Working on a Hackmaster 4e ruleset

[Sterno]

If anyone is interested in helping, let me know. I started with the 2E ruleset by Celestian and have been modifying it to work with Hackmaster 4th Edition. Here's what I've done so far in the last two weeks:

- Damage rolls roll penetrating dice automatically.
- All monsters have a 20 hit point kicker when rolling for hit points. (PCs need to add this manually during character creation atm, though that should be easy to fix)
- Manual commands to roll penetrating dice
- Fumble tables (but not crit tables yet). Need to be rolled manually atm, though it would be pretty easy to tie it into a roll of 1 on attack.
- Uses Attack Matrices for monsters (but not players yet... they still use Thac0)
- Added Comeliness stat
- Modified stats bonuses (to-hit for strength, reaction adjustment, etc) to match what HM4 does, and uses percentiles.
- Added honor and display of honor dice and whether or not you're in great honor/dishonor
- Added in save vs apology (not added into class progression yet... needs to be set manually)
- Added Fatigue Factor, save vs Fatigue, and a way to increment/decrement fatigue which can trigger fatigue penalties to stats. Currently a manual process of clicking to increment/decrement the fatigue counter.
- Tracking armor/shield damage and modifying the AC of your armor based on its damage is working and mostly automated. It's fully automated for armor. For shields hits, you have to hold "alt" while rolling damage for it to apply to the target's shield (following through to the target appropriate if the shield breaks)
- Detecting when a threshold of pain check needs to be made
- Detection of when a miss hit a shield (only works for PCs right now, as monsters would need some special coding to account for shield AC vs normal AC)
- +1 or -1 added to each die for damage and attack rolls when in great honor or dishonor.
- Changed how initiative works. No modifiers for monster size like in 2e. Reaction adjustment affects initiative.
- Missile weapons now use a fixed initiative like in Hackmaster (though it doesn't automatically handle ROF > 1 yet)
- Spells now use a fixed initiative (+1d4 if they have material components)
- Added spell mishap tables
- Added rolling for quirks and flaws (mainly because it was needed for the spell mishap tables)
- Initiative rollover when initiative is past 10. In Hackmaster, going after 10 means you go on the next round at init - 10. So init 12 means you actually don't go until 2 on the next round.
- Critical hit tables
- Detection of shield hits for monsters

There's also a lot of work I've done that probably isn't shareable, as a lot of it involved loading up the AD&D Player's Handbook module and then copying and modifying items, races, and classes to reflect their Hackmaster counterparts, plus inputting skills and talents.

Things I still want to add, ruleset-wise:

- Fully automate damage being applied to shields when appropriate. Just need to figure out how to pass the "You hit a shield" info on the attack roll to the damage handling.
- Attack matrices for PCs
- Auto-add the 20 point kicker for PCs
- Allow for special damage penetration rules in certain cases, like with crossbows (which penetrate on die max and die max -1)
- Automatically adding +1 to each die for great honor or -1 to each die for dishonor for appropriate roll types other than attack/damage (which are implemented).
- Automatically dealing with the xp bonus/penalty based on your honor. The 2E ruleset currently doesn't really support bonuses that change over time.
- Add apology save progression to classes.
- Something to help with awarding honor mid-game
- Refactor this whole thing into one or more extensions
- Automatically add a point of fatigue (max once per round) to a character when they attack.

https://github.com/drplote/FantasyGroundsHackmaster

[damned]

That will make a lot of people happy Sterno

[celestian]

Is there a reason you didnt try to make it an extension? That way you'd not (generally) have to keep up with the new features added to the 2E ruleset (assuming you'd want to). I get wanting your own space but wasn't sure you were aware of the difference.

[Sterno]

The reason it's not an extension (yet) is lack of experience, really. I just got introduced to Fantasy Grounds about 2 weeks ago and had absolutely no experience with it, even as a player. I had no Lua experience prior to this and was struggling to make even a basic extension at first just to add the Comeliness stat at first. I needed to get enough in place for character creation session with my players by last Sunday and hope to get most of the combat systems and data import I need in place by this Sunday, so just jamming hard by doing direct modifications on the 2E ruleset directly made the learning process easier and let me get changes in quicker. Also, when I started, I wasn't even sure what the difference between extensions and data modules was, so I wasn't sure it would be something I could legally let anyone else use anyway.

Having learned a lot in the last two weeks, I definitely hope to change it to an extension once I've got most of the features I need in, though! Somewhere around day 4 I realized I wanted to make the change, but in an attempt to get what I need in place by Sunday, I don't want to take time out to go back and refactor it all right now. I do have it all in source control along with a base commit before I changed anything, though, so worst-case scenario I should still be able to do some painful code merges when the 2E ruleset changes until then.

[osarusan]

Just curious - how compatible is HM4e with HM5e? I adore HackMaster 5th edition and am dying for the ability to play it on Fantasy Grounds.

[Sterno]

Not very, unfortunately. It's got some similar concepts but HM5 feels like a totally different ruleset, whereas HM4 feels like a mod for AD&D.

[Sterno]

I just wanted to update this in case anyone comes across this in the future.

I abandoned the full on Hackmaster 4E ruleset (though I did get it to the point where it has all the features I consider essential.. almost everything in my wishlist up in the OP was completed) and changed over to an Extension instead, so that I would be able to leverage the continued improvements Celestian makes to the 2E ruleset. The extension also convers some toggleable non-Hackmaster additions (such as AD&D 2E Player's Option rules). I have no plans to make any changes to the Hackmaster 4E ruleset or support/update it, but it is still publicly available on Github. I recommend anyone planning on a Hackmaster 4E game use the extension instead, though. The only real downside to the extension is that if I stop using Fantasy Grounds and updating the extension, at some point it might become incompatible with the 2E ruleset as it continues to receive updates, whereas the full-on ruleset won't break with updates, but also simply won't get updates. And there have been some nice 2E ruleset updates.

Anyway, the extension can be found here on Github (https://github.com/drplote/FG-2e-PlayersOption) or here on the forums (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...le-house-rules)