Patron Rewards, Round One

With the first round of payments all settled, I now feel obligated to make your subscriptions to this humble Patreon at least somewhat worthwhile.

So, first things first, hope you like Foundry VTT, because here's "v0.0.2 Alpha" of my questionably-named "Plutonium Tools."* (I've not used MEGA in forever, so if we run afoul of any download limits, do let me know.) If you don't like Foundry, or don't know what it is, I highly encourage you to check it out. It's like Roll20, if Roll20 was created by someone competent who cared about what they were doing.

Speaking of, this Foundry module marks the beginning of the (official) end of the <removed> script. While invaluable, it has been a constant drain on my time and energy, especially given Roll20 aren't very happy about it and enjoy breaking it whenever they can. Don't panic; I still plan to maintain it for the foreseeable future, but it will be purely maintenance work from now on--no new features (unless they're tiny).

Part of the reason for the ongoing maintenance, is one last mad plan I want to execute which requires betteR20's heart to keep beating: a full Roll20-to-Foundry converter. You export a game using betteR20's Module Exporter, click a couple buttons, and it gets magic'd into a Foundry game. Naturally, this process would work on all the official Roll20-released modules, too. More on that probably-not-Soon:tm:.

Which brings me on to how I plan to spend my development time in the near-future: implementing a character builder in 5etools. This has forever been the most-requested feature, and while there are many reasons (read: excuses) by which it doesn't yet exist, most of the genuinely problematic ones are no longer relevant. Additionally, I have a chunk of holidays left to take off this year at my """real""" job, so: it is time. That being said, there's a bunch of bugfixes/improvements to the last update I've been putting off because 110% of my free time has been soaked by writing the Foundry module, so expect the next update to be some final deck-clearing, and not a character builder.

Looking long-term, when the character builder is all tidied away, I'll start back on the Big List of Suggestions forever growing in the 5etools Discord. For those of you who are Patrons but not Discord members, you're going to be missing out on this second reward (and so I advise you to come join the party therein; we don't bite): increased voting power for Patrons. The "Goblin," "Commoner," and "Adventurer" tiers now include vote "modifiers," which add extra weight to your votes as both upvotes and downvotes. Use this power wisely.

I'm half-planning to make a Discord bot to have these scores be publicly available, but for now, here's a snapshot of the top 5 suggestions; without Patron modifiers:

<removed>

And with Patron modifiers:

<removed>

As you can see, this has made absolutely no difference to the order; just made some numbers bigger. Progress. I'm hoping that once we get past the "why-is-this-not-already-a-feature" features, this benefit will start to shine.

And I think that's about all I have to offer, for the moment. There's one other official-unofficial reward whereby Patrons can put in a request to have some small-ish homebrew converted for use in <removed>; if that's something you're interested in, stop by the Discord and ask in the #brew-conversion channel. Not sure how best to regulate/track that, so me personal system will probably be nothing more official than "giant Google Sheet lol." 'If it works, it works.'

Until next time, and thanks for all the gold,

~ Giddy

* Assuming "5e" is hexadecimal, it translates to "94" in decimal. No prizes for guessing what chemical element that translates to.

PS: It's 1am so please forgive any typos ty.