Vault Automation

Over the last several weeks I have been working diligently on getting automation for D&D 5.5e built into Embers Vault. That work has largely been realized now in the form of a Character Creation wizard, a Level Up wizard, and a Rest function.

You can get to the Character Creation wizard by making a new character of course. It will step you through picking your class, background, species, and everything else that goes with a new character. We’ve loaded everything in the SRD, plus rules-accurate coverage of the material outside it.

Alongside this is the Level Up wizard, which triggers when you enter enough XP to level up, or when you click the little button beside the XP form. It’s a pretty slick thing, with access to all our stock rules, supporting multi-classing, house rules, you name it.

And, just a few minutes ago, I pushed a new pair of buttons in the Trackable section for Rests. You can now click a Short Rest or a Long Rest button and watch your Spell Slots refill, Ability Uses recharge, Hit Dice reset, and, generally, see all the things that should be reset get reset.

This all started slow. As it turns out, there’s a lot that goes into this, starting with establishing rules in-system that we never captured previously. After the shape of the rules was sorted (and really, that was a lot more work than this sentence makes it sound) I went on to build in automation. This drove many smaller changes in our 5.5e sheets such as the equipped items section, and auto-equipping armor. After that, and after a whole lot more work on rule definitions, came the Character Creation wizard, which highlighted a whole lot of problems that I had to work out before getting to the Level Up wizard and Rest buttons.

House Rules do actually work, but none of the configuration screens necessary to set them up are exposed at this time. Every rule needs a bunch of things configured and doing that configuration is a bit tricky. If there’s a lot of interest in mechanics behind house rules, we can open those fields but they’re pretty dense. I get confused filling them out on the regular. :)

Leave a comment if you think you’d be interested in setting up your own house rules. In the meantime, you can use the Embers MCP to update your rules if you choose to. The MCP includes instructions on making these updates.

That’s it for now.

As always, thank you for your support and if there are features you’d like to see added let me know.