Shard Powers Activate
It has been a long time since we posted an update about what’s happening in Shard. This isn’t because there was nothing to talk about, but rather because the work has been very involved. We would make one change and that would lead to another change and so on. It took us a while to wrap the work up into a meaningful update. Unlike many past updates, there were some features that would cause us to go back and change previous work. Our strong desire is to not have features constantly changing in an incompatible fashion, thus the long delay.
So, now that the update is finally here…what is it? This release introduces a new action block for the character sheet that allows modeling and tracking features in ways that were never possible. Lots of features that were just text before now appear as actions that a character can perform or that modify characters in a temporary fashion. Using actions can now apply conditions to other characters or monsters and can build on top of each other in a collaborative fashion.
Actions
Features have historically been able to either describe the feature in text; modify characteristics of a character including allowing user selections; or track feature usages; but they couldn’t initiate an action, or track conditions. Features can now describe actions that can do all of this and more.
Here are some examples of how you can experience these new action features:
Dragonborn now have a breath weapon attack that will track usage of the breath weapon and place the action in the chat along with the saving throw and damage roll. The GM can roll saving throws directly from chat and players can roll the correct damage. The GM can even selectively apply the damage based on the targets making successful saving throws.
Rogue’s sneak attack ability can now be toggled on to automatically add the damage to all attacks or a player can make a roll and then apply the sneak attack damage to stack on the damage roll.
Barbarian’s rage now can be activated as an action. The action will track the duration of the rage as well as automatically applying bonuses to weapon attacks.
Druid’s wild shape now shows as an action where the player can choose from the specific set of valid monsters, including automatically consuming one of their available uses.
Cleric’s channel divinity features now share the use count for channel divinity and show available actions grouped.
Conditions
Conditions have been a handy way to track an effect on a creature or characters, but lacked full modeling abilities and could be difficult to define and apply. Conditions can now have the same modeling as any other character feature. Conditions are a new resource type that can be created and can easily be selected to add to a character or monster. Other features can also create conditions as part of their definition. These conditions can show up in chat rolls and can directly be applied to characters or monsters. Because of the expanded nature of conditions, it is now optional to show the condition label on the character tokens on maps. Conditions are now displayed in the action block on the character sheet to make them easier to find and use.
Here are some examples of how you can experience these new condition capabilities:
Inspiration is now a defined condition that you can add to a character. Just end the condition to remove inspiration once it is used.
The turn undead chat action includes a condition that can be applied to monsters to track the correct duration for the turned undead.
Bard’s can now use bardic inspiration to give a bardic die to the target that they can use to roll the die to enhance their roles. Using the bardic die removes the condition automatically, eliminating the need to track the bardic die manually.
Spells
Spells have had rich modeling for attacks and healing, but haven’t had good ways to track durations or other types of actions. Spells can now describe richer actions that includes applying conditions to targets, summoning creatures, or applying different effects like attack roll bonuses. Spells with durations are now tracked as active spells in the action block. Active spells can now apply modeling like conditions that can apply modifiers to the caster for the duration of the spell.
Here are some examples of how you can experience these new spell features:
Casting the spell mage armor now includes a condition for mage armor that applies the correct AC adjustments with a duration. This condition can be applied to the caster or to other targets to get the mage armor benefits.
Casting spiritual weapon will show the spiritual weapon as active with attack roll and appropriate damage rolls based on the casting level.
Conjure animals will allow you to pick what animal to summon and will summon the appropriate number based on the CR of the animal and the casting level. The summoned creatures will be added to the character sheet for the duration of the spell. Ending the spell based on duration or manually ending the spell will remove the summoned creatures from the character sheet automatically.
Chat & Dice Roller
When we started our Shard journey we were resistant to adding support for dice rolls or chat features. It was important to us to maintain that in-person play experience for dice and we didn’t feel that we had much to add with chat support. Our community has helped us to understand what we were missing and we have now fully leaned into both chat and dice rolling.
By understanding dice rolling we can now automatically handle rolling dice that include different damage types and keep track of totals for the different damage types. We can now add on to dice rolls to handle cases where there are features that allow for bonuses or penalties on D20 rolls, or where features can add additional damage or reduce damage.
Chat messages aren’t just about sharing text messages or dice rolls, but now make it possible to share details of actions and exchange actions between players and GMs. The GM can easily see the details of a cast spell. A condition from one characters action or spell can be applied by another player or the GM. The GM or player can make the appropriate save based on the save described by the chat. The GM can make saves for all of the creatures in an area of effect and then apply full or half damage based on the players damage roll and the creatures’ saves.
We’ll continue to expand on this usage of the chat messages and dice rolls based on feedback to make Shard is easier for players and GMs collectively and not just individually.
Conclusion
All of these updates will continue to work fine with existing characters and creations. We have tried to minimize any disruptions, but there may be a few cases where users might have to reselect some choices or where a rest is required to ensure that some usage tracking counts are correctly updated. Creations made with the previous modeling will continue to function as before. We will be working with creators to update as many of ours and their creations to utilize the new features as much as possible. We will also be working on new learning articles and how to videos to help users and creators understand how to leverage these new abilities.
As always please let us know how you like the new features. What’s great, what could use some tweaking and where there are bugs that need to be fixed.
Thanks for your continued support.