Eberron: Forge of the Artificer Character Creation

[hanamcmana]

Hi all,

Please bare with me, I'm not sure if this is a review or a bug report, so I'm going to go over my experiences this evening to see if I can get some help. Apologies if I seem scrambled or rude, its 2am for me as I try to figure this out.

I recently purchased "Eberron, Forge of the Artificer" as I'm about to run a campaign with a Cartographer! Everyone is quite excited to see the 2024 Artificer in action... However when I manually made the character in Fantasy Grounds and levelled up to 12, a number of things I expected to see in the Action Tab of the character sheet were simply... Missing. Checking under the "Abilities" tab, I could see everything listed as it should be so the module has loaded correctly it seems? I was just surprised that a passive feat such as "Observant", that applies no effects and has no daily uses, made it to the Action Tab.. When so many of the Artificer's actions that DO have limited use and could really use a counter, simply weren't there and had to be manually entered. As far as I'm concerned, having to manually enter the information in this way... isn't really what the point of spending 30 dollars of a digital product is. So I have to wonder.. Is this a bug or a feature?


The below features are all things I had to enter manually, and think should be under actions by default. Especially when the "Observant" Feat definitely made it, despite having no coded effects to apply or daily use limits.

Magic Item Tinker: Drain Magic Item / Transmute Magic Item / Charge Magic Item (shown under Abilities, but has separate daily uses and should be in actions)
Flash of Genius (shown under Abilities Tab, but has daily uses and should be in actions)
Spell Storing Item (shown under Abilities Tab, but has daily uses and should be in actions. Also no option to choose the spell used.)
Spell Storing Item: Store Spell (a separate daily use counter. Shown under abilities, should be in actions)
Tinker's Magic (shown under Abilities Tab, but has daily uses and should be in actions)
Magic Item Adept (Had to manually adjust the maximum amount of attuned items)
Mapping Magic No counter for limited free uses of faerie fire
No option to choose replicated magic items / display magic item plans
Create Magical Maps (Adventurer's Atlas) (Shown under abilities tab, but has daily uses and should be in actions)
Cartographer's Always Prepared Spells (Shown under abilities tab, but spells not applied under actions)
Ingenious Movement (Flash of Genius) (shown under abilities tab, has no coded effects or limited use but is an action like Quick Search mentioned above)
Portal Jump (Mapping Magic) (shown under abilities tab, has no coded effects or limited use but is an action like Quick Search mentioned above)




The below features WERE included under actions, and I'm grateful for that much...

Awareness (Adventurer's Atlas) (the initiative bonus effect)
Guided Precision (An action to add the bonus damage from Faerie Fire as an effect)


Like I said, I'm not sure if this is a bug, user error, or a very poorly coded module. I've added classes from both the 2024 PHB and Tasha's Cauldron in the past and seen a lot more detail / helpful additions automatically. My process with the 2024 Artificer was the same - make sure both the player and DM versions of the module are loaded, create new character, dive straight into Class / Level as a first step. Each level was added individually to make sure I was making the correct choices for the player. I'm using Fantasy Grounds as a standalone App purchased from Fantasygrounds.com many years ago, and on a Windows 11 Laptop.

Thanks in advance for any clarification offered! <3

[Zacchaeus]

Looks like most of those abilities relies on the Intelligence bonus for the number of uses, and there's no mechanism for automating the number of uses to an ability score modifier. So those would need to be done manually. You can create a new power group and drag all of those abilities into it and then set the number of uses in preparation mode for each ability individually.

[hanamcmana]

Edit: Thank the autosave restoration, my post earlier apparently failed. Let's try again!

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Ah that would make sense, thanks for the clarification. It's a shame that everything seems to be "working as intended". Great tip about dragging the abilities over though - in a system that has a LOT of drag and drop I don't know why I didn't try that previously?

There are a few class features on my list that don't rely on ability score modifier - is there a work around for those or any plans to automate them that you know of? Specifically;

Subclass' Always Prepared spells. These are fixed features of the subclass that do not change
Magic Item Tinker - This ability is stated to only be used once per long rest, rather than scaling with ability score modifier
Spell Storing Item - Is it possible to implement a selection for the spell within the storing item when the class feature becomes available? Something like, when you get a prompt to pick a cantrip on taking a spellcasting class.
Magic Item Plans - this currently has no easy way of being shown. Given D&D Beyond made a whole new UI for it under items, I don't think there's an easy way to solve this. I ended up making a custom feature under "abilities" , listed the characters chosen item plans and then bolded the items that they had made. The items themselves were then added to their inventory, and I put a little note in the item name to say that they are replicated. As the replicated items can change, and disappear on death, they need to be tracked. As I said, I'm not sure there's an easy solution for this but... This is what I came up with on the fly while setting up the artificer last night.

Thanks again for your time! Sorry to bombard you like this. If there's somewhere else I should be making these comments, or someone else I should be asking questions or complaining to, please let me know. I'm very new to actually using the forums beyond searching for automation coding!

[LordEntrails]

You can drag any ability to the actions tab and group them as desired. Many of them you will need to add or modify the effects/actions that FG may create to get them to be correct.

I don't know about future plans, but you can always add things to the Feature Request list or vote on them if they are already there. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/featurerequests

[Zacchaeus]

I think the spells should get added. I'll pass this along to Dominic who is the man that adds these things into the ruleset. (EDIT: the spells should be getting added but there's a misspelling in the code. It'll get fixed at some point in the future. BUt not right away unfortunately).

Magic Item Tinkerer is an extension of Replicate Magic Item so if you have Replicate then adding another action with another cool down would, I think, confuse things. I'd probably just make Replicate Magic item it's own power group and drag Magic Item Tinkerer into it as well and then add the limit to uses in the power group meta data.

As for the spell storing item there's no facility at present to add spells to items. Again for this I'd just have a power group and add the spell into that. You could add the name of the item into the spell name if you really need need to track what item was used. (I wouldn't bother with this since after a long rest the player could choose a different item).

For magic item plans I'd just use the magic items from the DMG and change the name so that it's clear that it was created by the artificer. If you need to track which plans they have then just, again, create a power group (or add it to an existing one) with a note of what they chose.

The Artificer is a PITA both to code and to play since it does things no other class does, so getting all of that automated would require an awful lot of coding for one class. It's the only class that needs a lot of book keeping and manual intervention.

[hanamcmana]

Yeah, I completely understand how Artificer would be a complete PITA. It's why I was hoping for a lot of automation honestly, because it's such a unique and tricky class!

I'm happy to hear the spells will go in! I wasn't expecting it to go in right away - honestly I was delighted and confused and slightly disbelieving when I saw that DragonDelves was redownloading and the Brass had been fixed <3

Thank you for listening to my concerns though :) Your suggestions continue to be helpful and it's interesting to get a bit of a peak behind the curtain.

If I may - I realised today that there might be a step that the FG team could take in regards to artificer that might not be too difficult to do, but would save a lot of time for the DM. I'm going to use Druid as an example, as it's something that's already implemented.

Earlier in the discussion, you explained that there is no way to automate the number of uses an ability has when it's limited and not set in stone. So anything that gets more uses over time, due to character level or ability score can't be automated. I don't understand what coding you do or don't have, but I'm happy to accept this fact and nod like I get it.

However - I'm not sure this means that the abilities don't have to be placed on the action tab when the class hits the relevant level. With Druid, the number of wildshapes they have changes over time. However, Wildshape is still added to the action tab automatically when the class reaches the relevant level to first learn it. I cant remember if it was one or two uses that was given automatically, but it's then up to the DM or the Player to update this as it changes. I noticed it with Bard as well, with inspiration.

Would this be possible for artificer? As we discovered, there's a lot that changes with Ability Score, but could this just be set to 1 use or even 0 uses by the coding, and then the DM/Player just manually adjusts the number. That way, we don't have to make a checklist of all the abilities that should be under actions to then drag them over.

Thanks again!

[Zacchaeus]

Yes, they probably could be added with a default of one use or something. I'll mention it to Dominic.

[superteddy57]

I will try and update the features, but right now the ruleset is in lockdown and may take some time for the updates to be LIVE. Thank you for your patience.