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Gear that adds to a Knowledge skill.

P

Paragon

Well-known member
In the Broken Earth setting, one of the things you can get are reference books that add to a particular Knowledge skill. Now, part of this is just a limited version of the Scholar Edge (since it only adds +1 and to one Knowledge) without the per-requisits and on a piece of gear. However there are a couple of issues I thought I'd ask about.

1. It needs to have some method of handling cases where the person doesn't have the Knowledge; what it should probably do is nothing, but I wanted to make sure how I'd set that up rather than get an error message.

2. What will the program do if someone has two copies of the same book? Is there a method to prevent any problems here (I don't think they'd stack, though the note is pretty terse).

Come to think of it, the books that add +1 to Survival might have an issue with either of these, too.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
I have not done anything with items adding benefits to a character.

However, I would argue that you use defined Knowledge skills as I argue elsewhere. In my opinion, if it is a referenced Knowledge (whether it be required by an edge or increased like you are wanting to do) it should be made to be its own "full" skill, and not relegated to searching through the Knowledge skills to find a matching Domain.

It is possible for edges to reference both the undefined Knowledge skills and the hard-coded knowledge skills. I shared how to do so. But since this is for a user setting file, the assumption is that people will be using it for their characters. If you define a knowledge skill, people wll be happy to just click on it and not have to type (or mistype) a domain.

I have not tried it, but an if statement inside the eval script that grants the bonus should be able to only grant it if it exists. However, I think that a mechanic might be the way to go because of...

Counting. The problem that is that if you have the item count for instances of itself it will not know if it is supposed to be the one that is giving the bonus. The most efficient way in my experience to get around this is to make a mechanic that counts for instances of an item, but will only grant the bonus once. In fact, I think the if ( <> 0) will do just fine and just give the bonus if one or more are there and not bother with the actual count.
 
SeeleyOne said:
I have not done anything with items adding benefits to a character.

However, I would argue that you use defined Knowledge skills as I argue elsewhere. In my opinion, if it is a referenced Knowledge (whether it be required by an edge or increased like you are wanting to do) it should be made to be its own "full" skill, and not relegated to searching through the Knowledge skills to find a matching Domain.
Click to expand...

That might be, but since I'm doing this for general consumption, I have to stick as close to the BE rules as I can, and these books are a generic entry for Knowledges (in other words, an individual book goes only with a specific knowledge, but there are books for many different knowledges, so...)

I have not tried it, but an if statement inside the eval script that grants the bonus should be able to only grant it if it exists. However, I think that a mechanic might be the way to go because of...

Counting. The problem that is that if you have the item count for instances of itself it will not know if it is supposed to be the one that is giving the bonus. The most efficient way in my experience to get around this is to make a mechanic that counts for instances of an item, but will only grant the bonus once. In fact, I think the if ( <> 0) will do just fine and just give the bonus if one or more are there and not bother with the actual count.
Click to expand...

Ah, that's fine then.

What about possible error messages for someone with such a book equipped who doesn't have a relevant skill?
 
I just looked at the Broken Earth book. You are referring to the technical book. I think that you are over-complicating things. I do not think that it should be required to add to the skill as it is a situational bonus. You do not run around with your book out all of the time. I suppose that some books are big enough to be used as a weapon, but then in that case you might want to add it to the hand weapons list instead.

But there is a problem with how the book shows up on the character sheet when you want to print it out. The Gear entries are limited to a very small space. For example, I just tested a book "Book, Technical (+1 Know Medicine)". All that showed up was up to the space before the Know. Not too helpful. However, I placed this in the Short Name "Book (Medicine +1)" and it showed all of it on the character sheet.

There are many examples where situational modifiers are not plugged directly into the character. An example is the Woodsman edge, as it only sometimes gives a bonus to Stealth, Tracking, and Survival. This is not a weakness in the Hero Lab, but the fact that it is not always part of the character's score. It is up to the group (especially the player) to say "hey, I am outdoors, I get a +2 to these skills).
 
Well, for situational Edges we have the ability to make them "Activated" or not, which is, admittedly, irellevant for people only using printed sheets, but for those using HL at the table it's pretty useful to just check the boxes that apply.

As for name limitations on the sheets, there are some ways around that but it mainly takes copying the files that generate the sheets and modifying them, and they are a real pain to work with (since I've done it to make a "full" sheet which does complete descriptions and such on the printout for most things, I have a post here about where to get that if anyone wants it.) That's definitely one of the things I would really like to see in Hero Lab, a much easier way to modify output. I think that's true for every setting in Hero Lab, even, since even with Pathfinder they've had a couple of other folks on the forums make sheets, but there is not really nice way in Hero Lab itself to do it.
 
I probably am overcomplicating it a bit, but there's still the issue of the fact if I have one selector for "Book, Technical", there's going to be no way as far as I can tell for a player using the program to display which specific one they want; if it references a skill they have, at least that will automatically display.

Is there a way to make purchasing something pop up a fillable field so they can at least note that what they actually have is Technical Book (Tactics) or whatever? I guess they can use the generic equipment adder, but I still want the program to have the listing for weight, cost and rarity.
 
I just tried adding a tag for User:NeedDomain, but it doesn't look like gear recognizes that, or at least doesn't create a separate blank spot or using the Menu like settings available on Edges. It may be worth asking for in the feature request thread, but in some ways I expect we might see some extra flexibility on things like that in the Sci-Fi Companion whenever it's released since it's full of a bunch of things that are kind of built on the fly in the book, anyway. I hope we'll see stuff like that anyway.
 
Hmmm. Then I'm guessing the only thing I can do is have people note what Knowledge is associated with the book in their Journal or some such? That's really annoying.
 
For now you could just have the item name in the Equipment list be "Book, Technical (whatever the skill is)" and the Short name be "Book (+1 whatever skill is)".
 
Yeah, but that's still creating a book for every conceivable Knowledge skill, which would certainly be a real PITA, and there is no direct way to associate some kind of note field/domain with a piece of equipment so no convenient way to link directly what that book is for. Arguably it would be easier to just not include any of those books in gear other than, maybe, to note they should be created as Custom Gear by the player so they can better note directly on their gear list what it is.
 
zarlor said:
Yeah, but that's still creating a book for every conceivable Knowledge skill, which would certainly be a real PITA, and there is no direct way to associate some kind of note field/domain with a piece of equipment so no convenient way to link directly what that book is for. Arguably it would be easier to just not include any of those books in gear other than, maybe, to note they should be created as Custom Gear by the player so they can better note directly on their gear list what it is.
Click to expand...

I'll list them as gear but make the note; that way there's at least a list for the costs and such that doesn't require referencing the book.

Annoying, but the limits of the program are what they are.
 
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