Advancing Animal COmpanion HD?

[TCArknight]

I'm entering stuff for a non-OGL book, and have run into a slight issue. In this book, a new type of Animal Companion is presented. I can use the normal animal companion rules for it with one exception. The minion has a different HD advancement than normal companions.

Here's where they advance:
Master Level HD
1 2
2 3
4 4
5 5
6 6
8 7
9 8
10 9
12 10
13 11
14 12
16 13
17 14
18 15
20 16

How can I match the HD of the companion to this increase? I can do everything else with the Race, Companion tab on the editor except the HD.

They also provide different special abilities than a normal Companion based on level.

Thoughts?

 

[ShadowChemosh]

The dragonrider class I did for SGG had this same problem. I had to reinvent the HD advancement from scratch. Not really too bad. The problem came in more that the order in the XML became important so I couldn't use the Editor as it would sometimes re-arrange the HD bootstraps.

Anyways if you look at the Dragonrider class in the SGG Package, which you can grab from Dropbox, that should point you in the right direction.

 

[TCArknight]

Hmmmm... these aren't working.

First/500
<bootstrap thing="cBonusHD">
      <containerreq phase="Level" priority="500"><![CDATA[fieldval:anCompLev >= 2]]></containerreq>
      </bootstrap>

    <eval phase="Level" priority="499">notify field[anCompLev].value</eval>

anCompLev doesn't seem to populate until after Levels. The notify at First/499 returns 0, but at Levels/499 it's a 1.

Thoughts?

 

[TCArknight]

Anything for this? Anyone?

Can I perhaps add a User tag such as User.SpiritLev on the class level at First/400 then do a tagcount[User.SpiritLev] >= 2 for the condition check?

Thanks!

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Hmmmm... these aren't working.

First/500
<bootstrap thing="cBonusHD">
      <containerreq phase="Level" priority="500"><![CDATA[fieldval:anCompLev >= 2]]></containerreq>
      </bootstrap>

    <eval phase="Level" priority="499">notify field[anCompLev].value</eval>

anCompLev doesn't seem to populate until after Levels. The notify at First/499 returns 0, but at Levels/499 it's a 1.

Thoughts?

That as this works and in use by hundreds of people that something must be setting the value before 499.

Looking further in the code we find:

    <eval phase="First" priority="490"><![CDATA[~ Set animal companion level based off the Steed Class ability
~ this is so the bootstrap Bonus HD work correctly.
field[anCompLev].value += master.hero.child[cDrrSteed].field[abValue].value

Damn and its even commented too. As mentioned I had to re-build the whole HD leveling process this means taking control of existing fields but re-using them for my purposes.

This is not a super fast easy thing to implement but you can do it if you want to spend the time. It was also fun working on the different timing as at some points the normal animal companion stuff will be adding values also to that field.

 

[TCArknight]

Doh!!!

I can't believe I missed that further down......

Thanks! I'll try with that and see what can do. Do you think it would be possible to add that to a creature type instead of a specific creature? That way, I wouldn't have to repeat it for every appropriate creature.....