Ground Rules

http://KDM-Manager.com is intended to help automate Monster's various bookkeeping and admin tasks without simulating game play.

Practically, this means that the software does not represent art assets included in the game's printed materials or reproduce the rule book in part or in whole.

In terms of actual features, functionality and the scope of the application, the basic idea is this: anything related to bookkeeping or campaign administration is fair game for implementation and/or representation within the Manager, while anything specifically related to actually playing the game is "off limits". The Settlement and Survivor Sheets are represented, for example, but Gear Grids and Tokens are not.

While designing, developing and maintaining the features of the Manager, I always apply the following guidelines:

• Representing Monster's visual assets is totally out of bounds: none of Kingdom Death's concept, rule book or other published art will be used in any part of the Manager for any reason.
• Relatedly, no story event text or dice tables (e.g. "Age", "Bold", "Intimacy", the Severe Injury table, hunt events, etc.) are or will be represented in the Manager as forms or menus.
• Representing Monster's written assets (e.g. flavor and rules text), however, is unavoidable.
• Representing the game's business logic and rules is also unavoidable, and automating the management and application of those rules is one of the main goals of the Manager.

Essentially, the rule of thumb, when designing features, is to ask whether using the feature would simulate flipping through the book, rolling the dice and/or comparing rules to cards and resolving events.

On one hand, a feature that presented a Gear Grid, for example, and automatically incremented hit box numbers on the Survivor Sheet when armor was added to it would cross this line: the gear cards and the gear grid are game assets, combining them with one another triggers business logic that affects a third asset and therefore simulates gameplay.

On the other hand, a feature that applies business logic to a record sheet would not cross the line between automation and simulation, since it does not use rules from two separate assets to modify a third.

To certain ways of thinking, features of the Manager may seem to toe the line between automation and simulation. The random "Fighting Art" and "Disorder" automation, for example, could be said to simulate shuffling one of those two decks and pulling a card.

Nevertheless, there is nothing about randomly choosing an item from an array of that simulates the interplay of two or more of game's assets and their effect on a third asset, so the feature exists.

Finally, the features of http://KDM-Manager.com that automate administrative tasks associated with game workflow, specifically the "Return from Hunt" functionality in the Campaign view, automate "paperwork" by performing basic administrative tasks (i.e. tasks where game assets affect or otherwise have consequences for the paper tracking resources), without considering the effects of two or more game assets on one another, and so those features exist.