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lbealsjr
February 9th, 2015, 20:21
Got most of the 5E books parsed and getting ready to start my first online game (which is going to be an AL compliant version of Lost Mines) and playing around with the character sheets. Came across a few gotchas and not sure if it is because I screwed up something in the parsing or if the ruleset is built that way.

1. If I drag and drop the race onto the character sheet it fills in the applicable skills as expected, same with background and with class. Where the gotcha lies is if there is an overlap in skills choices, the pop up menu that lets you select, let us say 2 from a list of 5, will allow you to select a skill that you have already gotten from race or background - meaning that there doesn't appear to be any validation code behind this, is this the expected behavior or did I screw something up? Work around is easy - just double check the players as they generate characters.

2. Encumbrance - noticed as I populated the characters equipment list, their carried weight was correctly totaled, yah!!!! Issue is with the encumbrance value that gets set in the character sheet initially. "

Page 179 of the PHB "Carrying Capacity. Your carrying capacity is your
Strength score multiplied by 15. This is the weight (in pounds) that you can carry, which is high enough that most characters don’t usually have to worry about it.

Variant : E n c u m b r a n c e
The rules for lifting and carrying are intentionally simple. Here is a variant if you are looking for more detailed rules for determining how a character is hindered by the weight of equipment. When you use this variant, ignore the Strength column of the Armor table in chapter 5.
If you carry weight in excess of 5 times your Strength score, you are encumbered, which means your speed drops by 10 feet.
If you carry weight in excess of 10 times your Strength score, up to your maximum carrying capacity, you are instead heavily encumbered, which means your speed drops by 20 feet and you have disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws that use Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution."

From what I can tell it seems somehow the VARIANT set of rules got programmed into the ruleset (or maybe this was the base rule in the early version of DD Next?) and not the base rules.
For instance a character with a strength of 17 is given an encumbrance value of 85 (5x their strength value) instead of the expected 255 (15x their strength value).

Is there a way to turn this off and revert back to the base rules. This was mentioned in one of the earlier version of the beta test of the ruleset.
I guess it is not a huge deal, other than confusing for the DM and players, since the appears from testing to be no code behind the encumberance value, i.e. encumbrance does not change PC speed or change ADV/DISADV on attacks. Would be nice if you could either edit the field to have the right values in it or have a way to select whether or not to use the variant rules.

3. Armor - Dragging armor from the equipment list into the player's inventory does not seem to update the player's AC, guess I sort of expected that since dragging weapons updates the player's action list. When you go into the Combat Calc pop up it can be pretty confusing for the user. Instead of using the value given for a particular set of armor in the book...like 18 for Plate, you have to enter (18-10) or 8 into the armor field to get the right end result. Would be better if you could drag the armor from the equipment list into the Combat Calc armor field and have it handle it correctly without the player having to futz with the math behind it .


I am sure I will be pestering everyone as I play with the system more.

thanks for all the help in parsing, it was a "learning experience" LOL.

Lawrence

Griogre
February 9th, 2015, 20:50
1) This is "more or less" expected behavior but Dropping Background first and seeing the skills stops the players from doing this however, there is not anything thing in the rules that prevents a character from losing a skill that way. :p Most DM's would tell a player to take a different class skill, of course so avoid having the character lose a skill.

2) This is correct. Smiteworks programed in variant encumberance not the standard encumberance rules. I personally feel the way you do, that there should be at least an option to use the standard encumberance rules since I find under the optional rule that rogues and some other classes can't carry their starting gear.

3) This is expected behavior, there is no automation in setting AC. There are a lot of different variants on AC. One common gotcha is the base armor class includes the 10 for no armor, and when you put in say leather armor you should put in the Armor mod as 1 not 11 since the default AC is assumed to be 10 by the ruleset not 0. Basically double check your PC's AC is not 10 too high.

lbealsjr
February 10th, 2015, 19:24
Okay thanks for the feedback.

Lawrence

damned
February 11th, 2015, 12:09
also i think the coding to check if skill already exists and then not display it would not be trivial...



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Ixion
March 21st, 2015, 01:13
I have a follow-up to this thread. I also have gotten the books parsed and was toying around with the character sheets.
I have a few questions regarding this too.
1)If I drag and drop a class onto the sheet, it also auto-populates the features (Yay!). But if I change the level of the class, no additional features are added. Past level 1, are all features intended to be added manually, or am I just missing something?
2)Is there any way to have equipment from backgrounds and class auto-populate? Currently I am manually having to do it. Not a big deal, but if there is an easier way...
3)Also, related to equipment packs, if there is a way to auto-populate the equipment, can the packs also auto-populate?
I am sure I will have more, but these are just the questions that immediately have popped into my head.

Thegroo
March 21st, 2015, 01:45
I have a follow-up to this thread. I also have gotten the books parsed and was toying around with the character sheets.
I have a few questions regarding this too.
1)If I drag and drop a class onto the sheet, it also auto-populates the features (Yay!). But if I change the level of the class, no additional features are added. Past level 1, are all features intended to be added manually, or am I just missing something?
2)Is there any way to have equipment from backgrounds and class auto-populate? Currently I am manually having to do it. Not a big deal, but if there is an easier way...
3)Also, related to equipment packs, if there is a way to auto-populate the equipment, can the packs also auto-populate?
I am sure I will have more, but these are just the questions that immediately have popped into my head.

For 1) Leveling up you have to drag the class again to the character sheet. The class features wiil then be added (the archtype features you still have to add manually)
For 2) and 3) you could make parcels with the item's, so you have to set them up just once. (but sadly you have to drag the item's from the parcel to the sheet)

Ixion
March 23rd, 2015, 23:57
The parcels are a good idea. I may just do that.

As for the armor, I understand that it doesn't auto-calculate, but I am not sure why it can't. You could create an armor class with armor type dependencies, and all of the armor characteristics could be applied if the DM or the player dragged an armor set to a place on the character sheet. Of course, that means I will have to investigate further.

Are skills supposed to auto-link on the character sheet? I put the skill description into a reference module, but if you click skills on the character sheet, you get an empty text box. I guess that makes sense since Fantasy Grounds supports 5th edition play but doesn't have the licenses for books yet.