Spell-Like Abilities

[Kendall-DM]

I've been putting all the monsters for my game in myself (since I have some house rules involving attack values, among other things). As a result, I've been looking around at what has been done before, and I see two ways this is done: 1) each spell-like ability (or spell) is put in individually, or 2) the spell-like abilities are put in as a single ability. I'm kind of torn on this, it's nice to have the charges, but it's also easier on my time to do the lump sum ability. I've seen Lawful_g mention that Pathfinder does it differently (I have not looked at any PF files, much less have a license access to it). How is it done there, just out of curiosity?

I've been coming up with some innovative ideas, that unfortunately I don't implement because of my lack of time or lack of memory to remember my initial brainstorm when I do get around to looking at HL coding. I have this strange idea (yet to attempt implementation) for spell-like abilities, but I'm not sure if I want to put in the effort if there is an easier way. Essentially, the idea involves using the spells editor for those abilities (since we copy all spells we need in other classes anyhow), bootstrapping them, and then adding charges for display in the charges tab, in combination with the lump sum ability for display in the specials tab.

On another note, is there a way to give an intelligent item its powers outside of the offered list. What I mean, is there a workaround that allows me to add custom powers until this gets fixed?

[Lawful_g]

I used to do the charges, but since I started chewing through all of the Monster manual I have decided to do the lump ability thing. Too much work when a solar has 25 different spell like abilities, and it would clutter up the In Play Tab

Pathfinder actually does it similar to the way you described, spell like abilities have their own section of the Spells tab, and the race/item/whatever just bootstrap the spell with tags specifying the frequency and whatnot, and a fieldvalue for the charges.

[Lawful_g]

I don't know how intelligent items handle anything really, I can't speak to that one, sorry.

[Kendall-DM]

Originally Posted by Lawful_g

I used to do the charges, but since I started chewing through all of the Monster manual I have decided to do the lump ability thing. Too much work when a solar has 25 different spell like abilities, and it would clutter up the In Play Tab

Pathfinder actually does it similar to the way you described, spell like abilities have their own section of the Spells tab, and the race/item/whatever just bootstrap the spell with tags specifying the frequency and whatnot, and a fieldvalue for the charges.

Yeah, I have just decided to try it out as a test. I can make the lump sum ability, and I can make a spell version of (in this case, command) for the race, then I can bootstrap that spell to the lump sum ability, but unfortunately, spells don't have a field for being able to add it to the creature (such as in the charge tab, or even the spell tab). They only show up if you give the creature a spell casting class, which is not an option. So I'm probably going to lump sum just like you did, sadly.

[Kendall-DM]

I can actually get this to work. I assigned the Hero.Caster tag to the race, and then I assigned sCastLeft= 1 on the appropriate spell (1/day or at will, just don't increment or set it to 99) that I bootstrapped to the spell-like ability. As a result, it gives the race a spell tab with only those spells. Still messing with it, but at least I got something to work that doesn't require alot of specials as charges for spell-like abilities. So when I make a spell for the spell-like ability, I don't type it to a class, I just tie it to spell-like, so it's reusable among other spell-like ability users that have the same spell, thus eliminating duplication. Cool huh?

[Kendall-DM]

So, I've got this working perfectly. It gives the spell-like ability in the spell tab, and indicates the number of times it can be used per day, including going red when all the daily allotment is exceeded. It's working great, and I can bang out the spell-like abilities in very little time, and a helluva lot easier than making a ton of specials for the spell-like abilities. There are a few artifacts with it, but that's because we, as users, have no control over those things. For example, my at-will abilities can't remove the incrementer (even though I can assign the Helper.NoIncr tag, it doesn't remove the incrementer in the spell tab).

[senjak]

could I please have a small example to look at? I'm not sure I'm following how you did that.

Thanks!