House Rules - Turning Off Causes Problems
 

I purchased Hero Lab last Wednesday, played aroung a bit, and the began looking to see if I could implement my house rules. One of them is that Light Shields & Quickdraw Light Shields give +2 AC, Heavy Shields give +4 and Tower Shields give +6.

After a little bit of frustration and lots of googling, I managed to get that implemented, saved into a custom user file with source so I can turn it on/off from the configure your hero menu.

However, when my houserules are not checked, the shields disappear entirely (although the quickdraw shields remain).

What, pray tell, am I missing?

Thanks for any help or insight you can provide.

If you replace something and add a source, you are not saying "use this version while this source is checked and the normal version if it's not". You are saying "This now works like so, and is now only available while this source is checked."

Replacements are checked before sources.

So the solution is, do the replacement, but don't give the replacement thing a source. Instead, make an eval script which looks for your house rule source to be turned on (there is a "source.WHATEVER" tag on the hero that indicates if a certain source is on), and then applies whatever changes are necessary under that rule.

Or I suppose you could make a mechanic which has your house rule source, which foreached through all the shields and bumped them up as desired.

I can't recall clearly but I think a shield is just marked as "buckler, light, heavy, Tower". Which means feats and abilities are looking at the Type of shield not at specific shields like would happen with a feat.

In that case just don't do the "Replace Thing ID" and instead have two versions one core and one house rule. Then on the "*Hidden" tab you can setup to hide the "CORE" shields when your house rules is turned on. When your house rules is turned off the CORE version shows and not your House Rule version.

Thanks for the help. I was hoping to avoid scripting, but will look at that.

ShadowChemosh:

Your idea mostly worked. I had to use the preclude tab.

On the downside - there are now ~30 items that are bootstrapped off various shields that don't see the base shield armor bonus.

Back to the drawing board. :_(

My bad I mentioned the wrong tab but you found the right one.

Why do you have 30 bootstraps? Nothing in my idea needed bootstraps actually.

Attached to this post is a .user file that shows a working proof of concept that I just did using the Light Steel Shield. If you have this source "Shield House Rules" turned off you get the CORE shield. If you have it turned on you get your new light shield that gives +2 bonus.

I tested with some Shield Feats and they all treat the shield just like the CORE version.

When working this kind of stuff its best to do Proof of Concepts. Do one shield and test it out in lots of different ways before spending time do all shields only to find it may not work the way you expect. In this case my PoC appears to be working...

So I am missing something about what your trying to accomplish?

I was unclear.

I have created (for example) a heavy wooden shield that is +4 instead of +2.

I have used the *preclude tab to hide it when my source is selected.

That works just fine.

An Absorbing Shield, however, doesn't. It is at +1 Heavy Steel Shield. When I select it with my house rule file unselected, it gives +3 AC. If my House Rule file is selected it gives +1.

If I do all six shields in my house rules, there are about 30 custom shields that I will need to redo. 17 are based upon heavy steel shields alone.

Just to make sure we are on the same page. You used the *Preclude tab to set your House Rules Source and the "CORE" ID of the Heavy Wooden Shield. The above makes it sound the opposite.

The *Preclude hides the Thing when the source is NOT checked. The opposite of how the sources normally work. So in this case you would have "4 Shield" IDs on the *Preclude Tab, more if you have UE, but its only the CORE shields that are listed on the *Preclude tab. When "House Rules" is marked the 4-6 shields you have on the *Preclude tab then get removed.

Your new shields, all 30 of them, are located on the "Armor" tab and are setup with your rules. Then these 30 are all source marked (ie the "Source" blue button) to your "House Rules" source so that only when marked do the 30 show up.

And boom your shields show up when the source is marked and the CORE shields are hidden. When House Rules source is turned off the CORE shields display and your custom shields do not. :D