How many ways are Requirements phrased?

Burning Empires Burning Empires Character Burner
1

I’m trying to provide a bit of automation for the Character Burning process—at least, a tool for GMs to check characters easily. I know about the following sorts of Requirement on lifepaths. Am I missing any?
[ul]
[li]Choice of several lifepaths
[/li][li]Choice of several traits
[/li][li]Must be your Nth (or Mth)
[/li][li]Choice of several lifepaths or this other one twice
[/li][li]Choice of several lifepaths and a choice of traits
[/li][li]Minimum/maximum age
[/li][li]Must not be your Nth (or Mth)
[/li][li]You must have this lifepath and not this other trait.
[/li][li]Any N lifepaths in some setting
[/li][/ul]

Some, like Owner-Aboard, aren’t really requirements on taking the lifepath: they’re requirements on the final character that come with the lifepath.

Given all that, it seems like there’s a small core of requirements and some logical combinators. Are there any subtle lifepath requirements I’m not going to be able to meet that way?

And all that doesn’t even mention the weirdo Born Vaylen lifepaths.

2

Lifepaths OR traits, which isn’t wacky per se, but isn’t on your list. For instance, off the top of my head Forged Lord requires Anvil Lord and Hammer Lord OR Your Grace (Or something like that anyway).

3

Absolutely, thanks. So the primitives end up looking like:

[ul]
[li] A previous lifepath, some number of times
[/li][li] A trait
[/li][li] All previous lifepaths’ ages sum compared to some number
[/li][li] All previous lifepaths count up to some number
[/li][li] A lifepath in some Setting
[/li][/ul]

And the combinations are the usual and, or, and not. That does mean character burning can’t be done straight through: you have to spend some of your Trait points to buy traits from early LPs to qualify for purchase of later LPs.

4

If you can automate Requirements checking, you’re my hero. That’s the one thing I just utterly gave up on in my own BE character burning spreadsheet.

5

Well, you could do it almost straight through, especially if it kept track of required traits and trait points. Just have it pop up a dialog “This LP will require the X trait, costing Y points. Do you want to buy the trait?”

6

You could. I couldn’t program my way out of a wet paper bag. I’m working in frickin’ Excel.

7

Well, bear in mind that sometimes you’ll be doing that using trait points from subsequent lifepaths. If you enforce the constraints all the way through the character-generation process, you may not be able to reach some legal characters.