Design question: Monsters that act like a class

[frumple]

Just a question folks.

When you are trying to code up a monster that has the abilities of a class, such as a Witch's hexes or Alchemist's discoveries, how do you go about it?

Do you make custom racial abilities of every hex/discovery, etc. the monster has access to? Have you figured a way to use the class's abilities directly (which in my experience leads to issues since races do not have fields such as xTotLevel, etc.)?

I am just trying to figure about the best way to do this that future proofs the creature for when more of a class ability gets added.

 

[Aaron]

Configurables can have custom specials added to them, so I would bootstrap one such to the race and set it up to accept hexes or whatever. That way, as Paizo or whoever adds more hexes there is nothing further needed for your race.

 

[frumple]

The issue I have found with that is when the specials reference a class ability. For instance, the alchemist discoveries that bootstrap a bomb type call the procedure BombDam which in turn looks for cAlcBomb and counts the # of alchemist levels. Others have something like this:

~ our strength is equal to our parent's caster level
      field[abValue].value += linkage[table].field[cCasterLev].value

which throws errors when used in a configurable.

I guess there may be a need for a race to "count as a class" for abilities in the same way it can count as a class for spellcasting.

 

[Aaron]

Those are arguably bugs, I wouldn't build around them.