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Stacking bonuses question

S

saturn082

Member
Heya,

In my campaign our party came across an elven wizard who outfitted us all with Cloak and Boots of Elvenkind.

Our DM Ruled that

a) Hide and Move Silently are a combined skill (like Pathfinder) known as Stealth

b) When both items are equipped the Stealth check stacks (normal behaviour is +5 hide and +5 move silently for the cloak and boots respectively)

Questions:

1) Is there any way to alter the skills in hero lab d20 so that some skills are combined? (Ranks put into one adds ranks to the others, so that only relevant modifiers are different)

2) How does one write a prerequisite that allows bonuses to stack when two particular items are equipped together?

Thanks!
 
You could make a new skill called "Stealth" and then preclude (hide) the original hide and move silent. Of course, this means that you would need something that transfers bonuses from the old to the new, (I don't know how to do this) or make copies of existing items that grant a bonus to Stealth instead of H/MS.
OR use ReplaceID to swap one of the old skills to 'Stealth', and work around the second.
 
saturn082 said:
Questions:

1) Is there any way to alter the skills in hero lab d20 so that some skills are combined? (Ranks put into one adds ranks to the others, so that only relevant modifiers are different)
Click to expand...

Dami's suggestions are probably about the best you could do here. If you crate the new skill, then replace Hide with it, for example, you can then either create a script on a condition that transfers all MS bonuses to Stealth or use an adjustment to manually add the appropriate bonuses.

saturn082 said:
2) How does one write a prerequisite that allows bonuses to stack when two particular items are equipped together?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Stacking bonuses isn't so hard, actually. There are a few different ways to add bonuses to skills, such as:

#competencebonus[hero.child[kHide],5]

If you use this script, HL will automatically take the highest competence bonus of all items that use this script. However, if you do this instead:

hero.child[kHide].field[BonComp].value += 5

then HL will simply add 5 to your existing competence bonus, which would effectively give you the stacking you desire.
 
It seems the first option is the best one, i.e. transferring all bonuses from the first to the second. That being said in my campaign we are using a series of combined skills,

Jump, Balance, Tumble ==> Athletics
Hide, Move Silently ===> Stealth
Spot, Search, Listen ===> Perception

Any chance you could point me in the direction of a script that would accomplish one of these combinations that I could use to extrapolate the other two?
 
saturn082 said:
It seems the first option is the best one, i.e. transferring all bonuses from the first to the second. That being said in my campaign we are using a series of combined skills,

Jump, Balance, Tumble ==> Athletics
Hide, Move Silently ===> Stealth
Spot, Search, Listen ===> Perception

Any chance you could point me in the direction of a script that would accomplish one of these combinations that I could use to extrapolate the other two?
Click to expand...

I don't think there's a value that contains the sum total of all bonuses and penalties given to a specific skill, unfortunately. That means you would have to transfer the value of each field individually with a script that looks like this:

Code: 
hero.child[kAthletics].field[BonAlch].value += hero.child[kJump].field[BonAlch].value

Depending on how stacking works, you might also consider this:

Code: 
#applybonus[BonAlch,hero.child[kAthletics],hero.child[kJump].field[BonAlch].value]

If you assume all bonuses of the same type stack you can use a variable, like this:

Code: 
var bonalch as number
bonalch = hero.child[kJump].field[BonAlch].value + hero.child[kBalance].field[BonAlch].value + hero.child[kTumble].field[BonAlch].value

#applybonus[BonAlch,hero.child[kAthletics],bonalch]

Once you've got that sorted out, you would then need to apply the same method to all the other bonuses. To find out what they are, right-click on a skill in the skill tab of the portfolio and select "Show Debug Fields".

I would recommend starting small, and just transferring one field from one skill to another to make sure you can get it to work. Timing issues might actually prevent this from working properly. I haven't tested it myself.

Clearly, this is not ideal, but I can't think of a better way right now. If I come up with anything, I'll let you know.
 
Thanks Sendric,

For now what I'm doing is manually adjusting all of the combined skills every time I put a point into one of them, this works for the bonuses but unfortunately does nothing for any class skills or skill prerequisites that require ranks.

I don't think there's a value that contains the sum total of all bonuses and penalties given to a specific skill, unfortunately.
Click to expand...

All it would need to do is include a rank as though it were actually put in. The manual adjustment increases the bonus, but does not consider the final value as ranks put in.

Ideally there would be a check box for 'pathfinder skills' but this would be a distant dream at this point I imagine.
 
saturn082 said:
Ideally there would be a check box for 'pathfinder skills' but this would be a distant dream at this point I imagine.
Click to expand...
Honestly if you are at this point I would just say "go to Pathfinder" and use all its rules. :)

But putting in "pieces" of Pathfinder rules into d20 system is not going to be something that LW will do. Which makes sense because that opens a door of people demanding that "every" Pathfinder rule being an option in d20... :(
 
ShadowChemosh said:
Honestly if you are at this point I would just say "go to Pathfinder" and use all its rules. :)

But putting in "pieces" of Pathfinder rules into d20 system is not going to be something that LW will do. Which makes sense because that opens a door of people demanding that "every" Pathfinder rule being an option in d20... :(
Click to expand...

Don't I know it. Believe me I've tried. Sadly with a library of 3.5 books accumulated over decades it's nigh impossible to get my friends to switch. I'll keep futzing with scripts and if all else fails I'll just adjust my available skill points to add ranks to the combined skills.
 
saturn082 said:
Don't I know it. Believe me I've tried. Sadly with a library of 3.5 books accumulated over decades it's nigh impossible to get my friends to switch. I'll keep futzing with scripts and if all else fails I'll just adjust my available skill points to add ranks to the combined skills.
Click to expand...
Don't forget you can use all your 3.5 books with Pathfinder. It is backwards compatible. Plus ALL its rules are 100% free on line look at d20pfsrd. Or the Humble Bundle is going on and you can get REALLY REALLY cheap pdf's and support a charity! :D Buy gaming books and help a charity out. How could you go wrong? :eek:

I don't have a way of doing this skill change in d20 off the top of my head. It would take me a bit of time to sit down in front of d20 and see what I could get to work. I think it can be done actually but takes a bit of scripting knowledge. "Maybe" this weekend I can take a look...
 
ShadowChemosh said:
Don't forget you can use all your 3.5 books with Pathfinder. It is backwards compatible. Plus ALL its rules are 100% free on line look at d20pfsrd. Or the Humble Bundle is going on and you can get REALLY REALLY cheap pdf's and support a charity! :D Buy gaming books and help a charity out. How could you go wrong? :eek:

I don't have a way of doing this skill change in d20 off the top of my head. It would take me a bit of time to sit down in front of d20 and see what I could get to work. I think it can be done actually but takes a bit of scripting knowledge. "Maybe" this weekend I can take a look...
Click to expand...

Anything you could do would be very much appreciated! That being said is there anywhere I can donate to support the work you guys do?
 
saturn082 said:
All it would need to do is include a rank as though it were actually put in. The manual adjustment increases the bonus, but does not consider the final value as ranks put in.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I understand. If you create a new skill, and then hide or replace the old 3.5 ones, wouldn't you just be putting ranks into the new skill instead of the old ones? In that case, there would be no need to determine what the ranks of the old skills are.

In any event, if this is indeed what you want, then I think the field you would be looking for is either kUserPts or kUserRanks. The former is the number of points you put into the skill while the latter is how many ranks you have, which is only different in the case of cross-class skills. If you use the same script as above with one of these fields (depending on what you need), that should do it.
 
The adjustment I used for testing was skill points. I adjusted skill points up for the combined skills and the result was that the modifier was higher (1 point added to jump for example) but the system didn't recognize that I had actually added a point to jump, it just increased the modifier. As a result any prerequisites that require points in jump were still greyed out.
 
Sendric said:
I'm not sure I understand. If you create a new skill, and then hide or replace the old 3.5 ones
Click to expand...
I am not even 100% sure this will work. Once you hide those Skills it will be like they don't exist. Meaning any feat or ability that tried to reference them could fail. This is assuming you are talking about using *HIDDEN and not if a Hide.Skill tag exists. Hmmmm working in too many different systems now I don't remember if Hide.Skill exists in d20.... :confused:

It maybe better to leave those skills and pull the bonuses from them to the new Stealth skill.
 
This might be a stupid question, but the original request sounds a lot like Pathfinder (those skills are combined and replaced in the same way).

Would it be easier to start with Pathfinder as a base, then, instead of trying to make 3.5 behave that much like Pathfinder at such a core level?
 
Silveras said:
This might be a stupid question, but the original request sounds a lot like Pathfinder (those skills are combined and replaced in the same way).

Would it be easier to start with Pathfinder as a base, then, instead of trying to make 3.5 behave that much like Pathfinder at such a core level?
Click to expand...
Yep I asked the same thing and it was answered HERE. :) :D
 
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