BoED Sanctified Spells Strategy

[WildMonkeyLaura]

I am in the process of loading the spells from the Book of Exalted Deeds and I ran into a bit of a quandary with the Sanctified spells.

Normally a new thing must be created for each class, but in the case of Sanctified spells they can be prepared by any class that prepares spells, or cast spontaneously by a cleric (assuming they are sufficiently worthy of course). It seems silly to do this for every class.

My second idea was to create single set of spells and then create bootstraps for each class/level that refer back to the original, along with a requirement (must be good), but before I go down that road, is there a better way to do this sort of thing?

The next issue I ran into was the material components for the spells. Sanctified spells introduce the Abstinence and Sacrifice components. I can always put this in the description and use sComp.Special, but what I'd really like to do is extend the sComp group with sComp.Abstinence and sComp.Sacrifice. Is this possible and is there a best-practice for this sort of change? I'm not seeing a place to do this in the editor, is this a case where we need to edit the xml manually?

Finally, since I'm still learning how this data set is put together, I'm doing a lot of "find in files" inside Visual Studio 2010 to track down tags and ids. Is there a better way to do this? Like *gasp* documentation?

-Laura

[Aaron]

I'd do option A, create a new spell for each class, as that is how things work currently. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by B enough to say whether that'd work or not.

The official tags can be found in the "aug_tags.1st" file.

There are various tutorials accessable in the Help menu, and we also have a Wiki:
http://hlkitwiki.wolflair.com/index.php5/Home

And, if you aren't aware, there are also some community files you can download to look at for more examples. I know I did the BoED feats, but I don't recall if I did the spells.

As for the sComp tag group, I don't think it is user Extensible. You may add a User tag to mark that though.

[Kendall-DM]

I found this out a few months back. You can give more than one sClass tag to a spell, you just have to add it to the tags manually. For example, you have made a 1st level spell A for a wizard, you can then add a tag sClass.Sorcerer to the tag list. When you make a Sorcerer, it will have this spell A available to it as well. The only problem with this is when you hover over a spell to get its description (the '?'), it will say SorcererWizard 1 under spell level, so a spell made for all classes would be something like BardClericDruidPaladinRangerSorcererWizard 1. Otherwise, everything else works as if the spell was made for the specific class you've chosen.

[WildMonkeyLaura]

Alright, I'll see what I can come up with. I've read through the wiki but it doesn't have as much info as one might want for getting started; it helped with the basics like terminology and data topology but didn't really get into anything specific for the d20 data set (which makes sense for the author kit wiki).

I've spent several months neck-deep in the RPGXplorer source code trying to wrangle some performance improvements out of it, but when I came across Hero Lab and their evaluation engine in the data files I decided that even if I made it lightning-fast it would still take a back seat to a tool like Hero Lab.

The good news is that I have very large xml data files that are community-contributed. I'd like to pick the low-hanging fruit first and add in everything that is fairly simple (feats, spells, etc) with a custom ETL process and then get into the more complex cases.

Has anyone ever dumped the entire set of Things and documented what they are? If not I'll need to do something like that to avoid creating duplicate things. Call it the d20 Genome Project if you like.

[bodrin]

Originally Posted by WildMonkeyLaura

*Snip*
I've spent several months neck-deep in the RPGXplorer source code trying to wrangle some performance improvements out of it, but when I came across Hero Lab and their evaluation engine in the data files I decided that even if I made it lightning-fast it would still take a back seat to a tool like Hero Lab.*Snip*

I knew I recognised your user name from somewhere.
Welcome to the boards.

I take it from this comment then you wont be contributing anything to the RpgXplorer program any more that's going to upset my DM but not me.
Last updated to V2.

Having used both tools I enjoyed the ease with adding custom items to RPGX but found Hero lab far more useful and quicker.

Merely creating the character was lightning fast, but adding custom stuff steep learning curve.
And dumping the whole Things? Not that i'm aware of!

[WildMonkeyLaura]

My group was anxiously awaiting new items from RPGXplorer as well, but I'm going to point them in this direction instead.

As you say, the learning curve is a bit steeper but the power under the hood with Hero Lab is simply in a different league as compared to RPGX. If I can decipher undocumented COBOL database files in EBCIDIC and merge them into 3nf SQL databases I can certainly puzzle this out.

[WildMonkeyLaura]

I created one spell with the Editor tool as a prelude to a template for all of the BoED spells. Here's the XML it created:

  <thing id="sTwiLuck" name="Twilight Luck" description="By means of this spell, the caster can impart the luck of the fey to one nonevil being. The target gains a +1 luck bonus on all saving throws for the duration of the spell.\n\n{i}Special{/i}: The caster must refrain from imbibing alcohol for 3 days prior to casting this spell." compset="Spell" summary="Subject gains +1 luck bonus on saving throws.">
    <comment>14 10 11 13 17</comment>
    <fieldval field="sRange" value="Touch"/>
    <fieldval field="sDuration" value="1 minute"/>
    <fieldval field="sSave" value="None"/>
    <fieldval field="sResist" value="Yes (harmless)"/>
    <usesource source="BoED"/>
    <tag group="sRange" tag="Touch" name="Touch" abbrev="{ref s_Touch}Tch{ref}"/>
    <tag group="sResist" tag="Harmless" name="Harmless" abbrev="Harmless"/>
    <tag group="sResist" tag="Yes" name="Yes" abbrev="Yes"/>
    <tag group="sSchool" tag="Abjur" name="Abjuration" abbrev="Abjur"/>
    <tag group="sCastTime" tag="Action1" name="1 Action" abbrev="Action1"/>
    <tag group="sClass" tag="Cleric"/>
    <tag group="sComp" tag="V" name="Verbal" abbrev="{ref s_V}V{ref}"/>
    <tag group="sDuration" tag="Minute" name="1+ Minutes" abbrev="1+ Minutes"/>
    <tag group="sSubschool" tag="Good"/>
    <tag group="sComp" tag="Abstinence"/>
    <tag group="sSave" tag="None"/>
    <tag group="sLevel" tag="1"/>
    <exprreq message=""><![CDATA[hero.tagis[Alignment.Good] <> 0]]></exprreq>
    </thing>

If someone wouldn't mind, could you explain what the items in red mean? The editor created them but they are a bit cryptic.

The item in green is one of two new spell components added in BoED, Sacrifice and Abstinence. Will this syntax add my tag to the sComp group on the fly or do I need to do something further before I can do this?

[Kendall-DM]

If you look at the spell in the spell editor, is there something in the comment field to the lower right? I usually use this area to make notes. That's all I know about the comments. The referencing in HL is something internal, there are just things HL does that you have to trust is being done right by the code, and the reference tagging is one of them.

As for the Abstinence things, you can only add new tags to group sets if the Editor allows for it. In other words, if it was possible, the component button on spells would have a listing of the components and for "new tag". Since it doesn't, this won't work, you can add the tags in the raw XML, but HL won't pick it up. Believe me, I've tried. Now, someone said that you can make your own tag file using the Pathfinder files and add them to the HL set, and he was supposed to post whether that could be done in d20 and how to do it. Haven't heard anything back on that yet, but I for one would like to know how to do that. Maybe when that is made available, you can add it, but for now, it will likely not work.

[Aaron]

Yes, the stuff bracketted in <comment> is nonfunctional notes in the lower right. If I recall correctly, those were notes I made when I was doing replace ID for the spells in core (which all had really unintuitive unique IDs basically the alphabetic order of the spell in that spell's list). So the first 2nd level spell on the cleric spell list was something like sClr200001, and as a result I made it looks like, 5 copies of whatever spell you duplicated, with a note that it was #14 on a particular spell level and list, #10 on the next, #11 on the one after that, and so on. In any case, anything in the comments is purely for notes, it doesn't do anything, so you can erase or disregard it.

abbrev="{ref s_Touch}Tch{ref}"
abbrev means abbreviation, the things in {} I believe have to do with how the text is displayed (for example {b} means bold and {/b} means end bold). Tch is the abbreviation of the full Touch tag, used when space is small.

The fellow who talked about making NEW tag groups was ShadowChemosh, you might try shooting him a PM, he hangs out in the Pathfinder board more than here. As Kendall says, I don't think you can add to the sComp tag group unless it has been pre allowed. However, give it a try and load up the program with your new spell to see for sure. I've been wrong before.

[WildMonkeyLaura]

give it a try and load up the program with your new spell to see for sure. I've been wrong before.

It crashed and burned in a big way. I'm sticking with Special for now and just adding it into the body text. Hopefully I'll have the parser finished tomorrow, I'm just working out the various combinations of target/range/components so I have templates for all of those. I doubt I can do it all in XSL but I know I can do it with LINQ to XML and some custom code.

With a little luck I can bulk-load most of the various spells that are missing from the 1.7 release by the end of the weekend. After that I'll try some trickier things.