Setting Skill Ranks Directly
 

I have a set of campaign traits for an upcoming game I'm running which I'm coding into Hero Lab for my players.

Each trait grants a class skill and a free point in that skill each level.

I'm happy with quick and dirty, so I can get around this by bootstrapping the Human Skilled Racial Trait and just saying "add the skill point yourself", but before I resort to that, I figured I'd at least have a stab at making it work properly.

hero.child[skSurvival].field[skRanks].value = #totallevelcount[]

Seems to work to cosmetically set the skill to the appropriate level, but it doesn't actually seem to do the appropriate maths etc.

It looks to me like I need to change skUser not skRanks (or possibly both), but I seem to not be allowed to mess with skUser.

Is there a way to do what I want?

Should I be doing it a totally different way?

Is this a Pathfinder question? The authoring kit is for creating new game systems from scratch. Individual games have their own editors, and do not use the authoring kit to add new content to that game.

Doh, my bad. It's a Pathfinder question.

Should I just repost in that forum, or should I contact a mod to move this post?

Assuming this is Pathfinder - look at some of the existing traits in the editor. There's already some that have that effect.

Are you able to name an example?

I know there are dozens and dozens of traits that give a small trait bonus, and make a skill a class skill, those aren’t a problem. I’ve got those bits working.

I’m trying to also grant them a rank in the skill each level. Thinking more on it, the only thing I can think of that does that in Pathfinder is the Heandband of Vast Intellect.

I’ve just had a quick look at how that works and it looks like there might be a special field for handling items that grant skill ranks?

I guess I could piggy back on that. Although it doesn’t seem ideal, it’s better than nothing...

There's three fields you might be adding to, but you don't provide enough description of exactly how the rules of your trait are phrased that I can tell which is the right one.

The skInnate field is for pre-assigned ranks, like the ranks assigned to an NPC, and the skExtRanks field is for ranks coming from external sources, like the effective ranks in skills granted by a bard's versatile performance abilities or the effective ranks a familiar gains in the skills their master is trained in. The skItem field is for ranks granted by a magic item, like a headband of versatile intelligence.

The question is - how do you want these free ranks to stack with ranks added by the user? So if a character has a few levels, and then uses the Additional Traits feat to buy this trait, what if they choose a skill that already has some ranks in it? Do you just want to grant enough free ranks to = their current level, or do you want the existing ranks to become an error, so that the user is prompted to retrain the existing ranks and spend them on other skills?

Also, your original post left out a very critical piece of information - the phase and priority you've assigned to your script. Without knowing that, I can't tell if you've made a mistake in timing, and that's what's causing the trouble.

Basically it's a "here is a bonus skill point each level that you must spend in this skill" type deal, so they shouldn't be able to spend additional points on the skill, it should just always be at the maximum possible number of ranks.

I'm not at my home PC at the moment, so I can't double check, but I believe the script is running Post-Levels with a Priority of 10000

Something like this:

Studious Squire
An armiger gains 2 additional skill ranks at each level. These ranks must be put into Intimidate and Knowledge (planes). In addition, the armiger treats Knowledge (local) and Knowledge (planes) as class skills.

This alters the fighter’s class skills and skill points per level, and replaces the fighter’s bonus feats gained at 1st and 10th levels.

Post Level 1000

Cool.

Thank you very much.

As additional information for anyone looking at this in future:

Post Levels 1000 works

Post Levels 10000 does not.

Also,

SkExtRanks allows them to add skill points on top, which I don't want them to be able to do, so I went with SkItem.