ABP Bonuses and Companions

[Valdacil]

I posted the following Feature Request to LW and their response was to post to the forums to gauge how popular this would be. They said they are aware of the ABP and companion problem and are working on a solution, so hopefully that means they will implement something like what I indicated I did to fix it. However, the ability to transfer bonuses from master to companion is still an outstanding issue and the root of the feature request.

TL;DR - ABP bonuses should not be granted to companions (animal companions, eidolons, spiritualist phantoms, etc), but request a feature to allow transferring of a bonus from master to companion. Read below for more details:

------- Posted Feature Request -------

Problem Statement: Automatic Bonus Progression rules serve to diversify character equipment by removing the Big 6 by granting equivalent innate bonuses. This is facilitated by sacrificing 1/2 wealth per level. This can be thought of as 'buying' a pool of bonuses the same way that the player would have bought the equivalent equipment. The problem comes with the way Hero Lab handles ABP related to companions (animal companions, eidolons, spiritualist phantoms, familiars, etc). Since the master (player character) is purchasing a single pool of bonuses with 1/2 wealth per level, companions should not also receive these same bonuses. Otherwise, the player character should get 0 wealth per level.

Potential solution: I easily solved this via an override to the ABP rules editing mechanic mechAutoBo to include a condition on every bootstrap for "(hero#CompIs.? = 0) & (hero#Race.tpAnimal = 0)" which prevents any of the bonuses from being bootstrapped to animals or companions.

Feature Request: While not an official rule, house rules related to ABP are that bonuses from the master can be 'transfered' to a companion. So my druid could choose to forego their +1 deflection bonus (for instance) and instead grant that +1 deflection bonus to their companion. Currently, I have to do this by adding an adjustment to the master to back out the effect of the bonus, then add an adjustment to the companion to add the effect of the transferred bonus (+1 deflection AC in this case). It would be great if this were easier to do. Either:

1) Ideal solution: From the ABP screen have some checkbox or other interface option to 'Transfer to Companion' and an indicator showing which bonuses had been granted but transferred and to which companion transferred to. This would be easiest for the user to manage their ABP pool.
OR
2) Add an adjustment to 'Transfer ABP Bonus'. This adjustment would allow you to select the bonus type (Resistance, Deflection, Armor Attunement, Weapon Attunement, Mental Ability, Physical Ability, etc), companion recipient, and ranks of that bonus. So if a character had 2 ranks of Resistance for instance, they could transfer 1 rank of Resistance to their companion and keep 1 rank for themselves. When transferred, the bonuses should grey out on the ABP tab of the master, and should show up with the appropriate number of ranks on the ABP tab of the recipient companion.