Natural weapons from feats question.

[Lawful_g]

Having trouble adding a natural attack from a feat. Deepspawn (from Lords of Madness) gives 2 tentacle attacks, so I bootstrapped wTentacle to the feat, gave it the appropriate tags for Primary natural attacks and the #, but as soon as I add the feat I get the following error.

Cannot access bootstrap source for non-bootstrapped pick 'fDeepspawn'
Location: 'eval' script for Component 'BaseNatWep' (Eval Script '#1') near line 37

As I recall, I have had similar problems with other feats that add natural weapons (like Strength Devotion, and some wild feats like... something of the Serpent that gives a bite attack). Any advice on this? I don't think I ever got this worked out before, but it just came up again.

[Lawful_g]

Nevermind, after looking back at the previous post, I saw the answer was to switch from Unique to not unique, which didn't work for the feat (since it can only be added once), but after making a non unique special that did the same thing and bootstrapping it, everything worked out fine.

Also, it occurs to me that maybe I can fix the Strength devotion problem by just adding a second non unique special bootstrapped to the Unique special (rather than the feat).

[Mathias]

Feats should not set their uniqueness to "Unique" - they should use "Add Once" as their uniqueness - that allows the bootstrap to track its parent, but doesn't allow the user to select the feat a second time.

"Add Once" is also required if you want a class to bootstrap the feat, but still give the user the option to purchase the feat before the class grants it (for example, allowing someone who purchased only 1 level of ranger to get the track feat to still purchase the endurance feat).

[Lawful_g]

I did wonder what the distinction was, so thanks for clarifying, but it was at "add once" when it gave me trouble. It's fine now though.

[Sendric]

I ran into this issue as well, so I copied the special you used, Aaron. However, the feat I'm working on (Illithid Grapple from Complete Psionics) isn't as straight forward. It can be taken up to 4 times, each time added a new tentacle attack.

2 questions arise from this:

1) Can you limit a feat to be taken up to 4 times?

2) When the feat gets taken a second (or third or fourth) time, can the natural attacks be stacked instead of appearing as additional weapons?

Actually, I'll add in one more since it's going to come up later. Another feat has a pre-req of the character having the Illithid Grapple feat all four times.

3) Is there a way to set the pre-req to search for a feat having been taken four times?
Update: Here's some code that seems to work for this problem:

        if (hero.tagcount[HasFeat.fIllGrap] = 4) then
          @valid = 1
          endif

I'm going to go on and finish some of the others then jump back to this and try to research/fiddle around with some stuff. If I figure out any solutions, I'll post it, but in the meantime I would appreciate any suggestions or answers to these problems.

[Aaron]

1 - Yes, you can set its maxlimit to 4

2 - Have each of the feats add +1 to the value of the helper that bootstraps the natural attacks. Then have an eval script on that helper that applies the same Value.? tag as it's current value to the bootstrapped natural weapon.

3 - That'll work, it'd also fit as an expr req.

[Sendric]

Originally Posted by Aaron

1 - Yes, you can set its maxlimit to 4

2 - Have each of the feats add +1 to the value of the helper that bootstraps the natural attacks. Then have an eval script on that helper that applies the same Value.? tag as it's current value to the bootstrapped natural weapon.

3 - That'll work, it'd also fit as an expr req.

Cool. I'll take a look at 1 and 2 on Monday. As for 3, that falls under the "duh" category. I'd already parsed it down a bit, but clearly not as far as I could have. Thanks.

[Mathias]

Here's a refinement of the prereq you posted. I find I prefer this to maxlimit in my own work:

 
hero.tagcount[HasFeat.fIllGrap] <= 2 + @ispick

(this is an exprreq)

@ispick is a special variable-like thing whose value is set by HL. Once you've added the item, @ispick = 1, but until then, @ispick = 0. That way, while you're still adding the feat, it's making sure that there are only 2 or fewer copies there so far (since you're adding the third), but for the copies that have already been added, it's looking for 3 or fewer total copies.

[Sendric]

Thanks, Mathias. I was wondering what @ispick did since I've seen it in a few places but haven't actually figured out how to use it.

[Sendric]

Originally Posted by Aaron

2 - Have each of the feats add +1 to the value of the helper that bootstraps the natural attacks. Then have an eval script on that helper that applies the same Value.? tag as it's current value to the bootstrapped natural weapon.

Struggling a bit with this one. Any good examples out there you know of that I could look at?

Also, I was tinkering with something else, and was trying to use the script below without success:

if (hero.tagcount[HasFeat.fIllGrap] = 0) then
 perform assign[Helper.Helper]
endif

Any thoughts on why this wouldn't hide the feat this script is used on until the feat fIllGrap was taken? I also tried the reverse (apply Helper.Helper with the tag then delete it after the feat was taken) to no avail. I tried several timing locations, but it didn't seem to make a difference. Is there something I'm doing wrong here? Also, is there another way to hide a feat from the selection list (like what happens after a feat set to "Add Once" goes away after it is selected)?