Pathfinder Community Packs

[Quintain]

Shadow,

Ok, go ahead and put it on the mechanic. I defined it on the abilities themselves and pushed the change. Make the correction as you need.

While you are in there, I'm not sure where you have defined it, but we need to implement Psionic Focus better.

All classes/races that have psionic ability have the ability to gain psionic focus. While gaining psionic focus, you get to choose the favored energy type (one of the 5 standard energy types -- fire, cold, electricity, acid, sonic -- and more to be added later) that you can use when manifesting powers like "Energy Missile", etc. Cryptics also get to choose their target type for their disrupt pattern ability.

You can have up to two psionic foci -- One naturally, the other with psicrystal afinity and Deep focus feats.

The reason this needs to be defined better is that there are a lot of Mythic Psionics abilities that reference favored energy, and base their mechanics from that value. If we could get a single place where having psionic focus or which favored energy is chosen is able to be referenced, it would go a long way towards consolidating code and keeping things consistent on the character portfolio.

Not sure how complicated this would be -- but the psionic focus should be an on/off value, and the favored energy should be enabled/disabled based on the on/off value of the psionic focus. Cryptics should also have a 3rd value of target type for their disrupt pattern.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Shadow,

Ok, go ahead and put it on the mechanic. I defined it on the abilities themselves and pushed the change. Make the correction as you need.

We seem to have a bunch of confusion going on in the files. There is only ONE single "Collective" class ability in use. This is "cPUCollect" which is the only one bootstrapped to classes. All other "Collective" class abilities are marked with a note of "Deprecated" and are not being used.

Meaning the simple solution is to remove the unused class abilities by really making them deprecated. Then we can update the Feats that reference the multiple Collective abilities:

#hasability[cPUCollect] + #hasability[cPUTacColl] + #hasability[cPUVitColl] + #hasability[cPW5Collec]

and make them only care about the cPUCollect ability.

This solves the issue of needing to make a new tag and apply it to class abilities that are not actually in use.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

All classes/races that have psionic ability have the ability to gain psionic focus.

Yeah and that is how things work currently so confused on this statement.

While gaining psionic focus, you get to choose the favored energy type (one of the 5 standard energy types -- fire, cold, electricity, acid, sonic -- and more to be added later) that you can use when manifesting powers like "Energy Missile", etc. Cryptics also get to choose their target type for their disrupt pattern ability.

Where is this about a Favored Energy Type? The only thing I see is a feat named that.

Personally I feel trying jump to other Psionic books is a bad plan. Ultimate Psionics is not even 100% implemented yet. Seems strange to spend time working on adding optional rules when the base rules are un-finished.

 

[Quintain]

As far as psionic focus: as near as I can tell, there is no way to add a second psionic focus to a character -- I could modify psicrystal containment and deep focus feats to add a second psionic focus if you could point me in the right direction.

Per Favored energy:

Sorry, wrong term: its active energy type, not favored energy (the feat).

Defined on Page 131 of Ultimate Psionics:

Energy Powers: Many psionic powers deal damage of a certain type of energy, with cold, electricity, fire, and sonic being the most common. For powers that have the choice of cold, electricity, fire, and sonic, the manifester must choose after he regains his psionic power points for the day which of these four energy types is his active energy. The manifester may choose to change which energy is his active energy by gaining psionic focus. If he is currently maintaining psionic focus, he may expend it as a free action and then gain psionic focus normally to choose a new energy type. The manifester need not maintain psionic focus to have an active energy type. Wilders may change their active energy type when performing a wild surge. Kineticists are exempt from this restriction and may freely choose the energy type at the time the power is manifest, so long as it is within the choices allowed by the power. He could not, for example, choose fire as his energy type when manifesting concussion blast, as the power does not allow a choice in energy types.

As far as I know this is not defined.

 

[Quintain]

As far as "jumping to other books", that is not my intent. I do coding in my day job, as I'm sure you do too. I'm big on "future proofing" the design aspects of code to ensure that we can expand on concepts which will prevent having to go back and redesign/recode things once we reach that point.

Being big on Psionics from DSP, I know that there will be additional feats/abilitiies coming down the road in regards to active energy type that will add to the list, so coding for this future expectation is good design, imo.

 

[Skarn]

@ShadowChemosh

Feature Request: ShadowChemosh's Adjustments (More Concentration Skills)

I just recently discovered the Caster Level & Concentration "Skills" that you added to the CP. Very helpful; I'll be putting them on any of my casters that they're set up for.

I'd quite appreciate it if you could add the Concentration "Skill" for the psychic casters from Occult Adventures.

This is especially important for Kineticists, as Concentration info doesn't appear on their class tab. (I mentioned this to Lone Wolf back in August, and they still haven't updated the tab.)

 

[ShadowChemosh]

As far as "jumping to other books", that is not my intent. I do coding in my day job, as I'm sure you do too. I'm big on "future proofing" the design aspects of code to ensure that we can expand on concepts which will prevent having to go back and redesign/recode things once we reach that point.

I was tired when I wrote that.... These are good points about trying to build the future.

Being big on Psionics from DSP, I know that there will be additional feats/abilities coming down the road in regards to active energy type that will add to the list, so coding for this future expectation is good design, imo.

Good point. I will have to take a look. The big hold back is that LW did a bunch of the Psionic UI components. Meaning I really can't change the Psioincs tab at all. So all I could do would be to put something on the In-Play tab.

I could "try" and see if LW will change the UI but not sure how much more time they are willing to put into it.

@ShadowChemosh

Feature Request: ShadowChemosh's Adjustments (More Concentration Skills)

I just recently discovered the Caster Level & Concentration "Skills" that you added to the CP. Very helpful; I'll be putting them on any of my casters that they're set up for.

I'd quite appreciate it if you could add the Concentration "Skill" for the psychic casters from Occult Adventures.

This is especially important for Kineticists, as Concentration info doesn't appear on their class tab. (I mentioned this to Lone Wolf back in August, and they still haven't updated the tab.)

Oh yeah I meant to do the Occult classes and totally forgot before the last release. Thanks for the reminder. These should make it in the next release.

 

[Quintain]

Good point. I will have to take a look. The big hold back is that LW did a bunch of the Psionic UI components. Meaning I really can't change the Psioincs tab at all. So all I could do would be to put something on the In-Play tab.

I could "try" and see if LW will change the UI but not sure how much more time they are willing to put into it.

Yeah, I'm not sure how easy the components themselves are. Since the Cryptic and their chosen type is pretty unique, I've got that taken care of. Active Energy type and the ability to add a second psionic focus through the psicrystal containment feat and Deep focus are pretty intrinsic though -- to every psionic character.

I couldn't even find the code on the psionic focus at all. Maybe they can remove it from the base set and give us their code to include in the community pack so that it won't be so unchangeable.

I do know that there will need to be a change to the PUPsiFocus procedure to enable a check against the 2nd Psionic focus, though.

Then we can go back and have the metapsionic feats and all the feats that depend on psionic focus check properly and disable if there is no focus found.

I opened a bug report with support to see if they would make the changes for us.

 

[Quintain]

Ok, more concept/coding help needed:

The "Extra Discipline" mythic ability (can be chosen up to 3 times) adds access to a chosen discipline's powers to the character.

We already have an example of this under the Dual disciple archetype. However, that archetype presumes only a single secondary discipline, whereas a Mythic Dual Disciple can have up to 5 depending on the number of times the ability is chosen.

Psuedo-codingly, we'd count the number of times this ability is chosen (With the "count" being modified by 1 if it is a dual disciple), and that number would determine which level of custom ability (secondary, tertiary, quartenary, quintary, etc) is opened up.

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of example code to work with. Any assistance would be appreciated.

As a side note: is there any place to find the various "res?" items so #resmax[] can be used for other things?

 

[Quintain]

Per the mulitple discipline abilities between Dual Disciple/Added Discipline/Extra Discipline

I changed dual disciple to not add a secondary discipline, but just increase the custom ability count by 1 so a second primary discipline can be chosen. Seems simpler.

Shadow: Can you remove all the secondary psion disciplines from the custom ability list -- I don't think they are needed anymore. -- actually delete them, don't depricate -- the only thing that used them was the Dual Disciple -- I think I'll need to repurpose them under the mythic psionics user file -- with the secondary discipline re-done with just custom abilities and the a new tertiary one added with just access to the power list for the discipline.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Per the mulitple discipline abilities between Dual Disciple/Added Discipline/Extra Discipline

I changed dual disciple to not add a secondary discipline, but just increase the custom ability count by 1 so a second primary discipline can be chosen. Seems simpler.

I agree this is simpler. Except you do get with this change and the removal of the secondary disciplines means we just broke any character with that archetype?

I 'maybe' can suppress the error messages but the person would open there character and be missing the secondary discipline. This maybe an easy fix for them to add it again as I don't think the discipline contains any additional choices.

But we have to be careful about some changes as it can be a big impact on existing characters. Plus this issue always seems to happen on "Game" night and I then get nasty email/PMs about broken characters.

I should have time over the weekend to make a character. Then pull down your changes and see how bad it breaks and if I can make the transition easy....

 

[Quintain]

It gets even more fun. Since the dual disciple archetype adds the custom discipline abilities at a different level than the originals, we need to do some conditional bootstrapping.

Per the archetype:

Secondary Discipline Ability: At 10th level, the dual disciple gains the 2nd level discipline ability of his secondary discipline. This replaces the bonus feat normally gained by a 10th level psion.

Secondary Discipline Ability: At 15th level, the dual disciple gains the 8th level discipline ability of his secondary discipline. This replaces the bonus feat normally gained by a 15th level psion.

I'll have to look to see if this can be done simply or if I'll need to reach out for for expert assistance

Edit: I'm thinking that we can alter the ClsSpecWhen tag value and have it be 2 by default, 10 if the tagcount for the discipline custom ability is 2 and the archetype exists on the character. And alter the other abilities accordingly. Will have to look up examples.

When doing conditional bootstrapping, the syntax for checking for the non-existance of a tag on a hero is: "hero#Group.Tag = 0" -- correct? -- I changed to: !hero#SpecSource.arPUDlDisc to test for the non-existence of the Dual Disciple Archetype. I'm using the test hero#SpecSource.arPUDlDisc & count:abCategory.PUPsiDisc = 2 -- to check for the hero having the dual disciple archetype and the pick being the 2nd discipline.

Not having much success though.

 

[Quintain]

Can someone explain the bootstrap conditions to me? I've read the http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=47611, but still can't figure it out.

Does the bootstrap condition have to return true in order for the bootstrap to function? I'm trying to count the number of disciplines on the hero with count:hero#abCategory.PUPsiDisc, but I think the timing is off, can I can't get what would appear to be obvious results ( equal to 1 gets standard progression, equal to 2 gets the "dual disciple second discipline progression").

 

[ShadowChemosh]

To put at the top here the most important part of thinking through this is how are you going to know which Discipline is First and which is Second? Nothing in HL will know which discipline is which. So if you go with bootstrap conditions ALL the abilities from all dicisplines will either be at level 2 or level 10. You will not get one discipline set to level 2 and another one set to level 10.

When doing conditional bootstrapping, the syntax for checking for the non-existance of a tag on a hero is: "hero#Group.Tag = 0" -- correct? -- I changed to: !hero#SpecSource.arPUDlDisc to test for the non-existence of the Dual Disciple Archetype. I'm using the test hero#SpecSource.arPUDlDisc & count:abCategory.PUPsiDisc = 2 -- to check for the hero having the dual disciple archetype and the pick being the 2nd discipline.

Most of the time the container tag that is checked by the bootstrap script is the hero. So hero# is sort of redundant but it won't hurt.

To make hero#Group.Tag = 0 work would need to add "tagc ount" logic:

count:hero#Group.Tag = 0

Otherwise you can use custom expression logic to just say "not" present:

!hero#Group.Tag

Can someone explain the bootstrap conditions to me? I've read the http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=47611, but still can't figure it out.

Your trying to make the script logic be when TRUE you want the bootstrapped Pick to appear on the hero.

My thought you would want to bootstrap the class ability "twice" to the Custom Ability with one set for level 2 one set to level 10. Then have:

count:hero#abCategory.PUPsiDisc = 1

and the 2nd conition set to:

count:hero#abCategory.PUPsiDisc >= 2

Does the bootstrap condition have to return true in order for the bootstrap to function? I'm trying to count the number of disciplines on the hero with count:hero#abCategory.PUPsiDisc, but I think the timing is off, can I can't get what would appear to be obvious results ( equal to 1 gets standard progression, equal to 2 gets the "dual disciple second discipline progression").

Now timing here. abCategory.? I am pretty sure is done late in timing meaning it wont' work for bootstrap conditions. The only tag we have that would be "auto" set is Ability.? actually. Or we have to make a new group/tag up and have a script on each Discipline that will push to the Hero very early so we can test for it in the bootstrap conditions.

The main issue I see here is how are you going to know which "Discipline" was the 2nd one? This is the same issue I had on the Psy Warrior and why it has a chooser. No automatic way HL will know which discipline is the 1st and which is the 2nd. So either both abilities work at level 2 or both work at level 10.

In other words this is allot more complex and why originally it was done as two separate custom abilities.

 

[Quintain]

I believe we are thinking along the same lines.

I did the count:hero#abCategory.PUPsiDisc exactly as you described above (actually the second was = 2 not >= 2. And I watched the debug tags populate as I was adding/removing the discipline abilities -- but the ability list didn't populate as I expected.

Knowing which one is the 2nd is done (at least intention-wise) is done by counting the abCategory tags on the user as the ability was added. The first one only had 1 tag, the second had two. I'm pretty sure that what I'm hitting is once again a timing issue.

One of the issues with the design problem we are hitting is once you get into mythic and you can choose "additional discipline" or "extra discipline" the bootstrapping of the discipline abilities is separate from the access to the discipline power list -- so you are getting into tertiary and quartenary abilities at this point. We are going to run out of room for all these configurations eventually.

 

[Roadie]

One of the issues with the design problem we are hitting is once you get into mythic and you can choose "additional discipline" or "extra discipline" the bootstrapping of the discipline abilities is separate from the access to the discipline power list -- so you are getting into tertiary and quartenary abilities at this point. We are going to run out of room for all these configurations eventually.

Well, in the worst case you could set up a configurable that exists just to give extra slots to choose things. That's my approach for dealing with the Avowed class, which gives 7+ pools of things to pick from.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Knowing which one is the 2nd is done (at least intention-wise) is done by counting the abCategory tags on the user as the ability was added. The first one only had 1 tag, the second had two. I'm pretty sure that what I'm hitting is once again a timing issue.

No. Let me try again you CAN NOT TELL which is first and which is second. HL does not work that way. As soon as you add the 2nd discipline the tag count is two for both test cases.

Every time you change anything on an character you test how the character is at that moment in time. You can NOT know which discipline was added 1st and which was 2nd.

This is why for the psy warrior has a chosser because the user MUST tell the script.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

It's my bad for answering your questions instead of just saying it will not work. You need a totally different approach to solve this.

 

[Quintain]

No. Let me try again you CAN NOT TELL which is first and which is second. HL does not work that way. As soon as you add the 2nd discipline the tag count is two for both test cases.

Every time you change anything on an character you test how the character is at that moment in time. You can NOT know which discipline was added 1st and which was 2nd.

This is why for the psy warrior has a chosser because the user MUST tell the script.

Right, that's kind of what I came up with as the basic problem (no static values after being loaded).

So, after a bit of brainstorming, here's what I caught on as kind of a solution. We'll keep the normal discipline abilities as is, no conditional bootstrapping, etc.

The 2nd-ary disciplines that are already created will need to be changed to be primary custom abilities, and we'll need to edit the name so that the user will understand that these are for the dual disciple archetype only (or make it available only to the dual disciple archetype -- which I think it may already be). Then we'll be able to use the 2nd-ary custom abilities for the additional discipline mythic ability, and the 3rd-ary custom abilities for the extra discipline power lists.

So, in short:

Primary Custom Ability for Psion Disciplines = Full abilities, and power lists, regardless of the level arrangement.

Secondary Custom Ability for Psion Discipline = Full abilities regardless of level arrangement with no power list additions

Tertiary Custom ability for Psion Discipline = Power list additions, with no discipline abilities added.

Thoughts?

Edit: From my initial testing, this works out perfectly. The only minor glitch is that the non-dual disciple disciplines (the standard progression ones) are still visible when picking the second discipline. Might want to implement a method of hiding those.

 

[Quintain]

It's my bad for answering your questions instead of just saying it will not work. You need a totally different approach to solve this.

No, answering the questions is fine, that's how I'm learning the system. It helped with working out the alternate method (above) that I came up with.