Use Effects, or Roll My Own in my Ruleset?

Hi all. I need some advice on whether or not to proceed with Effects or not as I am considering how the next round of milestones for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy ruleset can be achieved.

I've been doing quite a bit of research into effects. Please correct me if I'm wrong but while I believe there has been the intent for Effects to be portable across other rulesets, it "feels like" they still are biased towards how DnD wants to use them. There is still quite a bit of work for me to leverage effects within my own ruleset in the manner I need them to work.

For example, in AFF you have Talents. The Robust talent means you get +1 STAMINA regen when resting or eating. Now looking at Effects, the DnD way to do that is to apply that to the character sheet, and this has resulted in some very detailed class templates that you can mount and drag and drop onto your character. Ok, that's fine, but that will still take a non-trivial amount of work to just reverse-engineer what, for example, 5e is doing. But it would make more sense if my Talent could register one or more effect hooks. Add the Talent to the character sheet and viola, it all "just works" (TM).

Now, I'm happy to build that kind of a system myself and it feels like it will be just as much work, or possibly less, as trying to coax the existing FG Effects system to get the result I want. And given that sort of decision, I'll always go with building it myself for various reasons.

So, for those sages wiser and more experienced than I am in all things FG, is it worth my while investing some more research into core Effects or is it just as good a plan to build something I know I can maintain? If the latter, I'm more than happy to share my approach once I've got something working and maybe that could be of benefit to others.

Thanks in advance.

I cant recall much about AFF - its been a long time since i looked at it.

Taking your example - there isnt a time or an event in the 5E or CoreRPG systems for meals.
You might add Meals into the CT menu along with Short and Long Rests then that particular Talent could work with existing system.
You might create a list of Talents with an Interface that allows you to use the GUI to specify what a talent does - Event: Meal, Action: +1 Cur Stamina
and leave it up to the player to use the Talent

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Originally Posted by damned

Taking your example - there isnt a time or an event in the 5E or CoreRPG systems for meals.
You might add Meals into the CT menu along with Short and Long Rests then that particular Talent could work with existing system.
You might create a list of Talents with an Interface that allows you to use the GUI to specify what a talent does - Event: Meal, Action: +1 Cur Stamina
and leave it up to the player to use the Talent

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Thanks Damned. Yeah, that's the direction I was heading but then I wondered if Effects were a more correct way of handling it.

I think for permanent effects I'll do my own coding to handle that, and just use Effects for things that are temporal in nature (like suffering the effect of being hit by a poisoned arrow during combat). Does that sound reasonable?

I havent done very much with effect coding at all.
Its a 50/50 call - the closer you stay to the way other FG rulesets are done the more future proof your code is likely to be
Doing it your own way gives you more control