Chi War is a character and campaign manager for the tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) called Feng Shui 2, published by Atlas Games.
This server was coded entirely by Isaac Priestley.
This repository is the backend API server containing the database and JSON API that communicates with the frontend client shot-client, which is written with NextJS and React.
It is currently deployed on https://fly.io/ at https://chiwar.net/.
The intention is to be a full manager for a gamemaster's campaign of Feng Shui 2. The game is a tabletop roleplaying game similar to Dungeons and Dragons, but inspired by Hong Kong action movies.
A game of Feng Shui 2 involves a player known as the Gamemaster, who runs the campaign, and a group of players who play characters having adventures. The characters have various statistics such as "Guns", "Martial Arts", "Defense", or "Wounds", and they have various associated items including weapons and talents.
Each player controls a single character, while the Gamemaster controls all the antagonists and friendly characters not controlled players.
Feng Shui 2 doesn't have a ton of players, but it's my favorite RPG, and I've been running at least one campaign of Feng Shui 2 continuously since roughly 2016. I built this app for a few reasons:
- to manage my own campaign, tracking details of fights and characters;
- to allow my players a single place to track their characters and keep them up to date;
- as a tool to learn React and NextJS.
I chose to build the app as an API server only because Ruby on Rails is my primary strength as a developer, and I wanted to learn some new frontend skills on a big project.
Users of Chi War can be defined as gamemasters or players. There's also an admin flag to allow them to manage users.
A gamemaster has privileges to create campaigns and to edit all the relevant tables associated with their campaign. They can create or delete Fights, Characters, Vehicles, Schticks, and Weapons.
The main thing a player is concerned with in a game of Feng Shui 2 is their character. A character has many stats and attributes, but player characters are built from pre-designed archetypes such as "Martial Artist", "Ninja", "Private Investigator", or "Old Master". A character has a set of skills called "Action Values", such as "Guns", "Martial Arts", "Defense", and "Toughness".
Aside from Player Characters, there are several other categories of character:
- Uber-Boss, the toughest villain type in the game
- Boss, a powerful antagonist your characters would battle at the climax of an adventure
- Featured Foes, the enforcers, henchmen, and powerful bad guys your characters fight on the way to the Boss
- Mooks, the nameless foot-soldiers, ninjas, army men, or assassins your characters fight in waves. Think John Wick or Chow Yun-Fat facing hordes of killers in matching outfits!
- Allies, the non-player characters who might be allied with your Player Characters.
Each type of character has different relevant statistics, so the system was built to distinguish between them, and show the relevant attributes where appropriate.
Feng Shui 2 has a fantastic vehicle-chase system, and Vehicles are very similar to Characters in many respects. I almost built the vehicles as a polymorphic system, with just a "type" field to distinguish between a Character and a Vehicle. In the end I decided it would make more sense for Character and Vehicle to have their own tables, because there are ultimately a lot of differences which are easier to track that way.
In Feng Shui 2, your session will consist of roleplaying scenes, where characters talk to each other, and fights. The roleplaying scenes don't need mechanical details tracked, but in a fight there are a lot of things to keep track of.
Feng Shui 2 has a unique initiative system, very different than Dungeons and Dragons and other common RPGs.
A fight is tracked on a Shot Counter, which is a series of numbers counting down (usually from 20 or so) to zero. The characters roll initiative, which determines their starting shot. The speedy Ninja might start on shot 18, while the Sorcerer and the lumbering Big Bruiser start on shot 14, and the enemy Mook Ninjas start on shot 9.
The fight begins on the highest shot, and all characters on that shot take actions, in order. When a character takes an action, they spend a certain number of shots--3 shots for most actions. If the Ninja is on shot 18 and makes an attack, he spends 3 shots and moves down to shot 15.
So the Fight model in the app was built using a join table called fight_characters to join the fights table with the characters table and the vehicles table. fight_characters also has a field to identify which shot it represents.
If the Ninja is on shot 15, his character will be associated with the fight through a fight_characters record with a shot attribute of 15.
In Feng Shui 2, character talents are called schticks. A character has multiple schticks, and some schticks are gated by a pre-requisite. The system is built so a character can add schticks they don't currently have, as long as they do have any prerequisites needed.
They're also prohibited from removing schticks which are prerequisites to other schticks they own.
Gamemasters can create and manage Schtick records, and Players can choose from the existing Schticks, which have several levels of categorization, and add them to or remove them from their character.
Weapons have only a few statistics and a name and description. A character can have multiple weapons, and potentially multiple instances of the same type of weapon.
Gamemasters can create and manage Weapons, and Players can choose existing Weapons for their character.
The app also serves as a backend for a Discord bot, where a group running a game of Feng Shui 2 could use Discord slash commands to show the current status of a fight, and perform simple management of their characters.
The app was built targeting the following versions:
- Ruby version 3.1.0
- Rails version 7.0.4
- Postgresql 14.6
- Redis 7.07
To configure the app, you'll need some secret keys:
- a Discord token and client
- a Devise JWT secret key, to encrypt the JSON Web Token
- SMTP credentials to send emails to users
To edit the credentials, use the rails credentials:edit command:
EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit --environment production
The structure of the credentials is as follows:
discord:
token: ...
client_id: ...
devise_jwt_secret_key: ...
smtp:
user_name: ...
password: ...
imagekit:
private_key: ...
public_key: ...
url_endpoint: ...
Places where I think there are improvements I can make:
- Performance. Currently, if a fight has a lot of characters, and those characters have a lot of schticks, weapons, and so on, there can be a slight delay as the page renders. Most of that delay is currently on the NextJS/React side, but I do think there are things I could do to speed it up on the server.
- JSON serializing. I haven't chosen a library to do JSON serializing, so right now when a character is serialized to JSON, it includes almost all of its attributes and associations. I'd like to customize that further, so that different requests can serialize different attributes when they're not all needed by the client.