4E Alternative Wound Color text extension

After running a few 4E games in FG I realized in the heat of battle I had problems with telling at a glance which shade of red was moderate, bloodied or critical on the combat tracker when using the new option setting for detailed wounds.

To avoid having my combat result descriptions grind to a halt while I actually looked at the monster's wound number instead of just glancing at the color, I wrote this extension to use orange for moderate, bright red for bloodied and black text for critically wounded. Healthy is also now blue instead of the same green as lightly wounded.

You can get the latest extension here on the Forge: here

Let me know if you find any problems with it. If you don't use the detailed wounds settings it just changes the colors for light, bloodied, and healthy colors.

Edit: Updated to work with the latest theme changes and now available on the Forge.

Thanks Griogre - I'll give this a try in my game tomorrow evening.

You're welcome. :)

Worked fine for one of my 4E groups last night, Griogre. Much easier to read.

One of my players also suggested altering the colour of the chat damage result message in the chat window to help also indicate what health status this results in.

Hmm, that's a good idea, but I didn't see an easy way to change the chat colors so I just updated the extension to add more descriptive text. I'll look further at his string concatenation when I have the time. I had mixed feelings on adding light wounds notification but since I found my players cheering wound category changes at the higher levels where there can be hundreds of hp differences I decided to put it in to start the descriptive journey.

I'm also looking for feedback on the descriptive text, I used the same one word descriptions on the combat tracker but on the tracker the context of wounds is clear. I'm not so sure that's true in chat output, but I don't want to spam the chat window either.

Let me know if anyone finds any problems/typos. Anyone with the 05 should remove the 05 beta extension though the 06 beta will install side by side without any problems I could see.

This update modifies the text sent to chat to be a little clearer. All wounds information now start with: Wounds: *wounds category information*.

Let me know if you have any suggestions or find any bugs. The first post will be updated to point to the latest beta in a few minutes.

Updated for FG version 2.9.2. This will go to 1.0 after this weekend if no bugs are found. The download link on the first post will be updated in a few minutes.

Edit: I was in too big a hurry and I forgot to say if you updated to 2.9.2 you can delete the .61 version extension. The old extension will only work and load on versions of 2.9.1 or lower. They will install side by side but don't use the newer one on anything less than 2.9.2.

Updated extension to .91. Ten minute before my game last night I realized I didn't really want gradient colors for wounds displayed as dots (JPG's gradient code was so elegant it seduced me...). Wound colors now only change on No wounds, Light Wounds, Moderate Wounds, Bloodied, Critical, Dying. Dying color doesn't change on dead but does give a notification to the chat window. I'm leaning towards to deciding dead doesn't really need a different color from dying like the other notifications. Anyone have any feedback on this?

Updated extension to .92 in anticipation of an update for FG 3. Changed Party Sheet to use wound category text and wound colors. Also changed surge tool tip to show banded percentage of surges and updated bar to use same set of colors as wound categories. Let me know if you find any errors.

How hard would it be to convert this to work with 3.5/PF also? It's been driving me nuts that the health status is more varied than the color coding. First world problems. ;)

Cheers!

Hmm I don't know, in theory, it should not be that difficult given this only effects three scripts and a window class. Usually most of the effort is finding the right scripts and files. I'll take a look at it.

It's been a while since I played 3.5 so let me make sure this is correct. Without any non lethal damage, if Wounds = HP then Staggered. If Wounds > HP then dying. If Non Lethal damage > 0 and Wounds + Non Lethal Damage >= HP then unconscious. However, regardless of non lethal damage, if wounds > hp then dying. Effectively, having any non lethal damage takes out the staggered condition. Is that right?

That is my understanding of the system, yes. Thanks for checking it out, Griogre!

Cheers!

I have updated this extension to work with FG3. It seems to work but I have not yet had a chance to use it in a game. Let me know if you find any problems. I wanted to get it up so it could be used this weekend. This extension should only be used with FG3. The old version should be deleted out of your extensions folder as it will not work with FG3.

Once I shake out any bugs, I plan to convert a version over to work with D&D 3.5/Pathfinder and FG3.

The first post link has been changed with a slight update to version 1.00.01 where I updated the root and root version. I zoned out yesterday and forgot to update it. :p

Updated to version 1.01.00 to fix dragging negative wound values onto a monster not working. Apparently I missed a diff Moon Wizard slipped in a while ago. Let me know if you have any problems with the extension.

The AltWoundColors extension has been updated to be compatible with FG v3.1.2. The extension now also uses similar colors with the gradient setting in addition to the tiered setting. Many of the things the first version of the forefather of this extension, Alt Wounds, did are now build in options in the ruleset. For those wondering, the option settings I use under "Combat (GM)" with this extension are: "View: Bar Colors [Tiered]", "View: Health - Ally [Status]", "View: Health - Non-ally [Status]", "View: Wound Categories [Detailed]".

Many of these settings have very little effect on the combat tracker of the DM but a major effect on the Player's trackers. If you are not sure what the settings mean and have a game in 5 minutes, the above are "safe" settings that don't show the players each others hps or the monster's hps, but do show how damaged they both are in 25% increments plus unhurt and dying/dead.

When you have time start a second instance so you can experiment with the "View" settings and see the results on the player trackers so you can customize them to your group. I have updated the first post to point to the latest 1.10.00 version. Let me know if you find any bugs in the extension.

This extension has been updated to version 1.11.00 to work with FG 3.3.7. Let me know if you find any bugs.

This extension has been updated to work with FG 3.3.9 changes to party sheet and link in the first post updated to point to release 02.00.00 version. Note this version works with *both* the 4E and 5E D&D rulesets. So the load text changed to note that and the name of the extension is now just AltWoundColors instead of 4E AltWoundColors.

Sorry had a problem with zipping the files, the link in the first post will be undated in a few minutes to point to the repackaged extension.

The first post has been updated with version 200001 to allow the extension to work with changes to manager_color.lua. You should delete the old extension and use this one instead.

Still ToDo: The extension's overwrite of the HP and HD bar colors on the party sheet is currently not working correctly. There seems to be a number of changes to the scripts there that I will have to research before I make a fix.

Updated to work with FGU release 4.4.0.

This extension has now been updated to work with the latest theme changes and is now available on the Forge, here. You should delete any non Forge version as explained in the post here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...890#post696890

Please report any problems from now on in the above thead.

I'd appreciate it if a mod could lock this thread.