Modifying/Customizing Natural Weapon Attacks
 

I asked before about adding Blink Dog as an Animal Companion for Beast Conclave Ranger and now I'm trying to modify the Bite attack so it either counts as a Finesse weapon or uses DEX instead of STR (since apparently it's a DEX attack for Wolf but not Blink Dog for some reason). However since it's for my Animal Companion who is subject to ASIs alongside my character, I don't want to fix this just by adding a flat modifier as is done for the Wolf (I compared the data files). Any suggestions?

If you're interested in scripting it out the script would look something like this:

Pre-Levels/10000 timing should do it but I would test it at different levels to make sure it behaves properly.

This assigns the finesse tag to any of the natural attacks using the pre-made bite.

This is probably a good item to add to the community adjustments if it's not already there, just need a bit more work to make it into a selectable dropdown.

An alternate way to do it is to try and use the PF tags that 5e inherited: instead of assigning wProperty.Finesse you could work with the damage and attack option tags for various other stats. The code is basically the same, just swap one of the examples below in for wProperty.Finesse

Some example tags, the attribute modifiers are aSTR, aDEX, aCON, aWIS, aINT and aCHA

DamageOpt.aDEX <- tells damage calculators to evaluate dex mod
DamageOver.aWIS <- this tag forces wisdom to be the damage attribute.
MelAttOver.aWIS <- this tag forces Wisdom to be the melee hit modifier
RanAttOver.aWIS <- this tag forces Wisdom as the ranged hit modifier.
MelAttOpt.aCHA <- this tag says to check to see if CHA is the better melee hit option
RanAttOpt.aINT <- tell the attack calculations to check to see if INT is better

I figured scripting might be the way you would need to do it, but I just started using the editor and haven't done any scripts yet. So I honestly don't know what the different levels do, or how they should behave, at all.

What thing would I add this script to? Companion Type? Or would it make more sense to put it somewhere on like... the Racial Special? Right now I've got a custom Companion Type that I modified the script for that is bootstrapped by a custom Class Special which is bootstrapped by a custom Class Ability.

I know that the Companion Type bootstraps the Companion Bond Racial Special (as opposed to the Class Special), so I could imagine it theoretically working like "since this animal has this ability, it can use Bite as Finesse" but I don't know if that works in practicality.

Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Also, while I'm at it... I'm not a fan of how the Minion tab and base hit points are done... Is there a way to make it more like the main character with a Race and Class tab where class tab just has the additional hit die added per character level?

Update: I did add it as a script on the Racial Special and changed the bootstrap on my Companion Type, and that seems to have worked!

I still want to play around with the Hit Dice and ASIs so progression flows more naturally.

EDIT: Best case scenario this would play out like it does on the main character and even throw validation errors for not adding a Hit Die when leveling up as well as not picking Feats/ASIs when applicable.

Welcome to poking around in customizing your 5e stuff with scripting. :)

I'm not too familiar with all the minion calls, it sounds to me like you want to force the minion to have "levels" and level-up with a character. This would lean me personally toward creating a full "minion" class with the right hit die and then manually adding it to the minion and forcing the player to keep up with the minion's level manually. At least until you can figure out a clean way to do it or someone else does it and adds it to the community repository.

BTW, a good post explaining a lot of the editor terms you're probably not understanding can be found here.

edit: whoops. You were looking at the stuff I told you to look at. I'm dumb.

Thanks for the help (again)!