Help with House Ruled Monk Archetype

[Maidhc O Casain]

I'm playing in a heavily house ruled game, and desperately need some help with a couple of the modifications to the Monk class.

I'm fairly adept with the editor as long as it's a matter of check-boxes and "standard" changes. I've had a little bit of success previously with copying eval scripts and making minor changes, but I am - in general - absolutely worthless with code.

Now that I've got that out of the way, here's what I've got.

First, the archetype is a Gestalt of the Monk and the Barbarian. Got that part down. If possible, I'd like to make the changes below to the Archetype, not to the base Monk class.

The first house rule I can't figure out is to feat selection. The GM allows the Monk to take feats normally only available to Fighters (Weapon Specialization, for example) as feats taken with character progression (not bonus feats for Monk levels). I can't figure out how to make these available and active without error messages.

The second is changes to the Flurry of Blows ability, and is more complex to explain. First, the Flurry ability progresses to Improved at sixth level and to Greater at 11th level (due to the Monk getting full BAB). In addition to the extra attacks, at 6th level the Monk can now make a single extra attack (over and above the extra attack at -5 originally granted by Improved TWF) at his highest base attack bonus on a standard action attack, at the end of a charge or as part of a Spring Attack action, but both attacks take the -2 penalty. At 11th level, in addition to the extra attack(s) granted by ITWF, the Monk gets two more extra attacks, each at -5, and the -2 penalty for Flurry is removed.

Finally, in this game the penalty for iterative attacks is never greater than +5, regardless of character class, BAB progression, etc. So at 11th level a Full BAB character (which the Monk now is), the attack bonuses would be +11/+6/+6 (w/out Flurry). Flurry bonuses would be +11 (BAB)/+11 (ITWF)/+6 (BAB -5)/+6 (BAB -5)/+6 (ITWF)/+6 (GTWF)/+6 (GTWF).

Does that all make sense?

[Aaron]

For 1, anyone can already take Weapon Specialization in the general feat table. Do you mean his monk level counts as his fighter level for the purpose of feat pre-reqs? I believe the Magus does something similar, so you might want to look at the Fighter Training class ability for an example script.

For the 2nd, I don't think you can do this. The lower attack bonuses are all hard coded and based on the attack bonus of the weapon, so there is not a way to change the differences between each from 5 to something else. The closest that I am aware you can do is to set the Helper.ExtraHigh tag on weapons, which is used for things like Haste and Monks spending Ki for an extra attack. That tag adds 1 extra attack at the highest bonus, without affecting subsequent attacks.

[Maidhc O Casain]

Thanks, Aaron.

Weapon Specialization has Fighter Level 4th as a pre-req. So I guess it's available to other characters, but not without throwing up a validation error. I'll look at the Magus class ability and see if I can figure it out.

That's what I was afraid of on number two. I guess I'll track that one manually for now.

[Maidhc O Casain]

Got the Fighter feats figured out - much appreciated!

[Maidhc O Casain]

OK, more help needed!

In this game, Weapon Focus works for weapon group rather than individual weapons, and adds +2 damage in addition to the +1 attack (replacing Weapon Specialization).

I looked at the eval script in Weapon Focus, but first I got lost in all the added code to make it work for weapon groups if the Hero has certain tags, and then couldn't find where it actually adds the +1 attack (which was where I was thinking to add the +2 damage as well.

Greater Weapon Focus will then add another +1/+2 which stacks with the bonuses from Weapon Focus.

Help, please!?

EDIT: Found the attack bonus and damage bonus picks, but can't figure out how to use the feat to apply them to the weapons in the weapon groups.

[ShadowChemosh]

Actually after looking at the script its doing allot of what you need already. So a few small tweaks:

~ the chosen weapon, but to all weapons of the same weapon group.
      if (tagcount[Hero.MartVersa] + hero.tagcount[Hero.MartMaster] <> 0) then

In this section I would add the source ID for your Campaign like this:

~ the chosen weapon, but to all weapons of the same weapon group.
      if (tagcount[Hero.MartVersa] + hero.tagcount[Hero.MartMaster] + hero.tagis[source.YOUR_SOURCE_ID] <> 0) then

Replace YOUR_SOURCE_ID with your actual Source ID for the campaign. This will cause the script to go by Weapon Groups when your campaign source is activated.

Then this section is doing almost everything you need. You just have to add the bonus to damage here:

        foreach pick in hero from BaseWep
          if (eachpick.tagmatch[wFtrGroup,wFtrGroup,initial] <> 0) then
            perform eachpick.assign[Broadcast.WepFocus]
            perform eachpick.pulltags[WepFocus.?]
            endif
          nexteach

The above is looping through all the weapons in the selected group and giving them weapon focus ie +1 to hit. So you just have to give a +2 bonus on damage. Take a look at the fields on a weapon and see if you figure out which field should get the +2 added to it.

[Maidhc O Casain]

Thanks, Shadow.

So, when I tried this out it worked . . . sort of. I tried a few different things, first working on the +1 Attack.

First, a quick question - it looks like this script doesn't actually allow the hero to choose a weapon group, but rather expands the selection so that when the hero takes a weapon (such as the butterfly knife) it applies the bonus to all weapons in the group to which that weapon belongs. Is this correct, or am I reading it wrong? If I'm reading it right, I can make do with that but teh perfectionist in me really wants it changed so that the hero actually selects a weapon group.

I should also mention that the hero I'm working with has cold iron and alchemical silver shuriken and unarmed strike on his sheet - both are in the Monk Weapon Group, I think.

Here's what I did, and the results (working just with the attack bonus right now):

1. Added the Campaign Source ID, making no other changes. This caused some weapon selections - some Monk Weapons, some not - to add the bonus to the shuriken but not the unarmed strike. For example, Atlatl and Bich'hwa (not Monk Weapons) caused the shuriken attack bonus to increase, but Bo Staff (a Monk Weapon) did not. Adding Armor Spikes or Unarmed Strike caused Unarmed Strike bonus to increase; adding cestus caused the shuriken and the unarmed strike to increase. Weird.
2. Added the Source ID, and took out the other two picks in that line. Same results.
3. Changed the selection in the "Select From" drop down menu from "All Weapons" to "Weapon Groups." This caused the program to add the attack bonus to the equipped weapons regardless of the group selected (Axes, Heavy Blades, Monk, etc). This was true whether number 1 or number 2 above was in place.

For the damage part, I changed the code you provided to the following:

        foreach pick in hero from BaseWep
          if (eachpick.tagmatch[wFtrGroup,wFtrGroup,initial] <> 0) then
            perform eachpick.assign[Broadcast.WepFocus]
            perform eachpick.pulltags[WepFocus.?]
            perform eachpick.assign[Broadcast.WepSpec]
            perform eachpick.pulltags[WepSpec.?]
            endif
          nexteach
        perform hero.pushtags[WepFocus.?]
        perform hero.pushtags[WepSpec.?]

That seems to take care of adding the +2 damage as well, but otherwise the results were the same as 1-3 above. That is, it added both the attack and damage bonuses in the same instances as it did just the attack bonuses.

[Maidhc O Casain]

Been beating my head against this an hour or so a day since my last post, and my brain hurts from all the code swirling 'round in it - I'm just going in circles .

Still stuck with the three results from above - any advice or pointing in a direction to look would be much appreciated.

[Aaron]

Soo... I am a little unclear exactly what you're currently having trouble with. Somewhere along this thread you lose me. Could you restate your difficulty in simple terms and I will see what I can do?

[Maidhc O Casain]

Thanks, Aaron.

Part of the confusion is likely because my initial question changed - ShadowChemosh gave me an answer to that.

I'm now trying to make Weapon Focus work for weapon groups rather than individual weapons. In this game, Weapon Focus also adds +2 damage in addition to the +1 attack (replacing Weapon Specialization).

I think I've got the bit about adding the +2 to Damage working correctly.

For the bit about choosing a weapon group rather than a specific weapon, it looks like the current version already does this in some instances, so I've added the campaign source ID to those instances with the reasoning that whenever that source is checked it should activate this.

That produced the strange results I posted above in 1, 2 and 3.