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Changing character abilities as house rules in the Editor

J

JustinThomason

Well-known member
I have a house rule that I want to implement that affects one of my PCs class abilities. In our game group, all Knowledge skills can be made untrained. I have a player with an Investigator - at 3rd level he gets Keen Recollection which allows him to make Knowledge skills untrained. Since that's a non-ability in our game, I decided to reskin Bardic Knowledge and have investigators get that at 3rd level.

I have built the new ability in the editor, and it works great. I even found out how to replace the original with my new version thanks to Aaron's fantastic "Intro to the Editor" GenCon seminar posted on YouTube (seriously - if you have any interest in using the editor, and are less than experienced, do yourself a favor and check it out; it's well worth the time). However, I'm a little concerned about permanently changing stuff like this in case I ever end up playing in a different group with different house rules.

I have created a source for my own house rules, and I have already added a couple of things that I can turn on and off, but my understanding is replacing a Thing with another Thing happens before the sources are determined, so if I replace the old version of Keen Recollection with my new version, and make the new version dependent on my House Rules source in the Configure Hero dialog, the class ability will just disappear if my House Rules are turned off.

What is the best way (or is there one) to have a replacement like this dependent on a source being active? My original strategy was to create an investigator archetype that just replaced that one class ability and have that be part of the House Rules package, but that seemed kludgey and possibly problematic for the application of other archetypes. I saw some references to the Preclude tab, but I couldn't find a real clear explanation of how that worked or if it would even do what I want it to.

Thanks in advance for the help. I'm constantly amazed at how supportive and helpful this community is.
 
What I do for my home game is to clone the game system into a new folder (Tools -> Duplicate Game System), and then make the second one my house ruled campaign, with all the replacements and .user files I have made for that. The other copy of the game system remains free to be used when you play in some other game that doesn't include your house rules.
 
That's an interesting solution - certainly elegant. What happens when there is an update? I assume that you have to reduplicate the system. Do you have to pull out the .user files so they don't get overwritten?
 
No, you don't have to reduplicate the system or do anything with your .user files. Each folder needs to be individually updated though.
 
I just make a separate 'source' for each different campaign I'm in. In that source, I include any houserules that come up, any special plot specific items, etc. That way, they are only there if that source is enabled.
 
For myself, I make extensive use of precludes and doneifs to work with source selections so that the campaign can be turned on and off by just ticking/unticking the relevant source.

That way, if you want to have a house rule active across multiple campaigns, you just allow it for that campaign's source, requiring just one additional OR statement rather than having to copy things over.
 
Fuzzy said:
I just make a separate 'source' for each different campaign I'm in. In that source, I include any houserules that come up, any special plot specific items, etc. That way, they are only there if that source is enabled.
Click to expand...
Sources do NOT work with Replace ID logic. So you can't do this if you plan to do replace the Elf race with your own custom version. You would need to do as Aaron said and have multiple Game Folders.
 
ShadowChemosh said:
Sources do NOT work with Replace ID logic. So you can't do this if you plan to do replace the Elf race with your own custom version. You would need to do as Aaron said and have multiple Game Folders.
Click to expand...

Huh.. I've never noticed that. What exactly doesn't work with them? I honestly, have very rarely ever used replace, if I can help it - just curious.
 
I've seen several "how do I" or "why isn't this working" questions that end up being that the person expected that when they added a replacement and added a source, it would work the new way while their source was checked, and still work the normal way if that source wasn't checked.

Replacements are checked when you start a game system. They alter what goes into the database of things you can choose from. Sources aren't checked until you're working on a character, so much later.
 
I would think there's gotta be a way to remove the original item from the database later than that - after source selections are processed.
 
With most things you can get around it by having a preclude for the original, and a source for the new (if something like a mechanic it requires a doneif with the source in). Sometimes this isn't feasible though.
 
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