Extending effects

The effects system is fantastically useful and powerful. However, it's currently limited by the fact that effects can only be built in spells in the Actions tab of character sheets, or in the effects window. To make it fully functional, it really needs to be available much more widely. (My players are adding all sorts of psuedo-spells into the Actions tab to get effects for feats and abilities.) How difficult would it be to add the effects functionality into spells themselves, feats, abilities, and NPCs?

The idea is that the Actions area of the character sheet is used to track all action-oriented tasks for a character, including feats, etc. Right now, the Actions sheet is fairly weapon/spell focused, but you can workaround by creating a "Custom" spell class.

The challenge to add to other portions of the sheet is finding the time to do it, and the problem of figuring out the issue of clutter/layout in other parts of the sheet. I think that enhancing the Actions page to be more friendly to non-spell, non-weapon actions seems like a better choice.

One of the larger items on the 3.5E wish list is the addition of NPC spell management, similar to PC spell management. Someone could probably beat me to it with an extension.

Cheers,
JPG

Thanks, JPG - so we're doing the right thing at the moment! It would be good to have options to adjust CL on an individual basis (for the "Magic items" spell class), and to turn off SR rolls for abilities that aren't subject to it.

Spell management for NPCs would be very helpful, and I look forward to using that when it becomes available.

But I'm imagining that it would be nice to have effects built into spell descriptions, feats, abilities, magic items etc., so that they don't have to be recreated from scratch on each character sheet. Is that something that's possible?

The challenge with building in all the rolls and effects directly is the overhead of creating and maintaining the data for all the SRD information, and for any modules that have been created for 3.5E. Not a small task, and it would take a lot of time.

I built the spell parser to automatically parse most spell descriptions for attack rolls, saving throws, damage rolls and conditions. I already have parsing of modifiers on the wish list. You can access that parser as it stands now by right clicking on a spell entry and clicking Parse option.

Regards,
JPG

I see what you're saying, but I wasn't thinking initially of having all the SRD spells include their effects up front. I was wondering more if blank effects (and possibly the spells parser) could be added into spells (feats, abilities, magic items), so that one could build up one's own library of these. Eventually, of course, someone could produce a full set of the SRD spells with accurate effects included, but the first step would be just adding the basic functionality.

I don't mind limiting effects to the Actions Tab, and I don't need additional automatic parsing of items/feats. What would make life a little simpler might be to..

1.) Make it possible to add effects (and additional damage lines) to weapons. This might allow for more robust magic weapons support.

2.) Custom classes are good, but they might contain a bit more information than we need for magic items. It might be better just to have additional items (like weapons) for Spell Completion Item, Spell Trigger Item, etc. Each item could be set up with it's own dmg/effects, CL, abd charges/uses.

The goal, for me, is really just to reduce clutter on the Actions Tab and promote it for this sort of usage.

I'm probably overthinking the idea and underestimating how much work it would take, but (like the OP) I think there is room for improvement here. I'm not certain how much or how little will get the job done though. :)

I agree completely with Aristotle. I know there is more that I can do with the 3.5 upgrade than we are doing right now (hopefully we learn as we go!) but the one thing which stands out is that it looks like a great update for spell-casters and an mediocre update for other classes - if you were already using the d20_jpg base as we were.

What would really make the difference is the ability to include the same type of weapon parsing which exists for NPCs on the character sheets. I want a +2 flaming weapon to add 1d6 points of fire damage which is compared correctly to a creature with fire resistance. (adding functionality for flaming burst is probably way harder but boy would it be cool!)

And there is a place on the character sheet for DR but it doesn't do anything. Little things like that would do wonders for the non spell-casters joy with the update.

All that said, this program is absolutely awesome and I love it. If all it did was let me put characters on the map and talk to people it would be good enough for me!