Problems with Skills - Two Items trying to boost same skill
 

I first wish to say how much I like your product. I depend on it to keep my characters within the rules.

In this case, when I go to the Skill screen I show that the Sword Skill allows me to train in one skill. There are no other boxes except the Warfare Lore that is marked with an "*".
And also on Warfare Lore, there is a check already there from "Martial Disciple
Other". This check can not be unchecked. There are two checks in that column both of which are placed there by the program.

Can you tell me how I can correct whatever I have done wrong?

Thank you for your help,
GregDC

Which background in particular is giving you the option?

I think there is an issue w some backgrounds that grant a lore skill not properly opening up the skill options if that lore is already granted by another skill.

It way also be that it wants to give you a point in another specific lore but it's not one of the ones pre-made and needs you to add a custom one and name it what it expects

LWD: *transitions entire business model to an online server-based system*

also LWD: *can't even keep its forums working reliably*

Some backgrounds or abilities train you in specific skills. HLO will check that skill automatically and you cannot uncheck it.

I assume you're talking about PFS Swords training. That allows you to train one of a handful of lore skills. You might need to add the lore skill you want to train manually by clicking the + icon. When you add a lore skill allowed by Swords, it will also show that skill highlighted and *. The skills you can train for Swords should be listed in a highlighted alert at the top of the skills list—just add one of those lore skills to your skills.

Apples and oranges, we're not a forum host. Not my wheelhouse on the state of things there, but the HLO servers and forum servers have nothing to do with each other.

Anyways, yeah, when a thing trains you in a specific skill, that skill is automatically checked. Some things will open themselves up if you have multiple sources of the same skill training, so you can train something else, such as in the case of class and background skill trainings overlapping. I don't think PFS Swords training is one of those though. As for Lore trainings, like mototom said those must be added manually if there's an option, at which point they will indicate that they're valid options. We avoid automatically adding lore skills that can't be removed if they're optional, since there's a finite number of skills that can be present on a character.

what is the maximum number of skills? having a relatively low limit seems like a problem, considering the number of potential Lore skills is effectively infinite.

nevertheless, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Looks like it's 30 skills, so you can add 14 additional skills above the base.

what's the reason for the limit of 30? i mean i understand having a limit, but why that number in particular?

It's just a large number so that a good number of skills can be added, but not an infinite number that would have a negative impact on the performance of the portfolio. It used to be 26 for +10 skills, but people seemed to be hitting that a bit more than expected, so we added another 4 for a round 30.

makes sense, thanks.

would a non-infinite but very high cap (say, 300) impact performance noticeably? just curious how far it could be pushed before it became a problem.

So far, I'm only aware of a single bug report from someone who found a build that allowed them to be trained in enough lore skills that they wanted to exceed the current 30 skill limit, and even that character was designed solely for trained lore skill count, and was an exercise in testing the system's limits, not a character designed to be played. If you have a use case for expanding this, please present it, so we can weigh the benefits, against the cost of increasing resource usage for every PF2 character out there.

I'm not sure specifically if there's some sort of cutoff. The issue really lies in that there's a lot of moving parts of various impacts on characters, so it's less an issue of skills themselves being problematic as a ton of skills plus items plus feats etc. Usually if we add limits its to keep things within realistic boundaries so one can't just add 50 lore skills for the sake of pushing the system (also table bloat is concern in this case), when a normal character will never reach that point. Things like this wind up causing issues for the server, which then trickles down to affecting general performance. It's also why weapons have a limit on the number you can add. It's not that we *want* to limit them, it's that they have a LOT of processing behind the scenes so cases where a bunch get added to a character and never used just puts excessive strain upon that character. It's all done in the interest of keeping performance smooth and timely, both for individuals and as a whole.

per Daniel V further up the thread, "We avoid automatically adding lore skills that can't be removed if they're optional, since there's a finite number of skills that can be present on a character."

however based on what you're saying, it sounds like hitting the skills cap is very unlikely unless a user is going out of their way to try and do so.

so in that case, why not automatically add the lore skills after all? it would save on user confusion when expected lore skills from feats etc don't appear, and apparently the risk of this causing problems with the 30-skill cap is small-to-nonexistent.

edit: to be clear, i'm not asking for the cap to be raised. i'm asking for lore skills added by feats etc to be automatically added to the skills list. the questions about the cap were to try and find out whether that is feasible or not. it seems to me that it is in fact feasible, unless i'm missing something?

For the feats that only allow you to select from among 2 or 3 lore skills, we've got a project on the to-do list already to examine what we can do in terms of adding those to the hero automatically when you add the feat - we should be able to add them in a way that lets the user delete the ones they don't pick, if they want to reduce the clutter, but still delete the whole set if the user deletes the feat/background/whatever that added them in the first place. It wouldn't help for things like Terrain Stalker, which can select from among 10+ different terrain lores, or the raised by belief background that can potentially select from many dozen deity lores, but it should be feasible for the 2-3 choice ones.

But just a caveat - the project on our to-do list is to explore this - to check how easy it is to run up against the limit, and make sure that if you do run up against the limit the issue is handled smoothly, and then check how this ends up working if you add two different feats that can each select several lores, and they have some amount of overlap in those lists - what happens to the lores if you change your mind on one of those feat choices, but not the other?

Yeah, as Mathias said we've got some space to explore presenting options and allowing them to be removed if not selected. What we want to avoid though is cases where a feat allows you to get training in one of 3ish lore skills, and you pick one and the other two are just forever dead skill slots on your character taking up space, without the ability to be removed. That would potentially make it much easier to hit that cap. In cases where a source just gives training in one lore skill, we do add that skill automatically since no choice needs be made, so no unused selection will be present as clutter.

why would all of the potential lore skill choices need to be added upfront? can you instead add a dropdown selection menu on the feat, and only add whichever lore skill the user selects?

I'm not sure it's feasible to have an option that can both select from among existing items (in case the list of skills already added includes one that qualifies here) or create a new selection. The capability to accomplish this isn't available at this time.

I'm not sure if y'all have looked at the Strength of Thousands AP yet, but there is a layered academia system for players specific to that AP that is going to result in all the players being trained in multiple lore skills above and beyond what they will receive through class progression and background. Add to that the AP using the free archetype option, and I'm guessing the number of extra lore skills will be 4 or 5 by the end of progression.

Ah, yeah I don't think we've had a chance to look there yet. Pretty swamped with all the hard covers in the pipeline haha. But yeah, given that info, we might have to assess how we want to handle it. In most cases it should still be alright, as you'll still need probably another 6-7 or so after that and background before you hit the limit, but we'll have to discuss it. Thanks for the heads up!

I have a character that is trained in the same skill (Crafting) from two different sources. According to the Core Rulebook, after the first source makes it trained, I can train a different skill for the second source.

I can check on a source, but I still get the warning (blue) that a skill is being trained by multiple sources. And when I select the new skill to be trained, I can't train it from either of the sources the train the original skill. So, I pick my class as the source for training it (because I can't unselect either of the sources that train the initial skill.)

How do we fix this?

Which sources specifically are you looking at?

I am making a goblin gunslinger. I took Alkenstar Tinker as my background, which makes me Trained in Crafting. I then took Munitions Crafter as my class feat, and that, too, makes me Trained in Crafting.

According to the Core Rulebook, Alkenstar Tinker would make me Trained in Crafting and therefore, I can use the Trained that I get in Crafting from Munitions Crafter to get Trained in a different skill.

That seems to be bugged. The normal behavior I've seen is that when something is double-trained, one of the options does not automatically check and that column shows an additional skill training available. The class feat is getting lumped under "Other," which I'm guessing doesn't pick up that behavior.

Hey there,

Any time you might run into something like this please do reach out to us via the LWD support email address, I'm linking that below, we will be able to assess what is going on and get a kind of paper trail rolling to document the specific issue and conflicting options that aren't meshing together. When you would do so including a copy of the Character Sheet PDF, the URL from the Address Bar when the Character is open, and maybe even some screenshots to showcase exactly what you're seeing can help us hone in on the issue and really does help the team out immensely.

If you do message us about this, or really any other issue, getting it into our hands via support email really is the best way as we have a newer and dedicated sort of pipeline to get that into the hand of our authors and devs versus these forums which, admittedly, has seen better days given the post reply issues and database errors, to say the least.

Thanks!
--
Ryan Furnas
<support@wolflair.com>

This still doesn’t seem to work and I submitted a bug request about it months ago.

EDIT: and I sent it a few minutes ago to the email address suggested above.

Just for clarity, here is the pertinent rule from page 233 of the core rulebook:

“ Each time after the first that you'd become trained in a given skill, you instead allocate the trained proficiency to any other skill of your choice—though if the skill is a Lore skill, the new skill must also be a Lore skill.”

Hmm, I thought I covered that. Did some adjustments a while back when you'd reported this initially and I thought it was working (issue was due to a holdover from playtest setup), but might be an issue with the specific case where I addressed a larger scope. If you've got the bug report in, it'll be on our radar to check specifically.

I sent the bug report in a while back, and then sent an email a couple of days ago as instructed above, complete with a screen shot.

Hey, we got a fix for this in with today's release. Just wanted to give you the heads up there.

Hey, thanks!!!