Savage Beastiary - Adding NPCs to a datafile

[salcor]

I was wondering in the Savage World's editor what is the difference between a Racial ability and a racial property?

Salcor

[zarlor]

If you compare them you'll see that Racial Properties have a field for "Racial Edge Point Cost" which, when used with building a Race in the Editor, should show the final "Racial Properties Total" when choosing a Race with the Character Builder side of Hero Lab. Not all races were done that way or were built with a mix of Properties and Abilities so the totals, when shown, aren't always what they should be (it should be +2 for a balanced race if I remember correctly).

Outside of that, however, I'm not sure there is much of a difference. Personally I generally try to use Racial Properties for abilities used in creating races and Racial Abilities for what would otherwise be referred to in the books as Monstrous Abilities. I THINK it may also be true that if you create a "Creature" character type in the character builder (as opposed to a PC or NPC) only those things listed as Racial Abilities show up as selectable on the Abilities tabs and not Racial Properties, which would further reinforce the preference I try to follow above.

[salcor]

Cool, thanks for the info.

[CapedCrusader]

The difference is that the Racial Properties were designed for use with the Race Building system Savage Worlds uses now, originally from the Fantasy Companion. They are used on PC and NPC (non-Creature) characters.
Racial Abilities are for Creatures, and show in the Abilities tab under the Monstrous Abilities header.
Actually apples and oranges... you basically have one or the other for a given character.

[SeeleyOne]

I have used the racial property cost to balance races if people want to play with races that have a variable cost.

One thing that has made Humans cool was that in Hellfrost I removed the free edge and gave them 2 reward point. I had never seen so many Humans in one party.

[Paragon]

Originally Posted by CapedCrusader

A .stock file is equivalent to a .por file.

Necroing this, could you elaborate on this a bit CC? I just looked over a couple, and they each seem to be .zips that contain an index file, a herolab folder, a set of .xml files and a set of .txt files. That seems a bit more complicated than a typical .por file.

[zarlor]

CC would have to comment on his meaning, but I'm pretty sure your right that .stock files are not, inherently, portfolio files (although I suppose they could contain portfolios). I think they are a zipped collection of files usually mean to be similar to a .hl file, often containing what we usually work with as .1st and .user files. I could be completely wrong about that, of course, but that's what I think they essentially are.

I also pointed to a link in an earlier post which talks about a stock file being a form of collected portfolio file (http://hlkitwiki.wolflair.com/index....olios_(Savage))

One of the things it says there, though, about how .stock files are, presumably, just porfolios is the following:

Stock portfolios are standard portfolios. They contain one or more characters that the user is expected to import into his current portfolio. The key difference between stock portfolios and user-created portfolios is their placement and filename. Stock portfolios must reside in the data folder along with all the data files for the game system. They must also possess a ".stock" file extension.

This distinction accomplishes two goals. First of all, the files are kept separate from normal user-created portfolios, both based on filename and location. Secondly, the files can be readily identified and included when packaging up your data files for sharing with others.

You can use HL to create a stock portfolio. The default file extension used for portfolios is ".por", but you can simply specify a file extension of ".stock" when saving the file. After that, you can open it and manipulate it normally within HL.

Not sure if that elucidates anything, though. Especially since the wiki is woefully out of date.

[Paragon]

That wiki page seems to be missing, Zarlor. However, I found your earlier link, and it seems to be good.

[zarlor]

I just copied and pasted it straight from the page while I was on it: http://hlkitwiki.wolflair.com/index....olios_(Savage)

Or here is its reformatted as embedded if that helps?

Edit. Yep, it looks like only the embedded version works right. I think it misses the extra parenthesis at the end when just pasted for some reason. And I've fixed it in the previous post as well.

[Paragon]

Went and looked this over; I guess these could be multi-character .por now that I do a comparison. I'll have to put one together and rename it and see if anything looks different, but I suspect it was just I'd never actually looked at a regular .por in an editor before and didn't realize quite how many moving parts they have.