Jupiter's Children: TutorialTraits

Here's a little tutorial on setting up traits.

There's two things to remember about setting up traits. The first is that
you need to have the &traitclasses attribute on your CTO. That attribute
is what tells the traits command what kinds of traits you have. If you look
at +traits serenity you'll see Personality, Physical, Skills,
Resources, Jupiter.

					 Complete trait listing for Serenity

  Personality
	  General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Serenity's Personality 1
  Physical
	  General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +traits Serenity's Physical 1
  Skills
	  General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +traits Serenity's Skills 1
  Resources
	  General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Serenity's Resources 1
  Jupiter
	  Latent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Serenity's Jupiter 1
													  [  +help traits  ]

Serenity's &traitclasses is set with the command:

&traitclasses cto=Personality|Physical|Skills|Resources|Jupiter

You can look at your traitclasses with the ex command (short for examine)

ex cto/traitclasses

Result for Serenity:

TRAITCLASSES: Personality|Physical|Skills|Resources|Jupiter

You can have whatever traitclasses you want. Some people divide it all up
nice and neat, others just use one class. Like um.... Ah, +traits cinn.

					   Complete trait listing for Cinn
  General
	  Player Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 1
	  Tentacle Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 2
	  Tentacle Closet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 3
	  Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 4
													  [  +help traits  ]

so one of the important things to remember is that unless you have a
"class" stored in "traitclasses" the +trait code won't show it.

That can actually be pretty useful: you can write something and store it
on your CTO and it won't show up unless you put the class in traitclasses.

You don't need a lot of stuff in your traits. You could just put background
and powers in your traitclasses, like so:

&traitclasses cto=Background|Powers

The trait code will also display stuff in the order you list the classes
in traitclasses. So if you want Powers listed first, just do

&traitclasses cto=Powers|Background

Setting it up is a bit difficult, but it allows people a LOT of flexibility
since they can name their categories anything they want. There's no
'required' categories.

As for what you can call your categories, I think there might be a length
limit... but it's something like 30 characters. And you can't have a | in
the name. There might be another couple limitations... easy to tell. If you
run into something, it just won't work. :)

Now, each class has subheadings. You can have something like 99
subheadings in each class. You can name them whatever you want (with a
few limits), and can put them in the order you want (they are listed in
numerical order).

Look at +traits serenity again. She has 5 classes. And in each class,
She has 1 sub heading (at the time this was written; she now has more sub-
headings under Jupiter). These are the actual traits that the +traits code
refers to, so I'll call these traits for now on.

So you can have Trait Classes which are filled with Traits. You can have
many trait classes or just one trait class. And you can have many traits
in a class or just one trait. It's up to you to decide what you like best.

Let's take a look at Serenity's +traits again (+traits serenity).

Serenity has 5 classes, all but one with one trait.

Cinnamon (+traits cinn) has 1 class with 4 traits in it.

	                   Complete trait listing for Cinn
  General
	  Player Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 1
	  Tentacle Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 2
	  Tentacle Closet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 3
	  Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .+traits Cinn's General 4
													  [  +help traits  ]

The main advantage of Cinn's setup over Serenity's is that you can use
the following command to read all of Cinn's traits at once:

+traits cinn's general 1-4

Serenity, however, knew that she was going to change her traits in the
future due to character development so wanted room to add lots of traits
in her various classes.

There's nothing stopping you from doing any kind of mixture you want. If
having 10 classes, 6 with 1-2 traits and 4 with 10-20 traits makes sense,
then go for it!

Now, take a look at +help +cset/init for an idea how the command
is formatted.

You set the traits with the +cset/init command. So, with the Powers
class, you would do something like:

	               CLASS  # TRAITNAME       Trait text...
		+cset/init Powers 1=Megablast=This is my megablast power.

Each trait can have its own name. So you can make up names for Classes
AND for Traits.

In Cinn's case, she did:

	    +cset/init General 1=Player Notes=blah blah blah.
		+cset/init General 2=Tentacle Notes=blah blah blah
		+cset/init General 3=Tentacle Closet=blah blah blah

Etc etc.

In Serenity's case, she did:

	    +cset/init Personality 1=General=blah blah blah
		+cset/init Physical 1=General=blah blah blah
		+cset/init Skills 1=General=blah blah blah

Check out +traits kimi for a good example of something more complex. She
has several trait classes and each class has several traits.

You may notice that there's no traits listed under Kimi's Gear. That's
because she has Gear in her traitclasses, but hasn't set any actual traits
in it. You can use something like that as a place holder or a reminder of
something you want to add in the future.

What you put into traits is optional. So you can have as much detail, or
little, as you want. I think there's someone that actually put in some
jokes in his traits just for fun. :)

If you have any suggestions on how to improve this tutorial, please tell Kimi!

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Jupiter's Children : TutorialTraits