(Drop Dead Studios) Spheres of Power: Official Support Thread

[TheIronGolem]

Those errors suggest to me that your core package is out of date. What version do you currently have? The Alteration book needs 1.19 or higher.

[Quintain]

It seems I'm out of date -- isn't there supposed to be a auto-update method to this?

[TheIronGolem]

There is, and the instructions on how to set that up are found in a readme file that should be included with the .hl file you received. If you haven't already followed those steps, do so (you'll need to do it for each package if you have more than one, because they all update independently). If you run into any trouble or don't have the readmes, PM me and we'll get this sorted out.

[Quintain]

Yeah, it looks like all my custom sources were lost somehow. I went through and re-downloaded everything from DriveThruRPG and put them in one by one. All good now.

[TheIronGolem]

Great! I do still recommend setting up the auto-updates, if you haven't already. Newer package versions are occasionally posted to Drivethru, but not nearly as often.

[EldritchWeaver]

Furthermore, DriveThru is using 1.19, not 1.20 for the core file. Other files are similarly out of date, which is bad for you because of many missing bugfixes.

[Ualaa]

It looks the General Drawbacks are not granting bonus spell points.

[Ualaa]

The alteration tab shows I am allowed extra traits from 'Greater Transformation' and 'Extreme Transformation' (twice)... 7 traits at Caster Level 19.

But the configured Shapeshifts does not like having more than four. While I can freely take as many traits as I'm entitled to, those shapeshifts are red in color for having more than the base 4, for a caster at 19th level without Greater/Extreme Transformation talents.

It does like Favored Form, and allows the extra trait within the configurable window from that feat.

[TheIronGolem]

Originally Posted by EldritchWeaver

The shapeshift form is strangely enough always active, even if the checkbox isn't active.

Haven't been able to reproduce this.

Originally Posted by EldritchWeaver

It would be nice, if you don't need to go into that extra dialog to activate a shapeshift. Can't you add a checkbox in the alteration tab?

I considered doing this early on, and decided against it for reasons I can no longer recall. I'll revisit this again.

Originally Posted by EldritchWeaver

The handling of the warshifter is a bit iffy. I had a character with Alteration sphere and Lycanthropic drawback before I chose your Warshifter (used my own implementation of warshifter before). Now a warshifter gets Alteration with Lycanthropic as a package, unless you have Alteration already. At which point you don't gain Lycanthropic. My character instead got Alteration and Lycanthropic both a second time. Alteration was easy to spot thanks to seeing both entries, upon which I could delete the manually chosen one. Lycanthropic instead remained a single entry. Only when tried to remove and readd it, I noticed the existence of the duplicate. Not sure if you can implement it differently.

For cases where you're not supposed to gain the drawback because you had Alteration prior to taking the class, there's a "No Lycanthropic Drawback" checkbox on the class tab. Not exactly a graceful solution I realize, but it's necessary because HL doesn't know when you took a given class or talent, so it has to rely on your judgment as to whether you should get the drawback or not.

As for the extra Alteration Sphere talent, that's a convergence of quirks. The sphere-access talents are now Add Once instead of Unique, so that Basic Magic Training can conditionally bootstrap them without making them unavailable in the chooser tables. Add in the fact that Warshifter bootstraps the talent instead of giving a bonus talent (because it's a specific exception to the general rule about classes that grant a sphere giving a bonus talent if you already have that sphere*; a few other archs do this as well) and you end up with this weird little corner case.

*This rule is not spelled out in the book. But last year I noticed that some bonus-sphere-granting classes/archs explicitly say this and some don't. So I asked Adam about it, and he confirmed that it is meant to be the case generally.

Originally Posted by EldritchWeaver

Also, the warshifter doesn't seem to have the maneuver stuff there as entries in the special tab which makes it unfortunate regarding the checking what kind of abilities one does have.

Works for me. Did you ready the maneuvers? I don't know when this changed because I haven't touched the PoW code in about a thousand years, but it seems non-readied maneuvers are hidden from the Specials tab now.

[TheIronGolem]

Greater/Extreme Transformation and bonus SP from Drawbacks are fixed in my current build.

Going to try to get a release out tonight, but I'm not 100% sure it'll happen. Soon, if not tonight.