Forum:Table of Contents overhaul: Roles

< Forum:Watercooler

Building on Cherokee Jack's recent Forum:ToC overhaul post, it would be nice if we could additionally standardize the table of contents for roles, and hopefully their Strategy sections as well.

Sections for role pages don't fit into the suggested list at all, but every role has a similar set of sections. In no particular order:

• Starting equipment
• Intrinsics
• Rank titles
• Skills (sometimes with an additional strategy section)
• Codes of conduct (Knight, Samurai, Monk)
• Strategy (no standard organization at all; more below)
• Quest
• Abilities
• Origin (inspiration for the role)
• Variants/SLASH'EM/UnNetHack/etc
• Encyclopedia entry
• Gods (only on a few, already covered by God)

For a standardized table of contents, I propose:

• Introductory section: general introductory text with description from the Guidebook, not actually a section. Origins should be put here if they are relevant.
• Starting equipment
• Intrinsics
• Skills, consisting of just the skill table plus a short paragraph describing starting skills.
• Special rules. This merges codes of conduct with abilities. Anything that behaves differently for this role should be covered here. (For Cavemen, for example, this section covers the lack of cannibalism penalties). The section can be absent if a role (e.g. Barbarian) has no special rules.
• Strategy
• Rank titles
• Quest
• Variants
• Encyclopedia entry (a couple of roles have it in the introductory text instead).

Strategy section

The Strategy sections for roles, as they exist, are all over the place. Some (Rogue, Ranger) are just a simple bulleted list, whereas others (Valkyrie, Priest) attempt to break it up by general phase of the game. Knight is complicated and has a lot of subsections about the steed, because the steed is important to that role, and a lot of the strategy revolves around it. Weapon strategy ranges from being interwoven with nonweapon strategy to being given its own major section. I would like to try to get all Strategy sections into the same format, as well.

The Valkyrie strategy section is probably the best structured. It is divided into sections for the early game, midgame, and late game, each of which is subdivided into weapon strategy, armor strategy, objectives, and general advice. Of course, not all of these apply to all roles, and spellcasting strategy needs to be put in for spellcasting roles. Armor strategy is probably not important enough to merit its own subsection, since many aspects of it are the same for all roles and armor selection largely depends on what you find. Weapon strategy, though, is useful for all roles except perhaps Monk.

So a tentative Strategy section, modeled after the Valkyrie one, would look like this:

• Early game
  • Objectives
  • Weapons (if applicable)
  • Spellcasting (if applicable)
  • General (if applicable)
• Repeat for midgame and late game

Thoughts? --Phol ende wodan (talk) 03:45, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Looks like a good table of contents to me. Would it be helpful to include a "Character selection" subsection before "Early game" in the Strategy section, to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different race/alignment choices? In the Valkyrie article, the differences between humans and dwarves are spelled out briefly in a paragraph in the intro, but for other roles with more options a separate section might possibly be helpful. Some of the implications are already discussed in the body of the article (e.g. different objectives in the early game based on race/alignment); "Character selection" would just summarize the advantages and disadvantages for players about to decide on a character.

Getting ready to revise the Rogue article using your outline. --Cherokee Jack (talk) 15:42, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I revised Wizard a week or two ago with this, and one of the things I did there was move a big section on race selection to Race#Strategy comparisons. This is because there was very little that had to do specifically with wizards, and nothing that couldn't be rewritten to be about spellcasters in general. The same goes for alignment; it basically dictates which monsters will be peaceful and which artifacts you should wish for.

On the other hand, since most new players will use the role page as a definitive strategy guide, I can see the usefulness of notes such as "Lawful dwarf is the easiest race/alignment combination for a Valkyrie". I'm kind of ambivalent about it. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 16:27, 4 March 2017 (UTC)