Partial Armor Help

[Kendall-DM]

I've got a house rule in my game that if you have platemail, you can wear it as partial armor and it counts just like breastplate. Essentially you wear the breastplate portion only, this was for characters with Endurance that couldn't otherwise sleep in their armor. If that armor is magical, it isn't magical when worn partially.

What I did was, I made a new Breastplate (from Armor) armor that is a helper for platemail that will list a 0 weight breastplate on the character, much like guantlets are added to armor automatically. It works fine, unless the armor is magic, then it doesn't add the bootstrap. I've bootstrapped items to magic things before (specifically bootstrapped a shield bash to shields) and it works fine their, even for magic versions. Using the same methodology, I bootstrapped the breastplate to the platemail, but it doesn't work for magic armor.

Now this might be because I'm bootstrapping a weapon to armor as opposed to bootstrapping an armor to armor, but I'm clueless if this is the case. And if it is, is there a way around that so that it appears on magic armor?

[Kendall-DM]

Well, I messed with this a bit more, and I'm as perplexed as ever. I think this is something goofy in the internal workings of HL. I even went to look at all the user submitted things with bootstrapped specials on their armor, and they also don't work with custom magic armors.

Here it is, I made a shield bash that is assigned as a bootstrap to every shield type. It is a weapon, so I made it in the weapon editor and all I've done to make it work is give it the Helper.Shadow tag. This creates a shadow container that allows both nonmagical and magical versions of shields to inherit it (along with the tags) as a container transition. Great, I look at the debugger for gizmos on a magic shield, and its there and it is reporting that its live state is "shadowed". Awesome. So I do the same with a breastplate that I bootstrap to platemail, which works fine when the armor is not magical. When it is magical, the breastplate ceases to exist on the hero. I look at the gizmo picks on the magical platemail, and it reports that my breastplate is in the livestate, but it is not "shadowed" at all. Conundrum. I do the same by bootstrapping a special ability onto an armor, it appears when its not magical, disappears when it is. Hmmm, I wondered what would happen if I bootstrapped my shield bash onto my armor. I do so, and it shows up both on nonmagical and magical armor, and it reports that it is being "shadowed" on magical armor in the gizmo list. Now I'm confused. Why is this the case that armor (and as far as I know shields as well) will show the bootstrapped item when nonmagical but won't when magical, especially when I add the Helper.Shadow tag to the bootstrapped item and it refused to make the container transition unless it is a weapon?

Question, is this a bug, or working as intended?

[Kendall-DM]

Nevermind, got it figured out. Depending on what you are bootstrapping, the bootstrapped thing needs a container transition. I had forgotten about the displacement container transition, which is what is needed for bootstraps that are armor things. I just added Helper.Displace and it finally shows up on magic armor as well.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Kendall-DM

Nevermind, got it figured out. Depending on what you are bootstrapping, the bootstrapped thing needs a container transition. I had forgotten about the displacement container transition, which is what is needed for bootstraps that are armor things. I just added Helper.Displace and it finally shows up on magic armor as well.

Hmmm I wonder if this works in Pathfinder also. I have a similar situation and I was using "Helper.Forward" which did nothing.

So happy to hear you got it to work and I am going to give this a try and see if the helper works the same in Pathfinder.

[Kendall-DM]

From what I understand, the reason that Helper.Forward doesn't work is that it doesn't forward the actual thing, only the Tags. I don't think of this as a container transition, but it is a good way to get all the Tags from a bootstrap to the thing it is bootstrapped to. Since I haven't used it too much, LW can correct me if I've got that wrong.

[Mathias]

Helper.Forward is used in a single place - custom arms and armor - to tell it to run a script that implements a dozen or so

perform parent.pushtags[XXXXX.?]

operations, as well as copying some field values, in order to get all the tags and fields that define weapons or armor duplicated from the pick within the gizmo to the parent, so that the parent pretends to be the weapon/armor you added within the gizmo.