Alternate Conditional Bootstraps

[Paragon]

I figure I might as well ask whether this sort of things works before I get too deep into doing it.

In my ongoing 4e work, I'm trying to make the second tier ability of the Scholar Theme work at least halfway right (if the reader doesn't know what a Theme is, don't worry about it; it shouldn't influence the question). It has a situation where it gives you a bonus trained skill, unless you have all four of the permitted ones, in which case it gives you a bonus to one of them.

Over and above not knowing how to only make it only let you chose from one of the four permitted (that's another day's problem), I'm at the moment just trying to get HL to do the either/or trained/bonus thing.

Now how I planned to do this was to have a pair of conditional bootstrapped abilities; the first would be conditional on one of them not being trained, the second on all of them being trained. I'll, of course, have to try and discern how the 4e files flag a trained skill, but I figured once I do that I can just have it search the Hero for those flags and whichever one is true will apply.

Is there any reason this shouldn't work?

 

[Mathias]

In my experience, "add this if you don't have it, add some other bonus if you do" things are simpler to create by creating two separate versions - one of which has a prereq of that thing it would add, and then it adds the other bonus, and the other that adds whatever it is you're working with.

 

[Paragon]

Well, in this case, that would only move the question back a level, since the three tiers of benefit for the Theme are already bootstrapped off the Theme itself. So I'd still have to do conditional bootstraps, just at a different point in process. You can't really make the Theme itself conditional, since the conditions may well change between the time you first acquire it, and the time when the second level of bonuses (level five) kicks in.