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Tabletop Commander (TC) is a rules-and-tools app for tabletop games - board, card, war, role-playing, you name it! It is the spiritual successor of Chapter Master by Emmaline Autumn, a Warhammer 40,000 9th Edition rules reference and game helper.
Emma decided to move on from Chapter Master as her interest in 40k was supplanted by the greater wargaming hobby after the release of 10th edition made clear that Chapter Master was too inflexible and tedious to work on.
See, Emma had a vision that anyone could contribute to making rules corrections so that anyone could have all of the rules as they currently exist. This ballooned into the idea that you could have all the rules as they existed at any time ]]
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Game Systems
The basis of TC is called a Game System Package. This package includes everything needed for a game system, including schemas, publications, and tools. Players can follow a Game System to get consistently updated content publications, or fork it to maintain it themselves.
But who owns a Game System?
The neat part is that no one does! You can contribute to any Game System with updates to publications and schemas through a community review system. Those with the high enough scores contribute more towards a total approval score which is used to determine whether the Game System. The more your contributions are approved, the higher your score becomes, the more weight your approval and contributions carry.
If your score is high enough, and a contribution request has enough approvals, you can even be the one to merge it in!
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Schemas
Those who have studied English or databases, you would know that a schema is a structural pattern. TC aims to provide a simple, user-edited and maintained schema system for any game.
If that flew over your head, don't worry. Others can share the schemas they've made with everyone, which come as part of a Game System package that you can fork or follow to get both content and schemas ready to use.
For the techies:
The schema system makes use of a powerful custom query language (tcQuery) I designed. By writing queries directly into the schema, we can reduce the amount of re-written content, while maintaining the presence of data anywhere we need it.
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Publications
Publications are the actual content of the rules. They don't just contain the content, but also the style in which the content is shown.
Content can include text, images, and even video (through YouTube links or external embeds). Content can link to other parts of the publication through context based pop-overs.
For the techies (again):
Publications use an enhanced markdown syntax (ttcMD) that implements tcQuery, and adds a bit of custom syntax for things like pop-overs and styling hints for rendering.
The styling aspect is similar to a very trimmed down CSS, but can accomplish quite a lot. For example, this page is actually built using ttcMD!
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