (like "star wars", "rot", etc.).

Quote

maybe a Reference field refining the Source field

I love the idea, but someone will have fun filling that up... That said, the exact data-structure could be discussed later. Additional fields should also be optional, leaving the heavy lifting to be done over an extended period (making the update process less painful).

Quote

maybe to avoid common non-programmer errors switching to HJSON ?

I did not know HJSON, and I don't see how it is better than YAML for readability and simplicity's sake. I'm open-minded tho, so feel free to sell that to me.

Quote

PS: if having a couple of .json files laying around, they can easily imported to sqlite anyway.

They can get imported; indeed, well data are just data. My point was more about managing that raw data. If using GitHub and a text-based-format, everything is already built for cooperation without the need to code anything

I'm very happy you have been enjoying the results of this project. We've talked it over some more, and are content to let GTE be a finished and final product as is. GTE was created to provide tables with a broader range of options when Genesys was new, and resources were scarce, With the large number of official FFG talents now available, and the massive amount of community created content, the need for GTE is greatly reduced.

For those looking for a complete and actively updated list of official Genesys talents, I refer you to DrainSmith's Dispensary of Everything You Nee d.

Thanks you for all the enthusiasm. We do appreciate it.

6 hours ago, TheSapient said:

For those looking for a complete and actively updated list of official Genesys talents, I refer you to DrainSmith's Dispensary of Everything You Nee d.

You mean the "Talent Tome" which is available only as PDF ?

Sorry, but we are talking about being as open as possible in usage, like generating a web-site with templating and some such from the data-structures.

9 hours ago, Ogulrok said:

I love the idea, but someone will have fun filling that up.

the Talent Tome has this information.