Lone Wolf Development Forums  

Go Back   Lone Wolf Development Forums > Hero Lab Forums > HL - Pathfinder Roleplaying Game

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
JimGroves
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 106

Old November 13th, 2009, 02:25 PM
Hi there,

First of all, this is not a complaint. I'm actually looking for a good place to begin creating a Stone Giant Race template.

The Rise of the Runelords AP has a couple of named Stone Giant NPCs with wizard levels (one is 7th level and another is 14th level), moderately high level stone giant fighters, and even a stone giant ranger.

All excellent uses for HeroLab, except there is no default Stone Giant Race template. I understand why Mathias created templates for the races he did, so I'm not complaining, but sometimes the APs will add levels to the most surprising races. *Despite* what the Bestiary identifies as a race with Templates. Runelords is one such example with multiple Stone Giants having PC levels.

(And as a side note.. later on in Chapter Five we've got Lamia's with Cleric levels, but I'm focused on Stone Giants for the moment. One problem at a time.)

A few weeks ago I tried to create one following the tutorials, but it was a mess. When I logged into Hero Lab my Stone Giant efforts kicked back multiple errors, and so I deleted all the files that I created (and Hero Labs runs fine now).

Now I'm going to start fresh.

MY QUESTIONS:

Creating the basics of the race was pretty easy. Taking Mathias' advice I just looked at Orcs and Lizardmen, and duplicated the process. The bulk of it was pretty straightforward.

Where I ran into trouble is the special monster feats and abilities. Like Rock Throwing, Rock Catching, Blending into Rocky Terrain with a bonus to Stealth. And actually creating rocks to be thrown as ranged weapons.

The Rocky Terrain Stealth Bonus was somewhat easy to copy from an existing ability.

I searched all over for Rock Catching and Rock Throwing, as I assumed those would be in the Monster Feats.. as they're in the Universal Monster Rules, but I could not find them. I guess I have to create them and then add them to my Stone Giant Template?

I also created seperate files every time I created a Feat or Ability, as well as my Stone Giant template.. but then I got all kinds of duplication errors.

Any advice or pointers on doing this?

I have reviewed the tutorial, with the storm elves, but unfortunately that example just doesn't seem as ambitious or complicated as this situation.
JimGroves is offline   #1 Reply With Quote
Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,207

Old November 13th, 2009, 03:17 PM
Wait until next week - My current project is making sure that all the specials from the Bestiary's appendix are entered and available to use.
Mathias is offline   #2 Reply With Quote
Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,207

Old November 13th, 2009, 03:18 PM
Also, once they're in, they'll most likely be a Racial Ability, not a feat.
Mathias is offline   #3 Reply With Quote
Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,207

Old November 13th, 2009, 03:32 PM
Oh, and another thought - you should understand the difference between the various things in Hero Lab, since you're switching back and forth between calling the stone giant a race and a template.

A Race is selected from the background tab, and defines the basic characteristics of a race. A Template is something that modifies a hero, and is separate from the race. Every character has a race, but templates are only used in specific circumstances.

Feats are selected from the Feats tab - barring a few cases where the race or class gives one to you for free, or for the minion races like familiars and horses, where the default feats are entered as part of the race definition to speed up character generation, feats are something the user chooses while making their character.

Racial Specials have to be bootstrapped by a race or template. A list of them shows up on the Background tab, in addition to showing up on the special tab.

Abilities are more generic - they're things that are added by anything else, like DR's, SR, Darkvision. The real difference between Racial Specials and Abilities is that Abilities can be made unique. Racial specials shouldn't be made unique. So, if you have an ability like cold resistance, let's say on an Aasimar Abjurer 11. The Aasimar has Cold Resistance 5, and an 11th level abjurer can select cold resistance 10 (and change the resistance type for a day). So, both the Aasimar race and the Abjurer class bootstrap the same unique Cold Resistance special. Each one sets its value, but because Cold resistance is unique, they're both applying values to the same thing. The Cold resistance special then processes both additions and finds that the maximum value is 10, so the character has Cold Resistance 10.

If you're adding an ability to a race/template, a Racial Special should be your first choice, rather than an ability, because a racial special includes the code for calculating standard DCs based on HD and includes the code that appends the name of the parent thing.
Mathias is offline   #4 Reply With Quote
JimGroves
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 106

Old November 13th, 2009, 03:58 PM
Thanks for the explanations! Some of it was my sloppy choice of words, but a lot of it I didn't understand as clearly as you described it.

Yeah.. I can't wait till next week. Once those abilities from the Bestiary appendix are added it should be a lot easier.
JimGroves is offline   #5 Reply With Quote
Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,207

Old November 16th, 2009, 02:19 PM
Rather than creating new specials for each situational stealth bonus, I decided to make a single special that's designed to show those bonuses. So, add the racial ability raStealth to your race, and then in the bootstraps menu, go to the fields button for that, and add a new field entry. Put "livename" into the Field Id and "+8 Stealth in rocky terrain" in the Value. "Assign" is the correct selection in the other menu.

(I'll eventually get all those old situational bonuses converted over so they don't clutter up the list of specials).

For rock catching (raRockCat), just select it as a racial special. You may also want to modify the name like you did on the stealth bonus, giving it a livename like "Improved Rock Catching (+4)".

Start by adding Rock throwing (raRockThro) as before, and this time, edit its tags, and add a new tag. Enter "Value" as the Group Id and "180" in the Tag Id. That sets the range of the rock throwing ability to 180'.
Mathias is offline   #6 Reply With Quote
JimGroves
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 106

Old November 20th, 2009, 05:03 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathias View Post
Rather than creating new specials for each situational stealth bonus, I decided to make a single special that's designed to show those bonuses. So, add the racial ability raStealth to your race, and then in the bootstraps menu, go to the fields button for that, and add a new field entry. Put "livename" into the Field Id and "+8 Stealth in rocky terrain" in the Value. "Assign" is the correct selection in the other menu.

(I'll eventually get all those old situational bonuses converted over so they don't clutter up the list of specials).
I'm almost done with a new and much better version. (I went through the tutorials all over, since it had been a while)

I can't quite seem to locate this new raStealth ability. Not under the racial special abilities list anyway. The only one I find is raStealthy, which seems specific to the Tengu's.

Is this for the next update, or am I just missing something?
JimGroves is offline   #7 Reply With Quote
JimGroves
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 106

Old November 21st, 2009, 07:27 AM
I just went ahead and modified one of the existing bonuses to Stealth (I tweaked the raCrocHide ability, and it works fine). I reckoned the raStealth you mentioned would be put in next update.

I think the only thing I have left are the Slam attacks, and possibly creating an actual 'rock' weapon to replicate a rock being thrown.

I have added the slam attacks to the Bootstraps. They show up, but without the damage.. Which I assume has to be added to either the tags or the fields?

Lastly, I get a minor error. The program gives me a validation error message that I have more feats to add while at the same time the Feats Tab indicates that I have 0 feats left to take. Which is off because I gave the race no bonus feats. I did however, add the 6 feats listed in the Bestiary, but I did so through the Bootstrap menu. So without a PC level, there should be no feats to take. So I'm not sure why I get the validation error. It also expects me to add a favored class.. which would be okay, except there are instances where you'd just want to use the baseline creature (with no PC levels) in the TacCon.

I was going to e-mail you the file, but opted to wait until you invited me to do so.

Last edited by JimGroves; November 21st, 2009 at 08:38 AM.
JimGroves is offline   #8 Reply With Quote
Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,207

Old November 21st, 2009, 12:14 PM
The reStealth ability is in the list of racial specials I see: "Situational Stealth Bonus".

You can also add specials directly from the bootstraps menu. Just fill in "raStealth", and if it's a real thing, the name will be displayed once you're done typing.

In the editor manual (select the help menu from within the editor), look at the "Reference Information" page, then scroll down to the very bottom. That's where natural weapons are discussed.

Until I get touch attacks working, along with adding a natural weapons tab to the editor, go ahead and hold off on the rocks as weapons. In the meantime, the special lists the damage and the range, right? And the (ranged) listing in the attack information on the summary panels is your ranged touch attack.

Take a look at some of the familiar and improved familiar races, and compare them to the bestiary entries. Also take a look at regular races with hit dice (morlock, dark creeper, etc.).

How I've handled it is that races in the minion grouping pre-assign all the feats the race normally chooses, along with pre-assigning how the race distributes its skill points (which is handled in an eval script).

That means that a minion, like a horse or a familiar, has all its feats and skills correct when the user adds the race, and they can just go with it. For an Extra race or an NPC race, there are going to be users who want that as their character's race, or DMs who want to modify it, so I don't select the feats for them. For the races that do pre-select feats, you'll have to assign a negative number of bonus feats, equal to the number of feats you assign.

None of the Stone Giant's feats have a superscript "B" next to them, so there are no racial bonus feats for the stone giant (those feats you would add to an Extra/NPC race).

You can't be seeing "Feats: 6 of 6" at the top of the feats tab and "Feats: Resource Underspent: 0 of 6" in the validation list - both are generated by the same thing. What are you seeing?

pg 31: "Each character begins play with a single favored class of his choosing..." - There's an option in the house rules section of the configure hero form to suppress this.

Anyone's welcome to send me files if you're stuck, but if you can ask your question here, that may be helpful to the next person who tries this (hopefully people are taking a at this thread when they try to add their own race). My email address is my user name here, @wolflair.com.
Mathias is offline   #9 Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 06:56 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® - Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
wolflair.com copyright ©1998-2016 Lone Wolf Development, Inc. View our Privacy Policy here.