CnC Ruleset update v2.076

[dr_venture]

Another window that I didn't see much use for initially was the Effects window, and I consequently basically forgot that it existed. What a happy rediscovery when I stumbled back upon it!

Again I have included a picture of my Effect window. Again, the little radio button to the far right allows me to share appropriate effects with the players. Remember: players can drag effects onto targets just like attacks and damage (depending on how you have the option set in the Options window). This is useful and helps involved players in game play for things like casting a bless spell or turning undead. In the case of turning undead, it's also very useful in that undead are turned for 10 rounds, so dropping the saved Effect onto the affected targets immediately marks them as being Turned *and* automatically keeps track of when the effect expires. Slick!

To use them, you just drag them onto a combatant's token on the battlemat, or onto their entry in the Combat Tracker - easy as that. Then you'll usually want to edit the timer info or bonus/penalty, etc.

It's a great place to organize all of your effects, including any oddball ones you come up with. For instance, my list contains the effect "Death Threshold", with a timer that doesn't change. I use an optional rule that when a character goes into the negatives hit points, they can go negative as far as their Constitution stat or 10, whichever is higher (a little nod to my old AD&D days). When a character goes into the negatives, I drop that effect onto them in the CT, then set the value in the darker box to 10 or their CON. Then as the battle progresses, I have a very quick way of eyeballing how close the character is to really dying... and maybe hinting to my son that he might want to pay attention

A similar Effect is "DEAD" - this is just a quick flag to remind me that the guy I'm looking at has shuffled of his mortal coil. It *is* set up as a timer that counts up, because, well, why not? It might be useful to know how long he's been dead.

I use "WAITING" as a flag to let me know that a combatant is waiting to use an opportunity action.

Many of the other odd effects are due to my using the RoleMaster critical & fumble tables (which work well, actually, as long as you just modify some of the base 100 stuff to base 20). There are a lot of effects added by those tables (like bleeding, stunned, confused, etc.) that are kind-of a pain to track in a P&P game, but a breeze in FG.

[dr_venture]

So Danged - to answer your question regarding marking the goblins unconscious/dead: there are many ways you can do it, depending on what you like the best.

First off, I normally don't bother with tracking unconscious vs. dead with monsters, as they usually don't have any hope of being bandaged... so when they get to zero hits or less, I usually delete their token from the battlefield.

I don't know if you're aware or read a previous thread that talked about this, but effects are updated on the round of the person who caused them. So if Goblin 1 stuns the wizard, the stun effect on the wizard updates on the turn of Goblin 1. This is very important, because if you delete Goblin 1 from the combat tracker, the effect on the wizard will never automatically update/expire, and he'll be stunned forever, or until somebody notices that he never became 'unstunned'. Basically by deleting Goblin 1 you 'orphan' the effect on the wizard... sucks to be him.

For this reason, I *don't* delete dead combatants from the CT unless I'm sure that they have not caused any effects to be applied to other combatants - I just drag the "DEAD" effect onto them, and usually preface their name with "DEAD" also, just to make it easy to identify the dead guys.

Then after Initiative have been rolled each round, I just scan down the list of combatants to find the ones that I put "DEAD" at the beginning of their names and set their INITs to 0, so they're all piled at the bottom of the CT. Then I just go through combat as usual until I get to the dead guys at the bottom. You still have to use the "Next Actor" button to go through each of their turns to make sure any effects based on those combatants are updated correctly.

Combatants are kinda identified as being dead by their token's battlemat square turning gray, but it's pretty unsatisfying to see the gray color with a very alive-looking guy standing there on top of it... so I just delete their tokens, or alternatively, set them to invisible in teh CT and drag their ghostly token out of the way somewhere. You can leave a dead body token there if you want, but FG isn't very good at dealing with overlapping tokens. I really wish they'd include a 'background' layer in the battlemats so that you could use tokens on that layer for dead bodies, furniture, rugs, and other dressin's without making it virtually impossible to make a combatant's token walks across the top of them.

Does that answer your question?

[damned]

Both players and CK should be able to drop attacks, damage, and Effects (and probably more) onto either the CT or a token on the battlemat. Depending on how far the map is zoomed in, it might be easier to use one or the other, but they both work. When dragging onto the token on the battlemat, you should wait until you see the name of the target pop up so that you know that you're actually over the target.

when setting up battlemat/tracker what is the right way to add monsters? open monster and drag name to where?

combat worked fine but effects? how do you cast a spell for example?

[damned]

I knew there was going to be an ambush, I knew it!

you actually just ran into a random encounter - i just chose to make it an ambush because roark was a little carried away and not so cautious... we havent actually hit any of the planned stuff

[damned]

Personally, I leave attacks set to "On" because who cares if an accidental attack gets made - it doesn't really affect anything other than put a pointless entry into the chat log. Damage is another thing, cause that can accidentally affect somebody's hit points & has to be cleaned up... so I set Damage to "Report". That way when a player rolls damage, as CK I can just drag it onto the target's hit points - easy-peasy.

interesting - will try that next time - thanks.

[damned]

I went through the rules and found all of the common combat mods & put them in the window... and then it became obvious: it's not only a great way to organize the mods, but it also teaches all the players what the common mods are, gets them involved with applying their own mods, *and* it makes them easy to see in the chat window when they use them

yeah - the more number work the players do the more yime you can spend on setting up scene and playing other entities

[damned]

Again, the little radio button to the far right allows me to share appropriate effects with the players. Remember: players can drag effects onto targets just like attacks and damage (depending on how you have the option set in the Options window). This is useful and helps involved players in game play for things like casting a bless spell or turning undead. In the case of turning undead, it's also very useful in that undead are turned for 10 rounds, so dropping the saved Effect onto the affected targets immediately marks them as being Turned *and* automatically keeps track of when the effect expires. Slick!

When a character goes into the negatives, I drop that effect onto them in the CT, then set the value in the darker box to 10 or their CON. Then as the battle progresses, I have a very quick way of eyeballing how close the character is to really dying... and maybe hinting to my son that he might want to pay attention

so the effects captures your duration but not your actual spell? so my lvl 2 wizard wants to sleep a few goblins. between player and i we manually do the spell centre, roll some hit dice, roll some monster saves and then turn on effect tracker for 2 rounds?

[dr_venture]

when setting up battlemat/tracker what is the right way to add monsters? open monster and drag name to where?

Sorcerer is a better guy to answer this one. I would assume that if the ruleset allows you to do something, then it ought to work... and if that's the case (and I think it is) then whether you drag monsters from the Monster Manual into the CT, or if you make an encounter out of them then click the "add to tracker" button... or if you have your monsters in your "Personalities" window & drag them from there, I would think think it would all work ok and just be a matter of your preference and circumstance.

combat worked fine but effects? how do you cast a spell for example?

Effects are just basically an arbitrary text label that gets applied to a combatant. The label is just a way of tracking something that's going on with a combatant. The label is arbitrary and is not viewable in the CT by players. The players *do* see the combatant's label in the chat window when that combatant's name shows up for their turn.

Labels can either be applied by creating them on the fly in the CT, or you can pre-create them in the Effects window, then drag them onto combatants the same as you would an attack roll.

A great example of a useful label is "Turned," for use on undead. Go into your Effect window and right-click to bring up the radial menu. Then do the following:
1) Type "Turned" into the main text field of the effect you just created.
2) You want the effect to last for 10 rounds, so set the first number box to "10"
3) You want the first number (10) to count down by one each round, so set the 2nd number box to "-1".
4) You want your players to be able to choose which undead are turned when their cleric is successful, so click the little radio button to the far right.

Now when an undead creature is turned in the game, the cleric can drag the Turned effect onto each undead that was turned. When they do, you'll see:

"Effect 'Turned' applied [to Zombie] [by Clericdude]"

...in the chat window each time an effect is applied (so you can make sure that the players are doing what they're supposed to).

Any time that undead gets a turn, the chat window will show:

[TURN] Zombie - Effects: Turned

...so you know how to treat them. That label will stay on the undead creature for 10 rounds, during which time you can just look in the CT to see which effects are on which combatants, and how long they'll be there for.

After 10 rounds, it will automatically, and you'll see in the chat window:

Effect "Turned" expired [on Zombie]

So as you can see, Effects don't actually *do* anything, but they let you easily track things that are affecting combatants. So I have an effect for "Turned" and "Silenced" and "Blessed", etc. Make sense?

[dr_venture]

so the effects captures your duration but not your actual spell? so my lvl 2 wizard wants to sleep a few goblins. between player and i we manually do the spell centre, roll some hit dice, roll some monster saves and then turn on effect tracker for 2 rounds?

Yeah, the effect is just used to label the Goblin as "Sleeping" - set the first number box for the number of rounds that they will be asleep, then set the second number box to "-1" so that 1 is subtracted from the first box every round. When the first box gets to 0, the effect will automatically expire.

So spells are basically figured out manually, but Effects can label combatants as being 'affected' by something, which you as the CK then arbitrate.

[Sorcerer]

Sorcerer is a better guy to answer this one. I would assume that if the ruleset allows you to do something, then it ought to work... and if that's the case (and I think it is) then whether you drag monsters from the Monster Manual into the CT, or if you make an encounter out of them then click the "add to tracker" button... or if you have your monsters in your "Personalities" window & drag them from there, I would think think it would all work ok and just be a matter of your preference and circumstance.

In essence Dr_V is correct, if the ruleset allows you to do it, then it should be OK - but that is not always the case. Dr_V should remember a bug related to this very situation where dragging monsters from the manual worked, but clicking on the link in the CT related to that monster would crash the program, also just recently it was discovered that monsters dragged directly from the manual were not included in NPC dice rolls - both of these issues have been fixed in resent patches, but it just highlights that sometimes things get missed out in the code, so you need to be vigilant.

One thing to specifically note is that, you can drop any token onto the map and it will show up at the players side, but if you want them to be linked to NPC's/monsters you need to drop the token onto the NPC in the combat tracker first and then drag them from there onto the map.
NPC's which already have tokens allocated to them still need to be added to the CT first before putting their token is on the map.

Not sure if you have bought Monsters and Treasure of Aihrde, but that module already has the tokens associated with the monsters in the manual so you can just drag monster and token directly to the
h CT, whilst the standard monsters and treasure manual that comes with the ruleset has no tokens in it (they should be in separate in the token box).

Personally I only drag directly from a manual if I am in an unplanned for situation, which is not often, as I usually have 'planned random encounters - ie. I have all the random tables set up and populated already -with links to encounters in the encounters box.

Normally I drag from the manual to the Personally window so I can edit them. This can be important since some monsters have hit dice values of 2 -10, so you need to set that up, or attacks only listed as 'special'.

A couple of things currently missing on the NPCs window (should be added at next patch) are:

1. No XP field for NPC's, it only appears for monsters. Human Bandits would not be monsters, so you might want an XP value for defeating them. I will add that [I was hoping to do some auto XP totaling when creatures are added to the encounter box - but we shall see about that in the future as it is not high priority]
2.you might not have missed this one, but some rulesets allow NPC entries to be picked up and dropped back into the NPC window, creating a duplicate copy of the NPC. I find this very useful when creating adventure modules. You have dragged an orc from the manual, cleaned up the entries and now you want to create a special elite orc guard - currently you need to again drag a standard orc from the manual and set him up again , when all you really want to do is increase the AC and HP. The duplication feature is a real time saver (Check out the Crater of Umeshti module where there are about 20 different types of Kobold!)

with regard to spells, everything Dr_V has mentioned it true. I have it on my list to try and revamp the spell system, but its another big job (just rewriting all the spells in the manual would be a big job - although that would be fairly easy (just time consuming and boring) if the casting mechanisms were in place in ruleset code. The problem is the huge variety of spells and effects, its almost impossible to cover everything.

what I would like (and have absolutely not started), is to cover two things as a starting point.

1. have the damage dice of combat spells double click rollable from spell, Character and NPC/Monstersheets. This obviously has to reflect the level of the caster.
2. spells with a duration, to automatically create an effect in the CT when cast.

Your questions on spells (I think) were solely related to the CT and the casting of them.

However, a couple of other points, spells are dragged from the manual to the character spell list when they learn them.
but when they memorize them the player can click on the spells mini button, which opens a separate window listing only the spells they have currently memorized.
there is a button on the left hand side fore each spell. Clicking on this button reports to the chat window that the player has cast that spell, and it checks off that one of the memorized spells has been cast.
(actually it might be possible at this point to code in an effect drop when this button is pressed, but I would have to write something to parse the duration field as it has a whole lot of text in there (Like 'turn' round' 'instantaneous') and is not always consistent.



anyway apart from the steep learning curve, it sounds like you guys enjoyed yourselves,
which is, as far as I'm concerned, all that matters.

if, along the way, as well as questions you come up with any ideas , please post them.

I'm not saying that they will be incorporated into the ruleset, but there's a chance, at least the
ensuing debate can be entertaining, with possibly something useful popping out at the end

with that in mind, i will (hopefully) be posting update v2.08 later today [I guess that might be tomorrow for you dammed]. Which (amongst other things) addresses some of the points that came up in the "combat tracker - combatants with the same initiative debate".

hope you all find it useful.
Sorcerer