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World is Square house rules

Aaron said:
Using weapon finesse? if so, that is working as intended (unless world is square is supposed to change that).
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No, the character is a brawler so proficiency is there, Im even building it with the shield champion.
Melee +3 = +1 (Base Attack Bonus) +4 (strength mod) -2 (ACP from shield)
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The only time it changes is when I turn off the Wis Rules. I've attached the file for those that want to check it out.

View attachment Brawler Wis.por
 
Okay, I've had a look at the character that SpectreMarkIV provided, and I've diagnosed the problem. It's a weird corner-case bug in how Weapon Finesse was implemented by Hero Lab itself -- the World is Square rules only allowed for the highly specific set of circumstances that trigger the bug to occur.

The problem happens when all of the following are true:

1) You have Weapon Finesse
2) Your STR modifier is higher than your DEX modifier
3) You have a finessable weapon equipped
4) You have a shield equipped

When these conditions are satisfied, Hero Lab applies Weapon Finesse's clause about the shield's armor check penalty to finesse weapons even though the PC isn't actually using Weapon Finesse. The PC's attack bonuses are all calculated using the STR modifier, because it's the higher of the two, but the shield penalty goes through anyway. Effectively, the PC gains no benefit from the feat, but still takes its penalty.

I have attached a portfolio demonstrating the problem without the WiS rules getting involved.

SpectreMarkIV, your PC has Weapon Finesse (even though it doesn't look like it!) because the WiS rules give that feat for free to everyone, and then hide it in the list of feats. Your Strength is 18 (+4), your DEX is 16 (+3), you have a shield, and you have Weapon Finesse thanks to the WiS rules. So you get hit by the bug. If you disable the WiS rules, suddenly your PC doesn't have Weapon Finesse any more, and so the bug goes away.

In the ordinary course of things, this is unlikely ever to happen. No sane player would choose to take the Weapon Finesse feat when their STR mod is already higher than their DEX mod. No sane GM would give Weapon Finesse to a monster that could not benefit from it. And so the bug escaped notice.

One could argue that interpreting the rules strictly as written means that this behavior is correct. The feat says: "If you carry a shield, its armor check penalty applies to your attack rolls." Full stop. If you have the feat, you take that penalty, no if's, and's or but's.

A particularly sadistic rules lawyer could even make a plausible case that since the feat says "carry" a shield rather than "wield" or "use" a shield, you take that penalty any time you have a shield in your immediate personal possession, including strapped to your backpack or stuck in a bag of holding. And because it does not specify "finesse weapons," but instead says "your attack rolls" it should logically apply to every attack roll you ever make: with spells, with weapons light OR heavy, with your fist. Everything.

Clearly, that is NOT the intended behavior in the case of the WiS rules as written by Michael Iantorno. They eliminate Weapon Finesse entirely, allow the PC to choose whether to use their STR or DEX mod, and do not say anything at all about shields or armor check penalties. I only wound up giving Weapon Finesse to everyone because that was the easiest way to implement the change. I figured it would just pick the higher of the two modifiers with finessable weapons, and that would be that. After all, why would anyone choose the lower modifier?

I am uncertain what to do at this point. Question for Aaron or Mathias: would it be better to file a bug with Wolflair to get a fix for this extremely obscure bug, or just compensate within the WiS rules?

In the meantime, SpectreMarkIV, I suggest using adjustments to give yourself a +2 bonus on your unarmed strike and your dagger until this gets sorted out one way or the other.
 

Attachments

Thanks! It took longer to write it up than to diagnose, actually. It's important to write clearly in these sorts of things -- that went through three drafts.
 
Well I'm thankful that i've not done something to herolab. In my main character file I've done the bonus change to fix the issue and look forward to see what happens in the future in regards to this issue.

Thanks again for all your hard work.
 
If the rules don't actually give the feat, but rather let you choose Str or Dex for attack rolls, maybe that should be accomplished by a different means than the feat. You can apply a tag for individual weapons to switch what attribute they use for attacks, and an ability could be bootstrapped to all characters to make this choice.
 
Aaron said:
If the rules don't actually give the feat, but rather let you choose Str or Dex for attack rolls, maybe that should be accomplished by a different means than the feat. You can apply a tag for individual weapons to switch what attribute they use for attacks, and an ability could be bootstrapped to all characters to make this choice.
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At the same time Aaron, this should still be recorded as a bug in weapon finesse, right? Shouldn't the script that is checking to see whether to use Dex also enable the shield penalty?
 
wdmartin said:
When these conditions are satisfied, Hero Lab applies Weapon Finesse's clause about the shield's armor check penalty to finesse weapons even though the PC isn't actually using Weapon Finesse. The PC's attack bonuses are all calculated using the STR modifier, because it's the higher of the two, but the shield penalty goes through anyway. Effectively, the PC gains no benefit from the feat, but still takes its penalty.
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The wording of Weapon Finesse doesn't say that the shield penalty only applies when you are using your Dex as your bonus attack. They are in separate sentences.

With a light weapon, rapier, whip, or spiked chain made for a creature of your size category, you may use your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier on attack rolls. If you carry a shield, its armor check penalty applies to your attack rolls.
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@Aaron I am not enthusiastic at the prospect. It sounds like a lot of work to implement. And then everyone using the WiS rule set will be forced to make the choice for each weapon they possess. Virtually all of them are going to pick the higher bonus. End result: I'd be doing a lot of work and making it harder for players to manage their characters, in order to implement an option where the user's end choice is predictable 99.9% of the time.

@Farling. Yes. As I noted above.
 
Farling said:
The wording of Weapon Finesse doesn't say that the shield penalty only applies when you are using your Dex as your bonus attack. They are in separate sentences.
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Are there any other feats that apply a penalty for taking the feat? You don't seriously believe it is intended that once you take weapon finesse, you can't use a shield, even with a non-finessable weapon, do you?
 
wdmartin said:
@Aaron I am not enthusiastic at the prospect. It sounds like a lot of work to implement. And then everyone using the WiS rule set will be forced to make the choice for each weapon they possess. Virtually all of them are going to pick the higher bonus. End result: I'd be doing a lot of work and making it harder for players to manage their characters, in order to implement an option where the user's end choice is predictable 99.9% of the time.
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I don't think it would be much work, maybe 2 hours or so, for testing. I assume you've already got a mechanic around to implement these changes and bootstrap weapon finesse to everyone. Instead of the feat, bootstrap a racial ability (since those are shown on everyone) with a selector to choose Dex or Str, then all you need is an eval script to pull the "Use this for melee attacks tag" and to to foreach through all weapons on the hero to push that tag.

If having a racial special without context around annoys you it might be worth it to set a configurable up as an intermediary, then bootstrap the selector ability as a class special to that configurable. Call the configurable "WiS Special Rules" and you can even provide information (through other bootstrapped specials) to users about what is going on, to help future folk figure out what is going on if there is background stuff going on.

Anyway, it's your thing, and there may be complications I am unaware of, but that's how I see it.
 
Unlike bonuses, penalties stack, unless otherwise noted. -2 Weapon Finesse, -2 Shield non-proficiency. Specifically these are untyped penalties to the attack roll from different sources.
 
@farling No, I don't believe that. I thought that you were saying that's what you believed? Clearly there's some misunderstanding going on here.

I think the easiest way to resolve this is just adjust the script for Weapon Finesse so that it's only bootstrapped if the PC's DEX mod exceeds their STR mod. I'll experiment with it and see if that works.

EDIT: Nope, I don't think that approach will work.

Hour 1: Learned that you can't specify attribute value prerequisites in bootstrap tag expressions.

Hour 2: Learned that you can't assign a tag based on attribute values until the Post-Attributes phase, when it's far too late to bootstrap anything since that happens in the First phase. So I can't tag them as eligible for finesse and then check for that in the bootstrap pre-reqs.

Hour 3: Learned how to use Helper.FtDisable. Also learned that if your Weapon Finesse pick has Helper.FtDisable assigned to it, the PC still takes the shield penalty even if their DEX mod is lower than their STR mod, so assigning Helper.FtDisable to PCs that don't use their DEX mod for attack roll calculations won't actually save them from the effect.

It's almost 4 AM and I have to GM at noon. I'm not prepped, and will be making up a whole bunch of stuff on the spot. Must sleep now.
 
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I am on vacation for the next week, so if you like, I could send you an example of what my version would be. Is there somewhere I can read the rules for this system?
 
Here you go, took longer than it should have because I stupidly forgot to bootstrap the configurable to the mechanic, then was running around wondering what the heck I was getting missing agent messages for.
 

Attachments

Okay, I've reviewed Aaron's code, and it looks good! I have integrated it into the WiS codebase and tested it, and it seems to work nicely. There were a few bits of additional work -- setting sources, writing a quick eval script on the mechanic to give everyone HasFeat.fWepFin to satisfy prerequisites on other feats -- but those were pretty straightforward. Many thanks to Aaron for taking the time to help out!

I have pushed out an update that should correct that issue. It also fixes a bug with Warpriests; they weren't getting their sacred weapon damage dice increase correctly on all the weapons in a group. It was just a timing issue, and should be working now.

You may still encounter errors regarding the feat fCoverFirV. I have a bug filed on this already -- #134866 -- and am hopeful that it will be corrected before long. In the meantime, I don't think the errors actually cause any problems with most PCs. Just ignore them.
 
I'm getting an "Error 503 Backend fetch failed" from your download page linked in the first post. It looks like your CDN or caching server may be misbehaving.
 
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