[FROG] Talent Core - A D&D like Skill system and/or character building system!

[Frogboy]

Talent Core v1.3.1
by Frogboy
​

Introduction

RPG Maker MV has everything you could ever want when it comes to making the RPG of your dreams. It’s got weapons, armor, items, magic spells, special abilities, character classes, monsters and more. What else could you possibly ask for? Come to think of it, there is one thing that is noticeably missing. All of the things I just listed mostly revolve around combat. What about all that time your characters spend outside of combat? Aren’t they good at anything besides killing monsters?

Configure a system of Talents to perform out-of-battle actions.​

Well, of course they are! There just isn’t any core component within RPG Maker MV that covers this. They really should add that. But until then, there’s Frogboy’s Talent Core! What’s this, you say? What are talents? Simply put, talents are special stats that you can customize for your game to give your players stuff to do when they aren’t slaying beasts. What kind of stuff? That’s pretty much up to you. Chances are, you’re already doing this kind of thing. Maybe it’s picking locks, gathering information from a local tavern, finding hidden clues to help solve a mystery or balancing on a tightrope across a large canyon.

By default, you have to tie these abilities to actors or classes and if they aren’t in your group, you can’t perform these actions. That kinda sucks. If you want these talents to be something that anyone can do by training in such activities, now it becomes a lot of work and requires quite a few variables and custom events. This can be mitigated a tiny bit by various plugins but what we really need here is a full-blown system that makes all of this stupid simple, as if it were built right into RPG Maker itself.

Harold is going to try to pick the lock on this treasure chest.​

And that’s precisely what Frogboy’s Talent Core does! It lets you easily define all of your character’s out-of-battle talents, class proficiency bonuses, lets your characters earn points when they level up, allows them to use those points to improve their characters however they want, gives them a really nice user interface to interact with and allows you, the developer, to easily obtain or manipulate this information in whatever way works for your game. This system was designed to largely mimic Skills in the d20 system if you are familiar with tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder RPG or Star Wars d20. If you know what that is then you know what this plugin does but it can be also be customized and used in other ways as well.


Features

• Create a system similar to d20 Skills for your RPG Maker game.
• Create an alignment system similar to Virtues in Ultima.
• Add a robust system of actor variables.
• Create a pseudo job/class system where advancing Talents increases character’s Skills and abilities with the help of the FROG_TalentBasedTraits plugin.
• Incorporate Talent scores into formulas.
• Restrict the use of items or equipment to characters who possess a certain level of talent.
• Shape and customize your Talent system to fit your game.

Success! Harold is able to obtain the contents of the chest with his advanced lock-picking talents.​

How to Use

This plugin is a bit more complex than any of my other ones thus far but setting it up and using it should still be just as easy. Because there are so many parameters to cover, I'm not going to try to cover them all here. Follow the link below and it will take you to the full documentation.

Talent-based Traits v1.2
by Frogboy
​

Introduction

This plugin allows you to grant your actors talent-based traits. You will need to also install the FROG_TalentCore plugin to utilize this functionality. What this means is that as your players build up their actor’s Talents, your game can add new abilities and bonuses to said actors based on their talent level. This is useful for creating RPG systems that allow the player to customize their characters however they want as opposed to everything being determined by the character’s class.

Here are few examples of what you can easily implement with this plugin as your characters advance their talents.

• Adjust Elemental Resistance
• Increase Hit%, Critical% and/or Evade%
• Resist status ailments better
• Gain immunity to Poison and/or Disease
• Gain Extra Attacks
• Reduce Floor Damage
• Gain a chance to Poison or Blind when attacking
• Gain addition Skill Types
• Gain new weapon and armor proficiencies
• No longer risk being surprised during encounters

This is just a super simple example of how you can let your players build their actor's abilities through Talents.​

So for instance, say you've created a Talent called Armor Proficiency. You can use this plugin to grant better classes of armor as they apply more ranks to this talent. All characters would start out with something like Simple Armor which would probably just be Cloth but as they add ranks, they would gain access to Light Armor, then Medium Armor and finally Heavy Armor, or whatever progression you wanted for your game that fits your armor types. The same could be done for weapons, skills, resistances or anything else that can be done with Traits.

In the demo project for TalentBasedTraits, this is the system I set up to demonstrate how adding Talents can be used to improve the character's abilities. A real game would likely be much more in depth.​

Terms of Use

These plugins can be used in commercial or non-commercial projects. You also have my permission to write and share extension plugins for the TalentCore. While not required, if you use this in a commercial game, a free copy of the game would be nice as I put a lot of work into this and would love to see how you used it in your game.

Credit Frogboy in your work.


Changelog

Version 1.0

• Initial release

Version 1.1

• Notifies the player what abilities they'll learn when ranking up. Requires both plugins to be updated to Version 1.1 or higher.

Version 1.2

• Added automatic distribution of points per actor if desired.
• Trained Talents.
• Synergy Requirements and Synergy Talents.
• Automatic Talent Distribution option.
• Bug fix for class changes.
• Now requires FROG_Core.

Version 1.2.1 - Removed the localized namespace.
Version 1.3

• Added Class Change Reset option.
• Added Required Items to perform a check.
• Fixed bugs.

Version 1.3.1 - Added support for Yanfly's Auto Passive States.



Download

My Plugins Page - https://frogboymv.github.io/
FROG Core - https://github.com/FrogboyMV/FROG_Core
Talent Core Plugin* - https://github.com/FrogboyMV/TalentCore
Talent-based Traits* - https://github.com/FrogboyMV/TalentBasedTraits
Race Core Plugin - https://github.com/FrogboyMV/RaceCore
Remove Duplicate Skill Types - https://github.com/FrogboyMV/MiscPlugins

* The TalentCore and TalentBasedTraits plugin both have demo projects located in the /demo folder


Warning!!!

I made some fundamental changes to the foundation of this plugin. For one, it now requires my FROG_Core plugin. I changed the way I handle plugin parameters so upgrading from a version before 1.2 will likely have you re-entering a decent number of them. This change, while temporarily inconvenient, will allow me to manage this and my other plugins much more efficiently going forward. If you don't need any of the newer features, feel free to use an older version.

 

[bgillisp]

Nice! Now someone could use RPGMaker to make a game like say Quest for Glory if they wish with this.

 

[Frogboy]

Thanks! I hope that this will open up a lot of doors.

One thing I've noticed is that the d20-type Skill abilities are often times painstakingly created as mini-games or evented manually. Now there's nothing wrong with mini-games, they're great actually, but they're a very time consuming process and pretty much guarantees that the dev isn't going to be able to put more than a few of these in his or her game because of the amount of work it takes. Having a complete system built around this idea adds a lot of utility to a game for much less work. Once the system is configured to your liking, it's just a few plugin calls away from giving your players a lot more things to do.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. If you have any "Can I use this to make a system like X?" questions, I can also answer those and help you out with the parameter configuration. This plugin is very customizable so I'm sure it won't be as obvious to set up for those not as familiar with it as i am.

 

[Tamsyn548]

Wow! This is so awesome! I didn't know you were such a great coder!

 

[Fernyfer775]

Beautiful stuff! This opens a lot of development room for people's games, thank you for sharing!

 

[Frogboy]

Thank you both! I appreciate it. This one is, by far, my most ambitious and versatile plugin. I hope that there's a lot of devs out there that make clever use of it.

 

[The Stranger]

This is much neater than having variables, which the player can't see, govern new skills\attributes. Fantastic work!

 

[Amarok]

just wow, ive been trying to decide the best way to include a system like this in my game since im looking to make it closer to pen and paper rpgs and then you make this thank you!

 

[Frogboy]

Thanks! The response to this plugin release has been very encouraging.

 

[Philosophus Vagus]

Well this is quite great. I've been doing something similar with variables for my game but like you said having it as an established system seems much simpler. Might just supplant what I've done with this at some point, going to be playing around with it regardless though.

 

[Darmok0]

Excellence! Finally someone has come up with add-ons that can help developers actually create something that will resemble a *real*
Rpg. These plug-ins are perfect companions for those of us who primarily use PVgame assets. Keep up the good works - many thanks
to you for sharing.

 

[Frogboy]

Thank you both!

@Darmok0
"Real RPG" is quite subjective but I know what you mean. Table-top RPGs and classic western RPGs hold a special place in my heart and it's one of the few areas where there's a massive hole in the current available script library. You can expect more from me in this area.

 

[Knightmare]

This is a rather....tasty....looking plugin Don't mind if I give it a try...(Procures bib, knife, and fork, and sits at dinner table)

(Begins carving into the meat of the plugin and slivers off a piece and picks it up with his Fork of Plugin Eating +5)

Crunch.....

Crunch.....

Crunch.....

(GULP!!!)

The words are rather moist and the vowels and consonants swirl together nicely on the palette. Not too salty but a little dry after the 3rd chew but I won't hold it against you. Overall the cuisine was excellent and I hope to try the Traits plugin for my dessert.

 

[GundorfTheBlu]

Hey Frogboy, wonderful plugin! I played through the demos you have set up and was just wondering about something, would we somehow be able to have it so that once you have an actors rank reach a certain point and they get a skill that a window pops up showing them what they learned? Like once you allocate your points and hit finish it could be for example: "Harold has learned: Double Strike, Light Armor Proficiency, and Heal!" Or maybe even having it as an optional setting in the skills parameters in the database. Just a simple way of letting the player know what they got without having to flip through the menus, I'm loving this plugin so far and I believe this would be a good addition

 

[Frogboy]

@GundorfTheBlu
That's a good idea. I will see what I can do about adding that.

 

[Darmok0]

@Frogboy_Bad choice of words: to anyone who has a passion for game design; i meant no offense; i just have a preference for the
AD&D style of gameplay.

 

[Drifter92]

This looks great! Good job

 

[Frogboy]

UPDATE​

Talent Core and Talent-based Traits have been updated to version 1.1. This is a small but useful update if you use the Talent-based Traits plugin. When applying points to advance your actor's ranks, the Help window will show the player what cool, new abilities they'll learn if they commit their points. If you only use the Talent Core plugin, this update won't really do anything new for you.



In order for this to work, you will have to enter in the text that you want to display here in the Talent-based Traits plugin parameters. Each trait now has a Name property. Whatever text you put in there will show up in the Help window like in the image. Hope you all find this useful and it helps you out at some point in time. There is also a new parameter in the Talent Core to customize the "Learn at this rank" text. Even if you don't want to change this, for any existing project you have this plugin in, you'll need to open up the plugin parameters and then hit Okay to make sure that this new parameter is stored or you'll get an unexpected crash.

@GundorfTheBlu - Thank you for the suggestion! I implemented this a little different than you suggested but I feel it's probably better to inform the player before they commit their points as opposed to after.

 

[Jello92]

I love you, man! I can't wait to play around with the demo.

 

[Frogboy]

Thanks! I love this whole community and feel like I've received so much from it. Making cool plugins is the best thing I can do to give back due to the nature of my talents.

No pun intended.