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Problem with random Mutations

P

Paragon

Well-known member
Okay, I'm actually on the very last thing in my Broken Earth project, a creature called a Terror Monkey.

The problem is that the Terror Monkeys, in addition to their default abilities, often have some other abilities. Let me show you the table so what I'm talking about makes sense:

1. No other mutation.
2. Large: The monkey is size 0. Increase Toughness
by one and bite damage by one die type.
3. Poison: Bite delivers venomous poison.
4. Quills: An adjacent character who hits the monkey
must make an Agility test or suffer 2d4 damage.
5. Fast: The monkey has a pace of 10 and uses a d10
for its run die.
6. Armored: The monkey gains +2 Armor.
7. Horrifying: When the monkey uses its terrorize
ability, those who fail the test are Panicked rather
than Shaken.
8. Roll again twice.

Now, if all these were simple additional abilities, I'd figure I'd just put in an entry and let the GM add abilities in the Creature creation. But I'm not sure you can, for example, select an ability that will raise you to Size 0 when you're normally -1.

Can anyone see any tidy way to implement these?
 
An easy option for the single-mutation monkey is to have just one of each type. That is 7 (counting no other mutation). But two of each of the other double variations sucks. What, 7 + 15 entries? Hmm, that is a "clean" way,

The Racial Properties imply that they can be added to a creature, but I have never seen a race creatpr. There is a checkbox on the Racial Properties "Selectable for Creatures?" where you select if it can be used when customizing a creature. I have never seen this customizer. I had figured that maybe it is on the to-do list, but since I do not use HL at the table I had not played around with the GM stuff.

But if the creator does work, use Racial Properties instead and you are done.
 
When using a creature during the creator (basically, select Creature instead of PC or NPC) one of the options on the Edges tab is "Abilites" which will bring up a set of traits that have been selected as choosable.

The question I'm having is how to set up 2 and 6 so they'll work right; I seem to recall there's a problem with trying to add to, rather than replace armor, and I'm not sure howt hat works with size. I'm also not, of course, sure whether some of these (like those two) are supposed to stack. But even if I assume not, those two seem to be potentially problematic.
 
If you're just setting them up as Racial Abilities or Properties they should work fine. On the Armor one just make it Natural Armor. The problem would be if you had 2 of that same racial attribute where they wouldn't stack. But generally, by the rules, armor doesn't stack anyway, you just take the higher of whatever it is, so even if those monkey were wearing some armor the only number of note is whether the natural armor or the worn armor were a higher value for a given location. The Size one (again, only really problematic if you are stacking it, arguably just create a separate entry for that case). Size isn't really tracked in Hero Lab, just put in the toughness modifier to cover it, is all.
 
That's right; I forgot Size doesn't do anything but modify your toughness. I was just concerned that the Monkey's already start out at Size -1, so I'm not sure what would display if I do something that modifies that. I seem to recall when I did things with Natural Armor in the past that timing sometimes mattered if I had two different numbers, but since this stuff is going to be done just for them, I can just set up a custom Natural Armor entry for them that will look for the mutation ability and upgrade if its present if just having it use a bigger one doesn't work right.
 
Does Size -1 have a "No Print" option? If it is a Racial Property it does, not sire about Racial Ability. It will not take it off the list.

Actually what I would do is just change its name as displayed if it increases. So it will say Size 0 instead of Size -1. Just put an if statement that looks for the size increase in the eval script of the Size -1.
 
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