Effect Questions

[kleamovich]

Greetings everyone!

Last night during a game that I was running, I had two different effects not work properly. I was wondering if there is something in the background that would cause these two to happen.

1. A player was using the IFT: Effect_Name; Do_Something;
When the Effect_Name was placed upon the intended target. In this case the actual effect is 'IFT: Freebooted; ATK: 1; DMG: 1;' to test this effect we changed the 'ATK: 1;' to 'ATK: 10;' or 'ATK: -10;' when the attack roll would take place, it would show the rolled total of that players die roll and base modifiers (without adding the attack bonus via the effect), then it would show the next line to be hit or miss. We began to notice that it is not showing up on the rolled total, it would adjust the hit or miss accordingly (it would apply the attack bonus here not in the rolled total). Not sure if that is suppose to take place in the background like that or not. I did make an extension that added 'Freebooted' as an effect, which works.


2. A player was using Rage [Pathfinder]
The character raged during a combat, he was using his fists and doing nonlethal damage. When the rage was applied he rolled his attack and did nonlethal damage (from the die rolled and his base strength modifier), with rage added in addition to the nonlethal attack he would also do 2 points of lethal damage, instead of adding that damage to nonlethal rolled total and becoming nonlethal damage.

I am going to try to recreate these in a fresh campaign with no modules or extensions to see if it could have been one of those interfering with any of this.

[Moon Wizard]

Effects
The IF and IFT effect tags can only be used with standard conditions in v3.1.2. (i.e. IFT: Blinded; ATK: 2) If you are attempting to add a condition via an extension, you'll need to unzip the ruleset, and trace where it is breaking. (Note: An unzipped ruleset in a folder will override the downloaded PAK file that gets downloaded when updating FG.)

In the beta version (v3.1.2), there are now align/race/size/custom modifiers to the IF/IFT tags. There are examples on the effects wiki page. (Check out the DMG Magic Item Examples)
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Effects#Examples

Nonlethal Plus Modifiers
There was an issue related to modifier stack values being added as lethal damage to nonlethal damage rolls. This should be addressed in the v3.1.2 beta update to be released this week (not in there at the moment). My guess is that this will address the issue. If not, I will need more info to recreate (i.e. steps).

Cheers,
JPG

[Nickademus]

"Shaken" is a standard condition. This is what we were testing with once the "Freebooted" didn't work. All of the listed behavior was with the Shaken condition. (The original post is a bit misleading.)

[Moon Wizard]

So is this still issue in v3.1.2?

Thanks,
JPG

[Trenloe]

We began to notice that it is not showing up on the rolled total, it would adjust the hit or miss accordingly (it would apply the attack bonus here not in the rolled total). Not sure if that is suppose to take place in the background like that or not.
That is how it's supposed to work for IFT conditional effects that are compared against a target's AC (for example). You don't see the effect applied to the roll total, but it is taken into account on the hit/miss resolution.

[Nickademus]

Has there been any problems with the IFT conditional always evaluating 'true'? I didn't get the chance to watch all the testing that was done, but it seemed like the 'IFT: Shaken; ATK: 1' was applying the [EFFECTS +1] to rolls against targets that did not have the Shaken condition.

[Trenloe]

Has there been any problems with the IFT conditional always evaluating 'true'?
Yes, if the condition isn't recognised by the ruleset as a valid condition.

I've just done a test in PFRPG 3.1.1 with no extensions loaded and Shaken is recognised as a valid condition and an IFT: Shaken; conditional effect works properly - only applied to a target with the Shaken condition.

[Nickademus]

Good to know. I'll have more time to test during the next game. Thanks.

[Togainu]

That is how it's supposed to work for IFT conditional effects that are compared against a target's AC (for example). You don't see the effect applied to the roll total, but it is taken into account on the hit/miss resolution.

While I agree that a player shouldn't see that the total is being applied (after all they don't know if something is evil before hand). I think and would prefer myself as a GM to be able to see what the total result is and that the effect is being applied to the roll. This would make testing these type of effects easier and in my eyes also lead to less confusion about why certain things hit or miss for example.

[Moon Wizard]

Because a roll is independent of applying the roll to a target creature, effects which are specific to a target are only applied when the roll is applied to the target.

While it may not be optimal for some situations when you would prefer to see the final total, it solves a lot of issues with regards to flow of logic for the game rules to be automated in the first place. It also allows rolls to be "re-used" by dragging from the chat window to other targets.

Regards,
JPG

[Nickademus]

Any way to add a small note to the chat when this happens, in the targeting text line?

[Moon Wizard]

It's added to the resolution message already.

Regards,
JPG

[Nickademus]

Upon getting around to digging into this, I found the source of the issue with the Freebooted condition mentioned in the first post. Not being able to see the attack bonus directly applied helped to hide this, but the damage rolls made it clear that the condition wasn't working.

It should be noted that custom conditions for conditionals must be all lowercase when added to the DataCommon.conditionaltags table. FG will not recognize a condition with an uppercase letter (and will thus apply the effect to all relevant rolls). Once the lowercase condition is added to the code, it is no longer case sensitive in FG since FG will change it to lowercase to match the code upon evaluation.

The IF and IFT section of the 3.5e Effects on the wiki does not mention this.

[Trenloe]

No need for adding custom conditions to the base ruleset. Use the new CUST(condition name) effect. Or is it custom(condition name). I can't check as I'm on my phone.

[Nickademus]

[5E/4E/PFRPG/3.5E] Added new conditional operators (ALIGN, SIZE, TYPE, CUSTOM). Click help link in campaign effects window to see more info.


I haven't looked into the new conditionals because when I click the help link it takes me to the 3.5e Effects wiki page which has no information on them. Not sure where the details are supposed to be.

[Moon Wizard]

I've updated the 3.5E and 4E wiki effects pages with the conditional information.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/3.5E_Effects#Special_Components

Cheers,
JPG

[Nickademus]

Thank you kindly.

[Nickademus]

No need for adding custom conditions to the base ruleset. Use the new CUST(condition name) effect. Or is it custom(condition name). I can't check as I'm on my phone.

There is no custom conditional, or at least JPG didn't add it to the effects page with the others. I see it in the release notes, but is there a description of how to use it?

Also, there is technically no indication of how FG knows whether to trigger a conditional operator. I assume that they are compared to Type field of the NPC using the same format as the Bestiary/Monster Manual, but you might want to at least mention that the Type field needs to be filled in for the new conditionals to work. Some new people might not be using the pre-made monster modules.

[Moon Wizard]

The NPCs must be filled out just like any other creature in the MM. If there is no data on size, alignment, type; I guess I just assumed people would know it wouldn't work. :)

For the custom conditional operator, it was added quickly toward the end of update work, so got added after 5E wiki text which I used as base for others. But, it's there.

Regards,
JPG

[Nickademus]

So my question then would be, are there any gotchas we need to know about? I assume the format is something like "IFT: CUSTOM (SmellyFeet); SKILL: -2 diplomacy" and the target would need to have an effect with the phrase "SmellyFeet" on them for it to work.

Does the condition have to be one word?
Does the condition have to be alone in the Effect label adding it?
Is there a field in the PC/NPC character sheet that the condition could be typed so it doesn't have to be manually added?