5e.tools

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Help and Support

Please see our wiki for FAQs, installation guides, supported integrations, and more.

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Developer Notes

Data Sources and Versioning

Only "official" (that is, published by WotC) data is to be included in the site. Anything else should be added to the homebrew repository.

Prioritise RAW above all else. Aim to provide a 1:1 copy of the original data. Obvious typos (for instance, mathematical errors in creature statblocks) may be corrected at the discretion of the maintainer(s).

Aim to use the latest version of any published material. Older versions which are sufficiently different (and relevant to community interests) can be moved to the homebrew repository.

Page-Specific Notes

Languages page. As there is no well-defined RAW format for language data, the languages page collects together information from several disjoint places. A priority list of sources to be considered is:

• The "Languages" section on PHB p123
• official sources, in order of:
  • PHB > (DMG) > MM
  • Other "official" (i.e. published) products in release-date order
  • "Unofficial" products (i.e. Unearthed Arcana; Plane Shift) in release-date order

Within this ordering, the following prioritisation should be made:

• text that directly refers to or describes a language, in order of first appearance in the product (i.e. if a language is mentioned on page 2 and 10 of a book, the entry on page 2 should be taken as the primary source)
• text that is given for player use (e.g. the "Druidic" feature of the Druid class) (the text of which may have to be adapted to fit a reference format; i.e. changing "You can understand..." to "A speaker or X language can understand...).

Target JavaScript Version

Targeting ES6 was the original intent, but more modern features have long since crept into the code. Therefore, if something is available as standard in both Chrome and Firefox (preferably in versions dating back at least a couple of months), and isn't bleeding-edge, one can reasonable justify using it. As with all things, use common sense.

Style Guidelines

Code

• Use tabs over spaces.

CSS

• The BEM ("Block Element Modifier") naming strategy should be used where possible.

Data/Text

• Format JSON to match the default output of JavaScript's JSON.stringify (using tabs for indentation), i.e. one line per bracket and one line per value. JSON files programmatically generated from other JSON files (i.e. those stored in data/generated) should be minified, however.

• When "tagging" references in data (e.g. {@creature goblin}), the following rules apply:

  • Only tag references which are intended as references. For example, the Wizard class in You gain one cantrip of your choice from the wizard spell list should be tagged, whereas the Wizard class in Together, a group of seven powerful wizards sought to contain the demon should not be tagged. One is a reference to the mechanical class, one is merely the casual usage of the word "wizard."
  • In a similar vein, never tag anything within a quote-type block. Even if the quote directly refers to a specific creature, we can assume the quote is from a universe/perspective in which (for example) statblocks don't exist, and therefore the tag should be omitted to maintain the flavor of the quote.
  • Within data from a source, avoid referencing content from a source printed after the publication of that source. For example, MTF content might reference SCAG deities, but SCAG deities should refrain from referencing MTF content.

JSON Cleaning

Trailing commas

To remove trailing commas in JSON:

Find: (.*?)(,)(:?\s*]|\s*})

Replace: $1$3

Character replacement

• ’ should be replaced with '
• “ and ” should be replaced with "
• — (em dash) should be replaced with \u2014 (Unicode for em dash)
• – should be replaced with \u2013 (Unicode for en dash)
• − should be replaced with \u2212 (Unicode for minus sign)
• • should be not be used unless the JSON in question is not yet covered by the entryRenderer, i.e. should be encoded as a list
• the only Unicode escape sequences allowed are \u2014, \u2013, and \u2212; all other characters (unless noted above) should be stored as-is

Convention for dashes

• - (hyphen) should only be used to hyphenate words, e.g. 60-foot and 18th-level
• \u2014 should be used for parenthetical dash pairs, or for marking empty table rows.
• \u2013 should be used for joining numerical ranges, e.g. 1-5 should become 1\u20135.
• \u2212 should be used for unary minus signs, in the case of penalties. For example, "You have a -5 penalty to..." should become "You have a \u22125 penalty to...".
• any whitespace on any side of a \u2014 should be removed

Convention for measurement

• Adjectives: a hyphen and the full name of the unit of measure should be used, e.g. dragon exhales acid in a 60-foot line
• Nouns: a space and the short name of the unit of measure (including the trailing period) should be used, e.g. blindsight 60 ft., darkvision 120 ft.
• Time: a slash, /, with no spaces on either side followed by the capitalised unit of time, e.g. 2/Turn, 3/Day

Convention for Dice

Dice should be written as [X]dY[ <+|-|×> Z], i.e. with a space between dice and operator, and a space between operator and modifier. Some examples of acceptable formatting are: d6, 2d6, or 2d6 + 1.

Convention for Item Names

Item names should be title-case, with the exception of units in parentheses, which should be sentence-case. Items who's volume or amount is specified by container (e.g. (vial)) treat the container as a unit.

Mouse/Keyboard Events

Avoid binding ALT-modified events, as these are not available under MacOS or various Linux flavors. Binding SHIFT-/CTRL-modified events is preferred.

Dev Server

Do npm run serve:dev to launch a local dev server that serves the project files on http://localhost:5000/5etools.html.

Version bump

Do npm run version-bump -- [OPTION], where [OPTION] is one of the following:

• major to increment the major version (1.2.3 will become 2.0.0)
• minor to increment the minor version (1.2.3 will become 1.3.0)
• patch to increment the patch version (1.2.3 will become 1.2.4)
• a version number (like 1.2.3)

It will first run the tests and fail to increase the version if the tests fail. It will then automatically replace the version in the files where it needs to be replaced, create a commit with the message chore(version): bump and create a tag (in the form v1.2.3) at the commit. This feature can be easily disabled by doing npm config set git-tag-version false.

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License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.