Oozes and Immunities

[MaxAstro]

I have a vague recollection that this may have been reported already, but just in case it hasn't. I ran an encounter involving some Carnivorous Crystals recently and it was one of the most painful experiences I've had in Fantasy Grounds as far as fighting with the interface.

It seems that the parser interprets "Immune: Critical (except bludgeoning and sonic)" as "Immune: critical; Immune: bludgeoning; Immune: sonic". That's easy enough to fix on its own, but Carnivorous Crystals have the Split ability. And 300 hit points. And are highly resistant to damage that doesn't split them. And my party decided to take the tactic of intentionally splitting the oozes to then hit them with AoE sonic damage.

I could not, on the spur of the moment or now, figure out a way to make a new copy of the ooze in the combat tracker that kept the effects of the ooze being copied (oddly, it keeps the wound value just fine, but not the effects). So every time a new split happened - the party turned 3 oozes into almost 15 by the end of the fight - I had to go through and fix the immunities (which also included moving Immune: critical to its own line so it could be toggled). It being a long fight and towards the end of the night, there were a few times I forgot to do that and several oozes ended up being immune to a spell they should have had a weakness to.

Obviously the parser is never going to be perfect, but as far as fail states go turning a weakness into an immunity is pretty bad. :)

If there is a point to this other than the bug report - is there a way to make a copy of a creature and also copy the effects on that creature?

[Trenloe]

Thanks for reporting the issue with immunities. This was reported recently and has been logged in RS2.095.

For copying NPCs in the CT, the underlying CoreRPG code specifically deletes all effects from the source NPC when being copied, so that they can be rebuilt from scratch. This probably covers 99% of situations. However, I looked at the code and it was relatively straightforward to include the original effects, and not rebuild them, if the ALT key is held down when the NPC is dropped as part of the drag/drop copy process. This will be in the next ruleset release.

[MaxAstro]

Thank you so much, Trenloe.

I will mention that just having the ability to copy monsters in the first place (and it being as intuitively simple as dragging the dragon icon) was a huge boon when it came to adding new oozes and getting their HP set correctly. Split is an odd and very edge-case ability, and it's great that the program already handles it as well as it does.

I really appreciate that little extra bit of functionality being added in. In addition to handling splitting oozes, it means that any time I have monsters that I need to add an effect to in order to better represent their abilities (such as the "pack attack" ability that many creatures in a certain book of Age of Ashes have), instead of fixing every creature I could fix one and then copy it as many times as I need to fill out the encounter.

EDIT: Another question occurred to me; I'm not at my Fantasy Grounds computer at the moment to check. When you copy a monster does it copy changes that were made to that monster's sheet, or does it use the original entry? For example, if I add one of ShadeRaven's spells to a monster to replace a spell it originally came with, and then copy it, will the copy have the new spell, or the original?

[Trenloe]

EDIT: Another question occurred to me; I'm not at my Fantasy Grounds computer at the moment to check. When you copy a monster does it copy changes that were made to that monster's sheet, or does it use the original entry? For example, if I add one of ShadeRaven's spells to a monster to replace a spell it originally came with, and then copy it, will the copy have the new spell, or the original?
Everything on an NPC sheet is local data. When you add a spell all the info is copied from the spell into the NPC sheet. So when you copy a NPC then all of the current data gets copied, which is good functionality. The downside is that if (when) we release updates to the spells, then all creatures that use spells need to have their spells manually updated. But, that probably won't happen very often...