Bug Thread - Pathfinder Playtest ruleset - Release 1 (August 8th)

[Trenloe]

Speaking of paladins.. one of my players created a paladin. He finished the process but when he went to drag and drop from the Spells tab both Lay On Hands and True Strike, he gets the following error message:

Unable to determine class or level for new spell, please drop within a class level.

However, as the DM, I can drag and drop both of those into his powers tab without issue.

EDIT: This error will occur if the spell/power is dragged to a blank area of the actions tab. The power needs to be dropped on the "Powers" header.

Note: if the power is dropped on the main power details section of the action tab, a LUA script error will result. Bug # 1.056. I'm working on fixing that.

Edit: Also...
With Paladin's Reaction as a class feature, he chose Retributive Strike. It would be nice to have these class feature actions/power included in the game. Having said that, it is those features that may very well be ticketed for inclusion within the Actions Tab.

Reactions are actions, not powers. So, as you guess, they will be handled when the design and implementation for handling actions is in progress.

[Trenloe]

Trenloe: This is still a problem I pointed out in the Effects thread you started.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...482#post413482

In essence, only the All Actions selection is working when it comes to adding effects on the powers/spells tabs when it comes to RESIST. I have pictures and more documentation above, but to summarize, when I put in the RESIST: 3 all for the Retributive Strike for Paladin, if I set it to 1 action, 1 roll, or apply once, it won't work (though it does disappear on the damage). If I set it to all rolls, the resist will kick in.

Thanks for the reminder. Tracked as Bug ID #1.057.

[ShadeRaven]

Off topic question: I haven't built a Reference Document since the Par5e days. Without that function, what's the process for making a reference manual in an exportable module?

[Trenloe]

Off topic question: I haven't built a Reference Document since the Par5e days. Without that function, what's the process for making a reference manual in an exportable module?

Manual XML creation and then manually merging the XML into the exported module.

Or, using one of the helper extensions. Such as https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...Project-Author

[ShadeRaven]

Trenloe: Thanks for the info.

On to a few things about the current ruleset. Some of these, if not all, you may be aware and it's on your future projects list, but adding it here just in case.

a) Is there supposed to currently be code for the diminishing effects or is that in the works? We ran into Frightened:3 last night and at the end of the turn it did not decrease (although the effects of 3, 2, 1 as I manually decreased it worked perfect).

b) Auto Stabilization (setting) rolls definitely not working.

c) Similarly, being knocked to Dying (0 HPs) doesn't apply any Effects to the Character. Obviously, it would also be nice if it would shift the dying target to the initiative slot before the current initiative on the tracker in response (per the new rules). Beyond that, it appears there is never any reason for wounds to take a target below 0 HPs which it currently does. If that's left there for visual or tracking reasons, then Heal Powers/Spells/etc. need to begin their Healing from 0 HPs and not the negative value (so a target with 10 max HPs and 13 wounds receiving a 5 HP heal would go to 5 wounds instead of 8 wounds as it does now).

d) I know this is a future project, so this may be as much about curiosity as input. I have been toying with the Actions Tab and it's looking GREAT so far! However, as it currently exists, it can't be dragged onto anything on the character sheet if it's a commonly used feature by players. IE: Attack of Opportunity or a character that often uses Grab. Are you planning to allow it to be added to the various actions tabs (such as Powers) or perhaps just adding a new Action Category to go along with Weapon, Power Class, and Spell Class called Actions (Class)? And in the display of the Actions, I know you are in the works of putting in the Action filter (listing all the relevant of that type) - looks good. However, some suggested it might be nice to see the little icon representation in the list its self and in the By Trait (etc) tabs because everyone is getting good at recognizing those symbols for how the actions are used.

e) So Afflictions are a hassle, and I am sure trying to program them in is going to be equally so. If nothing else, a Stage counter would be nice but even that is tough because it's probably hard to tie in where saving throws are attached to in cases where there are multiple saves for various reasons (IE: ongoing poison in Stage 2 while also being targeted by Daze and then Burning Hands). At this point, I am trying to figure out what can be done because I'd even try to pitch in with an extension, if that'd help, but a master such as yourself will undoubtedly have better ideas. Is there any real avenue to making afflictions easier to deal with? Can there be an Effects tag with something that let's the end-of-round saving throws happen if it's marked as an Affliction? How about the stage effects as part of that? Seems like a beast!

f) Some minor things, too, such as having the Shield Raised toggle duplicated on the Actions tab is still desired so players don't have to hop back and forth and a Hero Points tracker since we've played 5 times in the last week and probably 15 times overall and players have only remembered they even have Hero Points once (last night) -lol-.

g) A DM nitpick item that I hope doesn't come across wrong because I am in love with your work but some Spells in the NPC tabs don't come with all the very handy Spell Action Effects (example being Quasit Fear has the Saving Throw button but no easy way to follow that up by drag-n-drop Frightened:1, etc). Same with poisons, diseases and similar that come with effects.

As always, we are huge fans of your work here and every update comes with an eagerness to see what's changed. We'll keep testing and suggesting until seeing my name on a post forces you to block them :P and I am more than happy to pitch in (if just in this format) as needed.

[ShadeRaven]

Played again tonight. Couple more things:

1st) Massive Damage (damage that's 2x or more of maximum hit points) is not killing creatures outright. Still just puts them into a dying state.
2nd) Spell Saves do not indicate when there's a Critical Failure vs. the DC, which is important in many spells.

That's it for now We had a great time playing. The ruleset is working superbly already.

[ShadeRaven]

So it came to my attention that Skill Checks that have the Attack trait do not apply the Armor Skill Check Penalty score - such as an Athletics Shove or Grapple Action.

Granted, that may be all solved if you are doing some sort of Skills Action Class on the Action tab where you can designate things like that or which recognize traits like Attack.

For now, we are just adding an extra Skills on the Skills Tab for the Armor Penalty skills (which begs the question... how would one add a new skill that you wanted to have the Armor Penalty designation associated with it?).

[Trenloe]

a) Is there supposed to currently be code for the diminishing effects or is that in the works? We ran into Frightened:3 last night and at the end of the turn it did not decrease (although the effects of 3, 2, 1 as I manually decreased it worked perfect).

Yeah, that automation hasn't been coded yet. I'll get to that when I also do the persistent damage flat checks at the end of the round. I had thought I'd added "handle manually" to the effect wiki page, but I see I hadn't (it's there now). Sorry for that oversight.

b) Auto Stabilization (setting) rolls definitely not working.

I've done nothing, yet, to automate the whole dying/stabilization process.

c) Similarly, being knocked to Dying (0 HPs) doesn't apply any Effects to the Character. Obviously, it would also be nice if it would shift the dying target to the initiative slot before the current initiative on the tracker in response (per the new rules). Beyond that, it appears there is never any reason for wounds to take a target below 0 HPs which it currently does. If that's left there for visual or tracking reasons, then Heal Powers/Spells/etc. need to begin their Healing from 0 HPs and not the negative value (so a target with 10 max HPs and 13 wounds receiving a 5 HP heal would go to 5 wounds instead of 8 wounds as it does now).

See above.

d) I know this is a future project, so this may be as much about curiosity as input. I have been toying with the Actions Tab and it's looking GREAT so far! However, as it currently exists, it can't be dragged onto anything on the character sheet if it's a commonly used feature by players. IE: Attack of Opportunity or a character that often uses Grab. Are you planning to allow it to be added to the various actions tabs (such as Powers) or perhaps just adding a new Action Category to go along with Weapon, Power Class, and Spell Class called Actions (Class)? And in the display of the Actions, I know you are in the works of putting in the Action filter (listing all the relevant of that type) - looks good. However, some suggested it might be nice to see the little icon representation in the list its self and in the By Trait (etc) tabs because everyone is getting good at recognizing those symbols for how the actions are used.

I'm toying with the idea of adding an "Spells" tab and having spells and powers moved to that tat. Then the "Actions" tab would be for weapons and actions. With the actions format very similar to the spell format as it is now, but specific for actions.

Yep, the activity symbol will be shown in the campaign data list at some point.

e) So Afflictions are a hassle, and I am sure trying to program them in is going to be equally so. If nothing else, a Stage counter would be nice but even that is tough because it's probably hard to tie in where saving throws are attached to in cases where there are multiple saves for various reasons (IE: ongoing poison in Stage 2 while also being targeted by Daze and then Burning Hands). At this point, I am trying to figure out what can be done because I'd even try to pitch in with an extension, if that'd help, but a master such as yourself will undoubtedly have better ideas. Is there any real avenue to making afflictions easier to deal with? Can there be an Effects tag with something that let's the end-of-round saving throws happen if it's marked as an Affliction? How about the stage effects as part of that? Seems like a beast!

Yeah, I haven't really began to think of how I'm going to cleanly and reliably handle afflictions. I know that I will handle them - hence why I put the affliction data record into the ruleset pretty early. I just haven't don't anything else with them yet.

f) Some minor things, too, such as having the Shield Raised toggle duplicated on the Actions tab is still desired so players don't have to hop back and forth and a Hero Points tracker since we've played 5 times in the last week and probably 15 times overall and players have only remembered they even have Hero Points once (last night) -lol-.

That will come, assuming I re-jig the spells/actions tab as mentioned above.

g) A DM nitpick item that I hope doesn't come across wrong because I am in love with your work but some Spells in the NPC tabs don't come with all the very handy Spell Action Effects (example being Quasit Fear has the Saving Throw button but no easy way to follow that up by drag-n-drop Frightened:1, etc). Same with poisons, diseases and similar that come with effects.

I did the Quasit before I'd done the first implementation of conditions.

You can re-parse the spell action (with care - see "warning" below). With the NPC unlocked (so, if it comes from the Doomsday Dawn module this will probably be when the NPC has been added to the CT), right click on the spell and select "Reparse spell actions" (the South-East option).

Warning: Reparsing spell actions deletes all previously assigned actions to the spell and then attempts to re-build the spell actions based off the wording within the spell. So only use reparse spell actions with care - if the spell in a module NPC already has a bunch of stuff setup, then some of that might have been added manually and reparsing might leave you with less than you started with. Maybe make a copy of the spell entry in the actions tab first.

Reparsing can work pretty well (the Fear spell you mention works out the save and the three different Frightened conditions) but some don't. Paizo do not use a standard wording for their spells - for example I've come across at least 10 different ways of saying "make a XXX save". I've been working on improving the spell parsing with virtually each release, but this is based on only a small set of spells I look at in detail. The heal action doesn't work at all yet as I have to completely re-work the parse code for that.

As always, we are huge fans of your work here and every update comes with an eagerness to see what's changed. We'll keep testing and suggesting until seeing my name on a post forces you to block them :P and I am more than happy to pitch in (if just in this format) as needed.

Hahaha - no blocking (yet). I really appreciate the feedback.

[Trenloe]

1st) Massive Damage (damage that's 2x or more of maximum hit points) is not killing creatures outright. Still just puts them into a dying state.

Yep, no dying automation as yet.

2nd) Spell Saves do not indicate when there's a Critical Failure vs. the DC, which is important in many spells.

I haven't done anything with save critical success/fails yet. There is some automation in the base 3.5E ruleset to handle half damage on save success and I intend to leverage that for all 4 levels of possible save result (Success, Critical Success, Failure and Critical Failure). But I didn't want to indicate the result in the ruleset until I'd actually implemented something behind it. But you're right, until the background code is present, it will be good to indicate critical success and failure.

[Trenloe]

So it came to my attention that Skill Checks that have the Attack trait do not apply the Armor Skill Check Penalty score - such as an Athletics Shove or Grapple Action.

Yeah, that was mentioned by @dantedoom early on.

Granted, that may be all solved if you are doing some sort of Skills Action Class on the Action tab where you can designate things like that or which recognize traits like Attack.

Whatever I do with actions, I do plan to take it into account if the action has the "Attack" trait. Until now a possible work around is: offset the the skill penalty as a positive value in the modifier box before rolling or, as you've done, setup an additional skill which doesn't have the penalty applied.

For the modifier box, you could use the /mod chat command dragged to a hotkey. For example, if the skill check penalty for a PC was -3, you could type the following in chat (but don't press return): /mod 3 No ACP and drag that to a hotkey slot - then just click that before making a skill check and it would add that to the modifier box and would indicate the modifier in the roll result.

...which begs the question... how would one add a new skill that you wanted to have the Armor Penalty designation associated with it?

Yeah, that's not possible at the moment. I don't want to make it an easy click as that could be changed by an accidental click. Maybe via a right-click option...