Lameness is Lame

[Alden Loveshade]

GCA 4 doesn't apply modifiers for Lame to all skills it would affect. How can I add the modifiers to a character sheet?

For example, B141 says, "Crippled Legs: You have all of your legs, but some of them are damaged. For a human, this means one bad leg. You are at -3 to use any skill that requires the use of your legs...." GCA 4 applies this -3 to combat skills, but doesn't apply it to skills such as Acrobatics and Dancing.

I checked Broadsword skill on a character with Lame (Crippled Legs). I went to Full Edit Window, Advanced Mode, and in bonuslist saw '-3 from 'Lame (Crippled Legs)'. This appeared to be uneditable from that window.

I opened up Dancing, went to Full Edit Window, and saw bonuslist without going into Advanced Mode and it was editable. I added '-3 from 'Lame (Crippled Legs)' to bonuslist. It changed the skill level not by -3, but by -300!

Weirdly, the next time I tried both of these, I got different results. I couldn't edit bonuslist on Dancing. I don't know if I entered Advanced Mode differently the second time or not, so I may not have done it exactly the same each time.

In any case, can GCA 4 be modified to automatically show the change to skills for Lame (Crippled Legs)? In the meantime how I can I edit GCA 4 for a particular character to add the -3 modifier to skills to which it would apply?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[Armin]

BonusList() should never be editable, because it's just an informational list of where bonuses are coming from. Even if it were editable, it would have no effect on a character, and would be immediately overwritten by the next calculation pass.

Because it's not a real tag, it doesn't normally appear in the Advanced Edit window at all. Advanced Edit allows you access to every tag a trait has, even where editing them could damage or completely change the trait.

However, if you *add* the tag to the trait using Add Tag, either in Advanced or the Full edit windows, it will continue to exist with whatever value you give it, because the bonuslist() that you normally see listed in Full Edit is, again, a made-up list just to show what bonuses are being received.

(Yes, this is actually somewhat confusing and can therefore be annoying. This will be simplified and improved in GCA5.)

Now, to answer your question...

Originally Posted by Alden_Loveshade

In the meantime how I can I edit GCA 4 for a particular character to add the -3 modifier to skills to which it would apply?

To change a particular character, you'll want to edit Lame (Crippled Legs) instead of Dancing or Acrobatics. In GCA4, bonuses and penalties are given, not taken, so gives() is the tag to edit, in whatever trait you want giving the bonuses.

Open Lame (Crippled Legs) to the Full Edit window, and look at the gives row. It looks like this:

-3 to "CL:Combat/Weapons - Melee Combat"

You'll be wanting to add your adjustments to the end of this existing text, so that it gives your -3 penalty to Dancing and Acrobatics. That'll look like this:

-3 to "CL:Combat/Weapons - Melee Combat", -3 to SK:Dancing, -3 to SK:Acrobatics

When you click OK after making that change, you'll be back in Simple Edit, where you can see in the Gives: block that additional penalties now appear (you'll probably have to scroll down the box to see the Acrobatics one.

When you click OK again to close Simple Edit, you'll be able to go to the Skills list and see your penalties being applied to your other skills, as desired.

Originally Posted by Alden_Loveshade

In any case, can GCA 4 be modified to automatically show the change to skills for Lame (Crippled Legs)?

To apply these changes to all versions of Lame (Crippled Legs) you use in the future, you'll need to put your changes into a data file, and then load the data file in the future, loading it *after* other files that may include Lame (Crippled Legs) to ensure your version is the one that lives on.

Go back to Lame (Crippled Legs) and open it up to Full Edit again. At the top of the window is a Save to Data File... button. Click it. You'll get a standard Save dialog box. Make sure you're looking at your GCA4 documents folder, in the \data files\ subfolder (or wherever you want to save this file). Enter the file name you want to use; if you save a lot of things, perhaps Alden's Custom Data or something.

If you're asked to create the file, say yes. You should then have the file to use, and to add to any data sets you create in the future, in order to add your custom data.

Hope that helps,

Armin

[Alden Loveshade]

Originally Posted by Armin

-3 to "CL:Combat/Weapons - Melee Combat", -3 to SK:Dancing, -3 to SK:Acrobatics

Armin

With copying and pasting, it literally took me about 30 seconds to fix the character. I'll probably add this to a date file later. Thanks a lot!

[Armin]

You're welcome.