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View Full Version : Ancestry With Choice of Ability Boosts?



MaxAstro
December 21st, 2023, 04:03
I am trying to convert some of the Battlezoo Bestiary ancestries to Fantasy Grounds, and I'm having a bit of trouble with the automation for one of them - namely Mimics. This ancestry lists "Strength or Constitution, Free" as its boosts and I'm unsure how to automate that; my attempts so far have resulted in either a boost to just one or a boost to both, but I'm not seeing how to offer a choice. Is this something that is simply not supported at the moment, or is there a way to do it?

Trenloe
December 21st, 2023, 12:52
I don't think anything like that has come up in the official Paizo products, so it's not something that the code currently caters for. I can't think of a work around.

MaxAstro
December 21st, 2023, 18:01
I was thinking I could do it with a CHOICE automation but I don't see any way to do an ability boost from lookup data automation, so I think I'm SoL.

Is there a way I can manually inject a warning/notification/popup either into the tracker or just as a popup? So that I can tell the player "The ancestry assumes Strength by default, if you want Con you'll need to adjust manually"?

Trenloe
December 21st, 2023, 18:29
Is there a way I can manually inject a warning/notification/popup either into the tracker or just as a popup? So that I can tell the player "The ancestry assumes Strength by default, if you want Con you'll need to adjust manually"?
Have a look at the MESSAGE PC automation keyword.

MaxAstro
January 12th, 2024, 18:56
Have a look at the MESSAGE PC automation keyword.

After finally having a chance to play around with this, I can't see any way to do this that isn't going to get completely lost in the tracker populating 15 other entries when an ancestry is added, since any message will be added in the middle of all those notifications.

Is this something that could be changed, especially for "attention" messages, so that they get bumped to top of the tracker after automation is finished? I notice this already happens for things that need player attention like "add ancestry feat". It would be nice if there was a way to add messages there. It would also be nice if the "attention" flag used the red giant title font like the "add ancestry feat" message does; even making it bold isn't enough to not be lost in the message spam.

Trenloe
January 12th, 2024, 21:48
Is this something that could be changed, especially for "attention" messages, so that they get bumped to top of the tracker after automation is finished? I notice this already happens for things that need player attention like "add ancestry feat". It would be nice if there was a way to add messages there.
I specifically want the attention messages to use bold and to occur when they are called - so that they are presented within the automation that calls them. It's also a lot of complex coding to move messages to the end of automation - storing all of them, and then when is the actual end? There's a definite end in the ancestry records as there's a function that covers processing all the ancestry data, so it's straightforward to code that - but freeform automation is a completely different thing.


It would also be nice if the "attention" flag used the red giant title font like the "add ancestry feat" message does; even making it bold isn't enough to not be lost in the message spam.
You can use the standard markup within the message text - so you can use <h>My message</h> to display "My message" in the header style - details on the available FG formattedtext markup is available in the Wiki here ("Internal representation" section): https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FGCP/pages/996645025/formattedtextcontrol

Although, with the current options, there'll still be some text added before the message. So I'll add a CUSTOM2 option to the MESSAGE automation - which won't add any text before the message, so you'll have complete control over what the message outputs to the chargen tracker - for example: [MESSAGE CUSTOM2 <h>This is my message</h>] will do this:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=59695

I'll make the CUSTOM2 message option available in the next Tuesday update.

MaxAstro
January 13th, 2024, 15:41
Thank you. Honestly just being able to use the title font is probably plenty. I know there's only so much I can do to get players to actually read things; I just want to at least a little bit try to have it not lost in the sea of other messages.

Obviously this would be a lot of work but I feel like the ideal solution would be to have separate message streams for "automation was applied" type messages and "player input/attention is needed" type messages. Or perhaps have the former messages collapsed by default with a button to expand them?

I semi-frequently get questions from my players that could easily be answered by reading the tracker messages and looking for where it said it needed player input, but I can't entirely blame them for not since about 95% of the tracker messages are just "I did what I supposed to do" in various forms and can be ignored.

Trenloe
January 13th, 2024, 23:12
Obviously this would be a lot of work but I feel like the ideal solution would be to have separate message streams for "automation was applied" type messages and "player input/attention is needed" type messages.
Plans are already afoot... but it won't be for a few months yet...