Item Hardness and Hit Points

[Silveras]

In the spirit of my previous thread about Spellbooks, I am posting this one to try to collect the various requirements and issues around tracking Item hardness and hit points. Please advise on any details I may have missed, and make suggestions for how to handle some of the challenges.

General
Items have both hardness and hit points, but HeroLab does not track them now. It is easy enough to write the amount of damage in the margins of a printed character sheet, but there is no way right now to track it in HeroLab itself.

Requirements

• Damaging an item down to 1/2 of its hit points should impose the Broken condition on the item.
• Some special attacks impose the Broken condition if any damage is done (Ex. Babau Demon's slime)
• An attacker damaging an item can choose to destroy it, or leave it with 1 hit point, if the Sunder attack would reduce it to 0 or less hit points.

Challenges

• The information is scattered in the rulebooks, and much must be inferred (see Table 7-12, 7-13, and 7-14 page 175 in the Core Rulebook). These tables in the Equipment chapter of the Core Rulebook define the typical hardness and hit points for example weapon types, but these do not align with other weapon groups (such as from Fighter's training groups). Individual magic item types (potions, scrolls, rods, staves, wands) provide specific values to use, but wondrous items can be anything.. so there is no standard for them.
  
• The ability to use special materials also complicates things, requiring that you reverse-engineer the standard weapon hardness and hit points to find the thickness of "metal" so that the proper proportional hit points from the special material can be used.
  
• Using speical materials does not always improve the entire weapon. A wooden-hafted weapon gains no benefit from changing the metal part from "steel" to "adamantine", because the hardness and hit points are based on the wooden haft.
  
• Sizing matters. Armor, weapons, and shields divide their hit points by 2 for each size below Medium, and double for each size above Medium.
  
• Each +1 of a magic weapon's enhancement bonus adds +2 to hardness and +10 to hit points. There is no similar note regarding armor.
  
• Having a counter show up for each item would make the In-Play tab unusable.
  

Proposal

• Ideally, only those Items which have taken damage should have a tracker appear to track how much damage it has taken. Placing a checkbox similar to the "Equipped" checkbox on the Item's entry could toggle the appearance of the tracker. The Maximum value of the tracker would be the hit points of the Item.
  
• Hardness is mostly informational, and could be added to the tooltip window with Cost and Category for every Item.

[Silveras]

As I continue to think about this, another proposal for a possible implementation comes to mind:

Because trying to automate the calculation of hit points is problematic for some items, it may be best to only worry about ones actually being damaged.

An adjustment that allows the user to select a piece of equipment (like the adjustment for Broken does) and enter the hit points manually in a field. Ideally, the field could be initialized with a value from the Item in question, but the expectation would be that only armor, weapons, and magic items with pre-defined hit points would be populated in this way. The adjustment could turn red to alert the user to add the Equipment Broken adjustment for the same item when it reached 1/2 hit points.

[bodrin]

I started this some time ago.

Here's the thread link.

I'll try to dig out the file too!

Here's a link to my file and NOTES

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by bodrin

I started this some time ago.

Here's the thread link.

I'll try to dig out the file too!

Here's a link to my file and NOTES

I never finished that as the "Time" it was going to take to do it right I finally decided it was not worth it. Plus as Aaron has said room on the Weapons tab is small and it already has LOTS of information.

Really I later settled on a whole new "Tab" with a new tables/portals to display and work with the information. But that is allot of hours of work for something I think does comes up not very often in actual games. Yes when you need it then it would be nice to have but I can't justify the hours needed to get it done correctly...

[Silveras]

That's partially how I got to my second proposal.
The variability of hit points due to magic and special materials makes me think that it is just better to add it to the Adjustment manually when you need to track that piece of equipment's hit points.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Silveras

That's partially how I got to my second proposal.
The variability of hit points due to magic and special materials makes me think that it is just better to add it to the Adjustment manually when you need to track that piece of equipment's hit points.

Yeah but the adjustment didn't have a good way to do this really without it being really confusing. It needs a special tab or window (ie like polymorph) has to allow all the "adjusting". Which again can be done but its allot of hours to put together new UI pieces. Or at least it is for me as I do it so little UI scripting.

Hence the "its not worth the time investment for such a little return on investment". But it would be cool too do. Of course if I have time to do UI components I really need to fix the Gestalt addon first....

[Silveras]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

Yeah but the adjustment didn't have a good way to do this really without it being really confusing. It needs a special tab or window (ie like polymorph) has to allow all the "adjusting". Which again can be done but its allot of hours to put together new UI pieces. Or at least it is for me as I do it so little UI scripting.

Hence the "its not worth the time investment for such a little return on investment". But it would be cool too do. Of course if I have time to do UI components I really need to fix the Gestalt addon first....

Understood.. the purpose of this thread is two-fold.. one, to try to get what is needed described in one place, and two, to try to brainstorm possible implementations. Maybe someone will offer a brilliant suggestion?

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Silveras

Understood.. the purpose of this thread is two-fold.. one, to try to get what is needed described in one place, and two, to try to brainstorm possible implementations. Maybe someone will offer a brilliant suggestion?

Yep sounds good.

The only thought I had for an adjustment that was not too bad was:
1) It would only work for Weapons/Armor for now.
2) The normal "counter" would be how you track Damage Taken.
3) Change the weapon/armor "Livename" to display the Damage/HP values.
4) Use the "Source" text box to allow someone to type in a "over ride" value for the number of total Hit Points that the item should have.
5) Use a new Helper Pick that stored the number of hit points that each "material" provides plus the base numbers. This would allow people with scripting knowledge to over ride the values for home games.

The above would not be "that" bad....

[Jamz]

I must have an unusual game as it seems to happen all the time in my campaign, so would love "anything" towards that goal. (Throw in one ooze and before you know it you have half the party with damaged items)

Auto-calculations would be cool but I'm fine with manual input. Our problem is, we constantly have to look up and calculate the max HP for an item and it's hardness. If we could do that once and store it on said item...

#3 would be "ok" but probably not needed? Adding "Broken" or "Damaged" would be enough but that's not really saving space is it? Preferably an Icon would be better but we can't do that I believe.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Jamz

#3 would be "ok" but probably not needed?

Really? I "assumed" players would want to know how much the Hardness/HP value was. And setting it on the weapon 'name' is really the only place I could get it visible.

I would think like your characters HP you would really want to see the Max HP and how much "left" in item HP you have left. Is my weapon almost gone or barely hurt.

Originally Posted by Jamz

Adding "Broken" or "Damaged" would be enough but that's not really saving space is it? Preferably an Icon would be better but we can't do that I believe.

Icon like view would require making a "new" tab to display this information or LW doing it. Just FYI...