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D&D 5e Community Pack

In case anyone is interested, all monsters and items from Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat have been completed and uploaded to the GitHub, including .stock files. You can grab the files now or wait for the next full release.

I do apologize, as Tiamat herself was ready for 2.3 and I neglected to upload her. But she's now in these files. I also included 5 additional versions of her in progressively weaker states. People familiar with Rise of Tiamat should understand the uses for that.

I'm about 1/4 of the way through the Ghosts of Saltmarsh items and monsters, and have started initial work on the Eberron monsters and items as well.
 
So I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong here, but if anyone can lend me a hand I'd appreciate it.

I downloaded the newest version of the community pack. Under Configure Hero I made certain that Eberron and the new UA class changes were selected. However, neither the artificer or any of the new UA options seem to be available when I attempt to create a character.

Anybody know what I'm screwing up here?
 
I am still not having any luck with getting Eberron into the system right. Could someone get on Discord to help me walk through it?
 
Luirru, have you downloaded the latest update to the community pack through Hero Lab? The Eberron stuff is in there. If you follow the instructions from the first post of this thread, then select the Eberron stuff from the Configure Hero window, you'll see it.
 
Brolthemighty said:
Not finding the class feature variant stuff either. Odd.
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Make sure you have the latest update of the community pack. Make certain that sources are checked in Configure Hero.
Can you be specific about what you are looking for that you haven't found? If you name the source and class - then its much easier for others to check if that material exists and tell you how to find it, or if you are looking for something that hasn't been done yet.
 
I don't know if the Class Variant UA material can even be implemented as is. I know I haven't even looked at coding that article. At this time, Fenris is the only person I know of who is still coding for HeroLab.

Due to medical issues, and my recent experience with what WotC did with the 2 Eberron books, I haven't ddone much in the way of coding. I have been trying to create an updated version of the Artificer, but haven't been able to focus sufficiently to get much done.
 
Mergon said:
I don't know if the Class Variant UA material can even be implemented as is. I know I haven't even looked at coding that article. At this time, Fenris is the only person I know of who is still coding for HeroLab.
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I'm still around to help with coding questions asked on the forums, but the UA Class Variations documents has some major hurdles.

I can see some of the easier stuff (the new spell lists and battle maneuvers) making its way in but honestly, the enhancements and replacements of class features isn't easy to implement in a 100% clean way - unless you want to make community copies of every base class, in which case the entire community code base will have to be inspected from ground up to make sure that all the options coded to date don't break.

That's a lot of volunteers that the 5e community doesn't have.
 
I haven't done any work on putting in the UA Class Variant features. If something is not included in the Community Pack release notes, it's almost definitely not in the pack.

I'm not coding any UA. The only exception will be if it's something I personally need for my game. Once/if it gets officially published, then it belongs in the pack. I am happy to assist anyone who wants to try and code UA and will gladly put finished stuff into the pack.
 
Currently, the onluy way I can see of implementing the Variant Featuree UA, is to make a copy of the class with the features implemented. I don't think you can add the features to an existing class any other way, but I could be wrong.
 
Mergon said:
I don't think you can add the features to an existing class any other way, but I could be wrong.
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Actually there is a way using the Helper.Disable and the Helper.SpcReplace tags you push these onto the ability you want replaced. It greys out the original special ability in the UI and removes it from the printed copy, but the greyed out item stays in the UI (or at least I haven't figured out how to remove it). So I don't recommend it.

Creating copies of all the classes is the right way to go, but it just makes for a ton of work. Since the document says you can pick and choose you have to add bootstrap conditionals on everything that gets coded so only the right one gets enabled. Every subclass and custom class ability in the community pack has to be updated in order to show up as an option. There are a lot of subclasses and primary, secondary, tertiary and even 4th tier options that have to be updated.

Then you have to look for the edge cases where replaced abilities might throw errors. There might be subclasses or features or even magic items that are looking for particular bootstraps.

That's a lot of work for a small group.
 
I was just commenting because there were Log notes about it being implemented, and a Source to only whether to include it. If it’s not implemented, that’s fine. I was just looking for the maneuvers, fighting styles, etc.

That, and the animal companions.
 
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The other thing to consider is that it all may change between now and official release by WotC. All indications are that it was one of the best received UA's they've had, so I expect it will become official either late this year or next year (my prediction is a planar XGTE-style book in Q4 2020, possibly crossmarketed with BG3).

If we could say with absolute certainty that the entire UA will make it to publication without any changes, then I'd say it's time to get to work on implementing it. But with so much else work to do for official, published content like ERftLW, I'm not going to spend time on stuff that may be thrown out unless I really need it for my game. Call that selfish, but I ultimately have to prioritize or we'll have another 2 years between releases.

The new animal companions work very similarly to the Battle Smith's pet. So once I get around to figuring that one out, I think the others will be easier to do. But it's not a priority for me.
 
In other Community Pack news, these items are now completed and ready for the next release. They're all in my branch on the GitHub:

- Hoard of the Dragon Queen monsters and items
- Rise of Tiamat monsters and items
- Ghosts of Saltmarsh monsters
- Essentials Kit Sidekicks*

*These go up to level 12 each, using the statistics provided in the Essentials Kit and the D&D Beyond supplemental material. Level 7 for each sidekick is kind of interesting, as they actually lose 1 point in their main ability score (going from 17 to 16) and gain 1 point in another (going from 13 to 14 or 15 to 16). It's a weird quirk but it's book-accurate. These can all be expanded to level 20 if a future book provides that information. You can also assign class levels of other classes to these sidekicks if you need to push them further.
 
For the sorcerer, the UA Class Feature Variants don't really replace anything (nor the wizard or warlock and I think rogue). If implemented in whole parcel and your DM doesn't allow one of them, you could just ignore that entry on your character sheet. I'm almost done writing the sorc for me into a custom .user (I hadn't done what my DM didn't allow but whatever) file. I'll link if anyone wants

I haven't looked into the other classes as I don't play them but
 
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I understand about not putting in all that work for a UA that’ll probably be refined in a later release. I appreciate the clarification.
 
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