Werewolf Animal Form Stats?

[dballing]

I am converting a HL Classic Portfolio to Hero Lab Online.

When it converted a Natural Werewolf NPC, I noticed something odd.

The HLC stats were:

Human: STR 16
Animal Form: STR 18

The HLO stats were:

Human: STR 16
Animal Form: STR 31

(a bunch of other stats changed as well, including hit-points, but this was just a particularly grievous example).

Clearly one of those two engines is making a grievous mistake on calculating the animal-form stats. Can anyone help explain to me how this is happening, and which of these I should trust?

 

[Daniel V]

Ah, yeah I recalled seeing a bug report for that a short while back. Tackled a few bug reports while switching projects, so pulled it up and got it addressed, so hybrid and animal forms should be applying their changes correctly come Wednesday's release.

 

[dballing]

Awesome. Thanks. Since I'm the nerdy curious sort, can you tell me what was happening under the hood to make things that wonky?

 

[Daniel V]

So the change shape ability for lycanthropes looks at what the ability score modifier would be for the animal (plus the template's mods) and compares it to your "starting value" for the ability score (10 + things like templates and race mods), and applies its own modifier based on if the animal's would be higher to make up the difference. Issue was that the calculation was being run right before that starting value was calculated, so it was seeing basically 0s and thinking it needed to apply a LARGE modifier to make up the difference (mainly because that base 10 wasn't accounted for). Something must have changed in the timings of processing ability scores in HLO vs. HLC, but it would up being a simple fix once I tracked down the problem.