Helper.NoAttacks only works properly for racial abilities?

[Roadie]

I've been working on putting together the Avowed playtest book for HL - for those who haven't heard of it, it's basically a conversion and enhancement of 3.5's Warlock class - and I've run into a few difficulties trying to get things set up like I want.

Since the class has a couple of damage abilities that can mode-swap from "attack roll and deal damage" to "area effect with Ref to half/negate", I was trying to set these up to display under Weapons (Attacks on a statblock) either way, but I've run into a problem:

In any ability context outside of racial specials (when set on a thing with Helper.WeaponSpec), Helper.NoAttacks only half-works. It will show up as expected in a statblock export, but not on the Weapons tab (e.g. the attack still shows the full set of attack bonuses).

I was also surprised to find that it doesn't work at all if added to an actual weapon thing, and that weapon things have the further weirdness that setting a wFixDamage field without choosing a weapon category works great in the Weapons tab in HL - but then won't export to a statblock!

Does anybody know a workaround for these problems? Of course, I can just list these under Special Attacks on a statblock if I have to, but since an Avowed character is likely to have anywhere from 3 to 12 different damage-centric attacks with a mix of ranges, attack types, full attacks vs single attacks, damage, and other weirdness, it would be really nice to group them all under Attacks and then leave Special Attacks for the attack effects that don't primarily focus on dealing damage.

[Mathias]

What are you trying to accomplish? It doesn't sound like the tag you're trying to use does what you think it will do, but without knowing what you're trying to do, I can't figure out what the correct solution should be.

[Mathias]

Here's what the FAQ has to say about that tag:

<li>Created the Helper.NoAttacks tag, for specials which do not make attacks but nonetheless should be shown on the melee line of the statblock/on the weapons tab. This is used for the Swarm attack special ability.</li>

So it sounds like it should only be on swarm attacks, and other things that show on the attack list, but without a to-hit showing.

[Roadie]

Originally Posted by Mathias

What are you trying to accomplish? It doesn't sound like the tag you're trying to use does what you think it will do, but without knowing what you're trying to do, I can't figure out what the correct solution should be.

Originally Posted by Mathias

Here's what the FAQ has to say about that tag:

<li>Created the Helper.NoAttacks tag, for specials which do not make attacks but nonetheless should be shown on the melee line of the statblock/on the weapons tab. This is used for the Swarm attack special ability.</li>

So it sounds like it should only be on swarm attacks, and other things that show on the attack list, but without a to-hit showing.

"Attacks without a to-hit showing" is the idea, yes. The class has a mix of rolled attacks, damaging area effects with a ref save (which I would prefer to show in the Attacks section to distinguish them from the 20+ non-damage-centric powers the class gets to pick), and effects that automatically apply damage with no attack or save.

If I set them up as custom abilities with the Helper.NoAttacks tag, I can get them to show up fine in a statblock export like this:

Ranged special sbname +X (YdZ) or
... special sbname with DC included here (XdY) or
... special sbname with DC included here (XdY)

The problem is that in the actual HL interface in the Weapons tab, they still show the "+X ranged" to-hit calculation, even though an identical racial special with the Helper.NoAttacks tag doesn't show the "+X ranged" and only shows the damage.

Edit:

Actually, one more complication: Even for a racial special, adding Helper.NoAttacks works with "Output hero statblock" but not for "Print Hero". For a simple example, make a 1-level character, add the swarm subtype to them, and compare the output of those two commands. "Output hero statblock" shows the Swarm Attack with "1d6 plus distraction" for the damage, while "Print Hero" doesn't show any damage entry for that attack at all.

[Mathias]

Compare your ability to the swarm attack, or some other thing that uses this tag - what's different? Is there some other tag the swarm attack uses to control its display in the UI?

Check if melee attacks would have their attack roll hidden - this may be limited in its application, since it was only designed for swarm attacks, which are melee attacks, and not normally something someone will print out - people print out their own characters, but for monsters, they print out the statblocks.

[Roadie]

Originally Posted by Mathias

Compare your ability to the swarm attack, or some other thing that uses this tag - what's different? Is there some other tag the swarm attack uses to control its display in the UI?

For testing purposes, the problem happens with identical tags and fields, just set on a class special instead of a racial special.

Originally Posted by Mathias

Check if melee attacks would have their attack roll hidden - this may be limited in its application, since it was only designed for swarm attacks, which are melee attacks, and not normally something someone will print out - people print out their own characters, but for monsters, they print out the statblocks.

wCategory.Melee has the same problem (outputs on statblock as expected, but shows "Melee +X" in the Weapons tab), and leaving off a wCategory breaks the output completely (it shows up as a weapon listing in the Weapons tab with no to-hit/damage and doesn't show up on the output at all).

I might be missing something, but as far as I've been able to tell from the combinations of things I've tested, it really does seem to come down to the tag only half-working for anything outside of racial special/racial custom specials.