Help with advanced scripting/authoring

[mdonovan]

Hi,

I've just purchased Hero Lab with Pathfinder + Bestiary, because I'm a programmer myself and I prefer not to re-invent the wheel, and HL seems pretty flexible. I also purchased the authoring kit.

1] I understand you have good reason to hide specifics of a game system in a package, but how can I change rules in general (apart from what can be changed in the editor), and more specifically, how do I find the structural elements and id names of the Pathfinder set so I can know what to override? And how do I override them?

2] Specific example 1: I know that custom wands and potions are on the to-do list, but how would I go about adding that myself? Can I add a magic item with an entity/gizmo which has fields for level, caster level, spell, cost per charge and charges? I'd like the price to reflect the current number of charges left, how can that be done?

3] Specific example 2: How can I add a field to a race type that controls how much the CR increases depending on the number of racial hit dice added to the race? Right now, it adds 1 to the CR for every HD, but that does not reflect the bestiary tables. How do I change this behavior?

As I said, I'm a programmer, so if you could just point me in the general direction for those questions, I'd be grateful.

Mike

[Mathias]

Custom Potions/Wands are done, and will be in the next update (within a week or two), and adding them was not something a user could have done.

The next update will have a CR adjustment, available from the adjust tab. You can use that to control the CR of a character. That'll be the interim solution until I can implement the full Bestiary CR rules.

[mdonovan]

Thanks Mathias,

It will be worth the wait. I appreciate the short time between updates.

Is it possible to modify the rules of a package (by adding extra user data files in the same folder) using the authoring kit? Of course I'm talking about changes not possible with the editor.

Mike

[Mathias]

Without knowing what information is actually in the structural files, there's not really any way a user could add structural material on to the files.

Could you be more specific about what you want to accomplish? I've found that many things that seem to need structural changes can be accomplished within the existing sctructure.