RPG (role playing games) adaptability

First of all: great work! I’m a huge fan of Open Source, and I wished I would know how to code, or have the ability to learn how to do this. Alas, neither is true. Otherwise, I’d do this myself! :slight_smile:
Now… I’m looking for a decent family tree software for quite a while now. Gramps seems to be quite comparable with any other FamTreeSoft that I have found until now, except for the “Open Source” part, which is a huge advantage if you ask me.

The problem is, though, that I’m actually not looking for such a software for the real world, but for use in fantasy role playing games.

There are some features that are missing in Gramp (or at least, I cannot find them) in order to really use the software that way.

  1. Customisable dates. Obviously, in a fantasy world, it’s not 2020. Most likely, the years are 365 days too, just out of convenience, but not even that is a definite fact. And the months will be different too, especially the names of the months. So this should be adaptable. Also: dates before the beginning of the era should be an option.

  2. There should be a time line. So you make a FamTree - for example - until the year 1040, but at the time the group plays, it’s only 1030. Marriages, births and deaths after 1030 aren’t accessable yet, but will be, once the date has passed (if the admin of the tree allows it).

  3. Multilingual name options. In translations of RPG’s, the names tend to be changed, in order to make sense in the new language.

  4. The ability to display both a portrait and the person’s coat of arms.

  5. Marking the tree completely or partial as “official” or “inofficial” before sharing. This means: there might be an official family (i.e. as described by official RPG sources of the game setting), but the maker of the tree might have added some family members of his own. Or a family might be completely inofficial. That way, people using that tree may decide if they use the inofficial part or not.

  6. Last but not least: “Fantasy” and the subsequent features, should obviously be an option that can be checked somewhere, while it’s unchecked by default.

I realise very well that there will be quite likely nobody up to add these features, but one can hope, I think! :slight_smile:

Dates for each country are managed by individual Date Handlers if available, so one would need to be made to support your world calendar. Reading the following page that would be within the realms of a non programmer:

https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Date_Handler

All the rest sound like needing the creation of custom third party views to do what you want , as you don’t program I suggest you would need to potentially hire a programmer to do that!

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Someone wanted to do something similar to record characters in a fantasy book they were writing. I also remember a discussion about the Game of Thrones calendar.

All of these features are possible and fairly easy to code. A person can already have multiple names and pictures.

In Gramps a tree is like a document - it doesn’t have an admin. It would be possible to create a report that filtered out a given date range though.

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Thanks a lot for the input. I shall look into this date formatting page. I will try to figure it out.
Now about “hiring” a coder… I don’t have the coin for such things, unfortunately. Not in a long run. :frowning:

Still thanks, though! I really appreciate it!

That is quite interesting indeed! Thanks for the heads up!
Here’s hoping that someone might come up with that! :slight_smile: