Custom PC Abilities
 

I've searched and googled for answers to what I'm pretty sure is a trivial question... especially since I've found forum posts that suggest other people resolved the question - but even after trying sporadically over days, I haven't had any luck.

I'm creating a PC for Edgewatch, using one of the campaign-specific backgrounds. I found where to add the feats and skills, but now I simply want to add a custom Character Ability (+1 Circumstance bonus to Deception, Diplomacy, ...etc).

I feel like I stumbled across something like this when creating a custom monster, but I am simply not finding it for my PC. I tried searching the "Permanent Added Abilities" table, since that seemed like the natural place for adding a Custom Ability, but obviously I have had no luck. And scanning 5500+ existing abilities hoping for a lucky hit has proved unsuccessful.

So - I want to add a free-form text field to the Character -> Special Abilities tab. How do I accomplish this?

Thanks!

Hmm, that's probably just a case of the Generic Ability not showing up in the Added Abilities tables. I'll note it to investigate, should be pretty straightforward and should be there for cases like yours.

There should also be an adjustment available for a situational modifier to a skill.

I just tried looking again for anything matching "Generic" in the search box, but I'm at the very least not getting hits in the places I'm thinking I should be searching...

The situational modifier for a skill was an approach I hadn't thought of - thanks for that! This at least gets me the note on my character sheet that I wanted, although it would be nice to figure out how to put something into the Special Abilities section as well.

Look under Modifiers tab->Adjustments->Temporary Adjustments. In the list of adjustments search for "Circumstance Bonus". After adding it and closing the menu, click the newly-added adjustment (in red text) to open it and select what it applies to (Diplomacy, Will Save, Strength, whatever) from the dropdown menu, and set the size of the bonus in the box above.

And voila! Now the circumstance bonus will appear on the Play tab, in the Modifiers pane under "Temporary Adjustments". It even includes a checkbox to turn the bonus on or off whenever you need to, right from the Play tab.

Thanks! That does indeed take care of the current issue, where I'm looking for a way to add the circumstance bonus.

But, it does still leave open the other part of the question, where I want to be able to add something to the Special Abilities section of the character sheet. Which, I've found I can do when creating NPCs... so it seems weird that I can't add it to a PC. Although, I could dump extra text into the Circumstance bonus blob to be "This takes 1 action, but can only be done once per turn..." Or, again, it could be that I'm overlooking a menu option somewhere - but I've tried searching enough times that I'm clearly not going to find it on my own :).

It would be really awesome if we had access to the same ability to define arbitrary powers for custom feats or items that we have for creating NPCs.

I tracked down the issue with Generic Ability not appearing on the Added Abilities tables and got a start on it, but haven't gotten it finalized yet (there was a bit of a catch in the fix so needs a bit more time and we've been slammed with wrapping up LOAG). Going to try and see if I can get a bit of time to wrap it up though before next week.

Awesome; thanks! :D

Didn't quite make it in last week, any this week is looking a bit grim (got a lot of stat QA for NPC ancestries I'm trying to get out), but wanted to let you guys know it's still on my radar