Another Noob here

[Baron_RWS]

I'm a long time player of FRPG's (since Chainmail) and Rolemaster in particular, when I saw that the Rolemaster ruleset was converted to FG I didnt hesitate.

I guess I am waiting for an e-mail with download instructions for both the FGII system and the ruleset since I see no indication that I can get either yet.

But on to my questions

What tools are people using to create maps?
Are there different scales in FGII for example overland travel vs. interior dungeon crawling.
My old Rolemaster campaign, which I will be trying to recreate in FGII had custom classes, how easy is it to create custom classes within the framework of the rolemaster ruleset - hints or links to tutorials would be greatly appreciated


Any hints would be helpful - thx

[joeru]

Uhm, so you've already purchased FG? Barring that the buying process has changed along with the ownership, unless it was bought with e-checks you should get an e-mail with your serial number directly. You can get the installer from here (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/downloads/).

Check your e-mail client's junk folder, just in case the spam filters have tossed it there. Can't help you with the Rolemaster ruleset, though.

[Foen]

I think custom classes should be OK, subject to what you want to achieve. If you wish to use the same basic building blocks (skills, weapons, armor and spell lists) then you should be fine. Custom skills are OK, as are custom weapons. New spell lists are do-able, but less easy and a new armor system (such as armor by hit location) is pretty difficult.

Please yell if you have specific ideas you want to test ;o)

Stuart

[ionofrao]

I just bought the rolemaster rules from the store here at fantasy grounds and it said I would get an e-mail with download instructions, but I never did. I actually waited like an hour before I noticed there was a link on that page to download the file.

So I got mine and all is well, but I never did get an e-mail (this is over a week ago now), so if you are waiting for one you may want to fire off an e-mail to the store here telling them you are waiting or you may not get one.

[Veldehar]

I am a total noob when it comes to any kind of coding, and by simply applying some logic and elbow grease I eliminated the illusionist from my RM campaign and substituted in a Shadow Mage. It was cake to then go in and address the spell lists and profession description and stuff like that. So long as the template is there, life is good.

Veldehar Snow-Elven

[grimm182]

Hey Baron! HF told me you were getting into FGs...what i have used for making tokens and detailed battlemaps is the NWN2 Toolset. It doesnt work well for large indoor areas due to the orginal being 3D...but outdoor maps look amazing. If you want to see some examples just let me know.

I tried quite a few map making programs, but its not as fast as the nwn2 toolset.

[Baron_RWS]

Hey Baron! HF told me you were getting into FGs...what i have used for making tokens and detailed battlemaps is the NWN2 Toolset. It doesnt work well for large indoor areas due to the orginal being 3D...but outdoor maps look amazing. If you want to see some examples just let me know.

I tried quite a few map making programs, but its not as fast as the nwn2 toolset.

hey Grimm , you know that's a darn clever idea there I'll have to give it a try

[Anoril]

Hello!

I've jsut come into RMC ruleset and I want to set my campaing up... But I'm used to playing with several Companion's stuff that is not in the RS. First races and then professions.

How can I add new races and professions?

Regards,

[Foen]

Hi Anoril and welcome to the forums - I hope you find us helpful and friendly!

There are two ways to include new races and professions: the easy way and the hard way.

The Easy Way: Do (Almost) Nothing

Races do not have much impact on the ruleset - they are a convenient way of setting racial adjustments for your characters, but there is nothing to stop you setting those adjustments manually. You want A Dark Dwarf that has +40 on its RR vs Chaneling instead of vs Essence? Edit the RR racial adjustment on the front page of the character sheet and change the race name to 'Dark Dwarf'. No other automation is impacted and you have complete freedom to amend the racial adjustments.

For professions it is a similar story - type Assassin into the profession field on the character sheet and you're away. The only problem with professions is that the skill development point costs are filled in for you if you use a standard profession, but you'd need to enter those manually for a non-standard profession.

The Hard Way

To add or change a race or profession so that it appears in the Library/reference material and works using drag and drop requires you to edit the Character Law reference module, RMCCharacterLaw.MOD, and alter the XML data in it. This is non-trivial and you'd need to be comfortable with XML before trying it (and take back-ups!) and have a good XML editor.

Race data is held in reference.races and reference.racedata.lists and profession data is held in the skill lists at reference.skilllist.primaryskills.list.<skillid>.cost and at reference.skilllist.secondaryskills.list.<skillid>.cost and must be modified for each skill.

Hope that helps

Stuart

[Anoril]

Hi there!

Thanks a lot Foen for your welcome! I parse quickly the forum and for sure people around here is quite friendly! I'm pretty happy to become a part of it! (note my English may sound strange... I'm foreigner :bandit: )

So, the easy way is quite simple. I even not thought about just modifying the bonuses directly on the character sheet as I've decided to to get them corresponding to my version of RM (an old 2.0 from 1989 :hurt: ) ! (In fact, I'm making use of paper CS that I translate to FG to make use of powerfull and rather speedy combat manager! The way bonuses are managed between old version and the RMC is different and my PC were astonished to see drop in their OB and LifePoints :p )

And because I'm quite a Hardcoder, I'm not frighten in messing around the code to add my Companion races and professions! So, that's the way I choose!

Thanks for the help! And see you for other question :D

By the way, thank you guys for the magnificent work you've done with FantasyGrounds and that superb RMC ruleset!

[Baron_RWS]

Hi Anoril and welcome to the forums - I hope you find us helpful and friendly!

The Hard Way

To add or change a race or profession so that it appears in the Library/reference material and works using drag and drop requires you to edit the Character Law reference module, RMCCharacterLaw.MOD, and alter the XML data in it. This is non-trivial and you'd need to be comfortable with XML before trying it (and take back-ups!) and have a good XML editor.

Race data is held in reference.races and reference.racedata.lists and profession data is held in the skill lists at reference.skilllist.primaryskills.list.<skillid>.cost and at reference.skilllist.secondaryskills.list.<skillid>.cost and must be modified for each skill.

Hope that helps

Stuart

I had discovered the easy way right away but I want to have it done the hard way as well. My first attempt would be to enter in new races to the tables because as you say, races have little to no effect on the rules and such a change is of minimal scope.

1st, am I correct in understanding that the .mod files are really nothing more than .zip files with a different extension? I assume the best way to unpack a .mod is to simply rename it with a .zip extension and go from there.

So I dug into both the client and common.xml files of rmccharacterlaw.mod and they appear to be largely identical. Both having table 04-01 race abilities which is enclosed in the following


<raceabilities>
<name type="string">Table 04-01 Race Abilities</name>
<placement>
......
</tr>
</table>
</text>
</raceabilities>

I have edited the entries of both these tables - recreated the mod file and after backing up the original mod file put my own in the module directory....no change in game. I get no errors. just the original table.

I use windoes notepad to edit the xml files

Am I missing something.

[Baron_RWS]

Ah ha - I found the references section and the racedata list and races.. so I will pursue that and get back to everyone with my success/failure :)

more soon :D

[Baron_RWS]

Ha - easy peasy - added 3 races - no runs no drips no errors - so far :)

[Baron_RWS]

Ok this is going quite well, only issue i have is the table cannot be resized so the footnotes are scrolling off the bottom edge of the screen and no scrolling seems to be permitted.

Ideas how to resolve that?

[Foen]

Table 04-01 should resize automatically, and the other tables (for each generic race such as Humans, Trolls etc) can be resized by holding down the CTRL key. You may wish to make sure you delete the campaign registry once you have changed the module contents, as the old size is 'remembered' may over-ride the auto-resizing.

Hope that helps!

Stuart

[Baron_RWS]

Indeed it did, deleting the campaign registry allowed the race table to properly resize. Thanks much

Next question would be. As a test I attempted to add the No-profession to the tables so I;

added a no_profession entry to reference.professions using fighter as a template.
added the no_profession cost in reference.skilllist.primaryskills.list in each of id-00001 thru 00029
added the no_profession cost in reference.skilllist.secondaryskills.list in each of the skill id entries


there did not appear to be any table entries or library entries that needed to be edited, yet the skills table doesnt include the no profession entry, those two tables have abbreviations for the professions which i cannot seem to find anywhere. - which may be the reason why the tables have no entries.

BTW my apologies for this thread which seems to have veered off into a talk more befitting the workshop forum as opposed to this one.

edit -I just found reference_skills.xml in the ruleset directory and have the new column added - now just got to get the costs to populate the table

[Baron_RWS]

well half a success is better than none - I cant seem to get the skills to populate the table, however the costs will automatically fill in when the skills are dragged over to the character sheet.

[Foen]

The table layout is defined in the ruleset rather than the modules, in reference_skills.xml. The windowclass "referenceskills" and the windowclass "referenceskilllist_entry" define the column headings and the column contents respectively.

Hope that helps

Stuart

[Baron_RWS]

The table layout is defined in the ruleset rather than the modules, in reference_skills.xml. The windowclass "referenceskills" and the windowclass "referenceskilllist_entry" define the column headings and the column contents respectively.

Hope that helps

Stuart

Appreciate the reply, yes I discovered reference_skills.xml and made the requisite changes. I have the column label working but the actual skills dont fill in the table. Still dragging the skill name off the table to the character sheet does populate the correct skill cost on the character sheet.

Mt assumption is that I've missed something very basic

[Foen]

To populate the table itself you need to edit referenceskilllist_entry in reference_skills.xml and include the right stringfieldX control (it should have a source attribute which matches the data you added to each skill in the module.

If you are stuck, post some more code snippets and I can take a look.

Stuart

[Baron_RWS]

Very well - first the link goes to an image of what I presently get when I run the game.

link to image (https://earchitect.50megs.com/models/FGII/ps.jpg)

this snippet of code seems to work fine - it creates the column lable "NP" which is visible in the table - you can also notice that the background hasnt grown.


<stringcontrolX name="noprofession">
<anchored>
<to>bard</to>
<position>right</position>
<offset>5</offset>
<size>
<width>17</width>
</size>
</anchored>
<font>sheetlabelsmallbold</font>
<static>NP</static>
<center/>
<script> function onClickDown(button,x,y) window.hilight(self); end </script>
</stringcontrolX>

now down below in the area where the data should be entered it looks like this


</stringfieldX>
<stringfieldX name="noprofession" source="costs.noprofession">
<anchored>
<to>bard</to>
<position>right</position>
<offset>5</offset>
<size>
<width>17</width>
</size>
</anchored>
<font>sheetlabelsmall</font>
<center/>
</stringfieldX>
</sheetdata>
</windowclass>
</root>

the spelling of "noprofession" matches throughout all entries in all xml files.

[Foen]

It looks like you may need to increase the width of the referenceskills windowclass to allow the windowlist to show the next column.

The skill list is resizeable, so pressing CTRL and dragging the window should work.

Stuart

[Baron_RWS]

I manually edited the width of the screen in the following code snippet.


<windowlist name="skllist">
<anchored>
<top>
<parent>name</parent>
<offset>3</offset>
<anchor>bottom</anchor>
</top>
<left>
<offset>15</offset>
<anchor>left</anchor>
</left>
<right>
<offset>-2</offset>
<anchor>right</anchor>
</right>
</anchored>
<class>referenceskilllist_entry</class>
<datasource>.list</datasource>
<noscroll/>
<script> function onListRearranged() local alt = true; --[[ set row shading ]] for i,win in ipairs(getWindows()) do if alt then win.setFrame("rowshade"); end alt = not alt; end end function onInit() if super and super.onInit then super.onInit(); end local rows = #getWindows(); setAnchoredHeight(rows*12); end </script>
</windowlist>

My skills list is not resizable - no amount of holding down control and dragging the mouse resizes it, it simply drags the fixed size window across the screen. In the above text I changed the right anchor from -19 to -2 (accounting for the 17 width listed previously) the text appears fine now..

The paper background still doesnt match the table size. I deleted the Campaignregistry as you suggested before but with no joy this time.

Now the table looks like this (https://earchitect.50megs.com/models/FGII/ps2.jpg)

Thanks for your patience and help

[Baron_RWS]

The two skills lists display in the frame referencebox..

I suppose I could edit the size of reference box as outlined in this code


<framedef name="referencebox">
<bitmap file="frames/referencebox.png"/>
<topleft rect="0,0,14,12"/>
<top rect="14,0,512,12"/>
<topright rect="526,0,18,12"/>
<left rect="0,12,14,508"/>
<middle rect="14,12,512,508"/>
<right rect="526,12,18,508"/>
<bottomleft rect="0,520,14,14"/>
<bottom rect="14,520,512,14"/>
<bottomright rect="526,520,18,14"/>
</framedef>

What do the 4 numbers represnt for each coordinate it would appear looking at the code above that the reference box is 526 (somethings :) ) wide x 520 tall.

Edit: nope thats not it

[Baron_RWS]

BTW please forgive all my questions as this is the very first time Ive ever even looked inside an XML file let alone messed with one

[Baron_RWS]

PROBLEM SOLVED:

All that needed to be done was edit the sizelimits of the frame as seen in this entry I increased minimum width to 700 from the 645 it was before


<windowclass name="referenceskills">
<frame>referencebox</frame>
<sizelimits>
<minimum>
<width>700</width>
</minimum>
<maximum>
<width>800</width>
</maximum>
</sizelimits>

Thanks for all the help - I am now capable of adding races and classes to my ruleset so I'm a happy camper :)

[Foen]

Got there before me!

[Baron_RWS]

Heh, figures. I run off with my new found skills only to fail again. I go to add yet another one of my campaign specific classes. It shows up on the tables fine but doesn't auto fill the character sheet.

It's never easy is it?

BTW next task. Learn how to add new spell lists :)

[Foen]

Watch out for spaces in the class name, they play havoc so 'lay healer' needed special hard-coding to make it work.