Multiple Custom Abilities

[DeathSheep]

I'm just getting started on learning the scripting for Hero Lab, so bear with my learning curve please!

I'm trying to add two custom abilities to a background. Essentially, I want more than one multiple choice abilities (such as the Hermit's Life of Seclusion). I'm trying to puzzle out what I need to do in order to add a second custom ability.

Thanks!

 

[dungeonguru]

I'm just getting started on learning the scripting for Hero Lab, so bear with my learning curve please!

I'm trying to add two custom abilities to a background. Essentially, I want more than one multiple choice abilities (such as the Hermit's Life of Seclusion). I'm trying to puzzle out what I need to do in order to add a second custom ability.

Thanks!

Generally speaking, the background Features like Life of Seclusion are static entries. You create a "background feature" in the General section of the editor on the Ability tab. You then can bootstrap those features to any background you create in the Background section. There isn't really a limit to how many of these you can bootstrap.

You can't dynamically add an ability to a background that exists though, so if you wanted to add a second feature to the Hermit for instance, you would have to copy the Hermit and make the changes to your variant. (And name it something like "Hermit - Mountain Variant"

 

[DeathSheep]

In this case, I'm not trying to dynamically add a feature to an existing background, but rather create two sets of features for a single background. I used Life of Seclusion as an example. If, for example, I wanted to create a background that both the Life of Seclusion and the Favorite Schemes features, then I would need to create two custom abilities with 6 choices in each one and assign them both to the same background. What I haven't figured out is how to add that second custom ability.

 

[dungeonguru]

I'm pretty sure you can't do that easily. You can have multiple features in a background, but you can't have multiple custom abilities - the mechanism expects a single custom ability where you can roll randomly on the custom abilities you've defined.

One way to simulate what you wanted to do would be creating a configurable and bootstrapping it to your background. A configurable creates a new tab to select multiple options, I would suggest looking at the existing configurables (Totem Warrior, Ritual Caster feat) and see if you can understand how those work before trying to tackle it. I don't think you would be able to replicate the random roll portion though.