Quickly change skill used for gun types?
 

Hello all, I have a fair number of custom rules I'm using for my Shadowrun game. One of them is that Longarms and Automatics are rolled into one skill - let's call it Longarms for easy reference. It's easy enough for me to override the skills in Hero Lab Editor by creating the skill using "Replaces Thing Id".

However, is there an easy way to modify the skill used in the weapon descriptions themselves? It kind of bugs me that all the calculations for weapon dice pools in the charsheets are now off because they're all created to use a skill (Automatics) that is no longer valid in my game. The only way I can think of is to recreate every single weapon that uses Automatics and override the original weapon Thing Id and set the skill used to Longarms, which could take a long time.

Is there any kind of plaintext file I can do a mass search and replace on to change the skill used on the weapons?

Not sure if it helps / hinders / changes the process, but I am running HL on a Mac. I imagine it's not much different from running it on Windows, but who knows.

Disclaimer: Mathias and Aaron are the experts, so they might have a better suggestion.

I think the simplest solution may be to replace the Automatics skill with a new version that simply adopts the value of the Longarms skill. Simply force the user-entered value to zero so no one inadvertently uses the skill and assigns BP to it, then have the net value be calculated as equal to the Longarms skill. Once the same value is mirrored into both skills, all the weapons based on the Automatics skill will instantly work and use the correct values for your custom game.

Changing one skill will be vastly easier than changing dozens or weapons to use a different skill. Granted, changing all the weapons is the "proper" solution, but it's also very annoying, because you will need to replace all the weapons that use Automatics via the editor and one at a time.

There should be zero difference between the Mac and Windows versions with respect to editing data files. Both platforms use the identical data files and have the exact same editing features available.

Hope this helps....

Thanks Rob, that's a great idea!

Following your suggestion, I decided to try modifying the Longarms skill instead so that it:

A) bootstraps the Automatics skill, and
B) modifies the Automatics skill with its own rating.

Thereby hopefully preventing players from trying to modify Automatics on its own.

I got A) down pat but I think I might have some syntax incorrect or something with B). Right now I have an eval script running that looks like this:

Phase => Traits
Priority => 1000
Index => 1

~Make Automatics rating the same as our rating
perform hero.child[skaAutomat].field[trtMagic].modify[+,field[trtFinal].value,""]

But that doesn't seem to do anything. I also tried changing trtMagic to trtFinal on the skaAutomat Thing ID, but Hero Labs didn't like that at all. Any suggestions for a good way to do this?

Thanks again for the initial suggestion, this is a great way to make the weapon skill calcs work correctly once I can get the script working!

Skills in Shadowrun are a two part system - the skills themselves, and their dicepool helpers.

On the Dicepool Helper tab in the editor, try making a copy of the Assault Rifles item - you'll see that it is linked to the automatics skill, and then to the assault rifles and battle rifles categories of weapons.

So, what you can do is to find all the dicepool helpers for automatics, and replace them with copies that use longarms instead. That way, the longarms skills will now be linked to those weapon categories.

Then, use the *Hidden tab to get rid of automatics, and you won't even have to touch the longarms skill itself.

Wow, thanks Mathias - that's awesome! Regarding Weapon Categories under the Dicepool Helper; is there any way to modify those so that specialties apply correctly? I tried adding my own in the Dicepool Helper for my copy of Assault Rifles, but it needed a unique ID so I'm guessing that has to be created somewhere different. Maybe I'm blind or something, but I couldn't find a tab that would let me do that.

I did try creating a copy of the Longarms skill with its own specialty set to see if that would create the tags for specialties accessible by Dicepool Helper items, but that didn't seem to work.

Thanks again, this is awesome!

Actually, never mind, figured it out - thanks! Creating the dicepool helper adds it to the skill specialty list and everything gets calc'ed out nicely :)