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Negative levels not working correctly

S

Sigil

Well-known member
I had a 6th level ranger and I was wondering what would happen if you applied a negative level. I was happy to see the adjustments HL made for the negative level. The one problem I noticed was that when my ranger went from 6th level to 5th level his attacks should have gone from 2 attacks per round to 1 attack per round. Instead HL just reduced the bonus on each of the 2 attacks that a 6th level ranger would have. I believe negative levels should also remove any feats taken within the period of negative levels.
 
According to the SRD, the only effects of a negative level are as follows:

-1 penalty on attack rolls, saving throws, skill checks, ability checks; loss of 5 hit points; and -1 to effective level (for determining the power, duration, DC, and other details of spells or special abilities). In addition, a spellcaster loses one spell or spell slot from the highest spell level castable.

That's it, at least until the save is made to determine whether or not the negative level becomes actual level loss, so it sounds like HL is doing the calculations just fine.
 
My bad!! :oops: You are absolutely correct. I keep on forgetting there are differences between DnD 3.5 SRD and DnD 3.5. Very annoying, I wish WOTC would license LWD so the gamers would have a program that support what ever flavor of DnD you want to play! :evil: Sorry about that just venting. I will check my facts better next post before pointing fingers. I think WOTC should do what Steve Jackson Games does and license a bunch of character generators and let the best one win. HL of cousrse!
 
Not trying to bring this back from the dead, but have a question along a similar line of inquiry. Is there a way to apply an overall effective level to a character, much like negative levels do. I like that negative levels creates, the level plus a backslash with the effective level. Is there any way to do that, or is there a field I can adjust for effective level?

This seems to only affect things cast with spells or spell-like abilities. Can I just adjust cMagicLev for the same effect? Seems difficult since more than one class may have a cMagicLev...
 
You could create an adjustment that selects a class helper and pulls the unique ID from it.

Then do a foreach using that unique ID for all class specials, and checks if they are derived from that class. If it is, apply the adjustment to it's xExtraLev field. Like so:

Phase PreLevel, Priority 10000
perform field[pChosen].chosen.setfocus

foreach pick in hero from BaseClSpec
if (compare(focus.idstring, eachpick.root.idstring) = 0) then
eachpick.field[xExtraLev].value += field[pAdjust].value
endif
nexteach
 
Ah, never knew I could compare id strings, nice thing to know.

However, even this did not give the character an effective level. For example, I used this on a 3rd level Druid to give the Druid an effective level 1 less than it had, but it still lists its spells as 3rd level, its vs. SR as +3, and its animal companion (with Natural Bond) is still getting the companion bonus HD. So this is not giving me the effective level I need to adjust the character.

I'd use the negative level adjustment, but even that does not do this. I've been baffled by this for some time, trying everything under the sun to make it work. Unfortunately, I've had no success. I have a feeling it may be one of those things where two things are being done simultaneously (calculating and printing the calculation to the display) without being able to get anything done in between. At least negative level does the current level/effective level backslash that can serve as a reminder, I just don't want all the negative level effects that come along with it.

So, am I correct in assuming this can't be done in the d20 files? And if so, is there a way that can be fixed in the future?
 
Ah phooey, I just thought of a solution that will work as well as any. I'll just apply the negative level (to get the backslash reminder), then just add all the negative level effects back into the character. This will do, and I don't have to try to do effective level effects (except for animal companions, which I can't seem to get to work yet, but I will).
 
Actually, I'd recommend working with tags, not with strings (the string manipulations like compare() in Hero Lab take more processor cycles than tag comparisons):

Code: 
var searchexpr as string
searchexpr = focus.tagids[SpecSource.?,"|"]
 
foreach pick in hero from BaseClSpec where searchexpr
 
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