[Phoenix] Encumbrance Display Problem

[Onkl]

Hi guys

Thanks to your help and long nights before my screen, I've successfully created a racial template for a WH40k game. You can find it on TME's wonderful GCA Repository.

Now I got a little problem with phoenix it seems. I love this fantastic character sheet with the gazillion options you can set. Unfortunately, I seem to have made an erroneous configuration and can't seem to fix it.

Please have a look at my sample Space Marine. He's wielding 359.5 lbs of equipment. I usually don't print the inventory but rather put everything the PCs carry in loadouts and print them out. I also set the "Combat" load out to be the one determining the encumbrance. In the GCA loadout window it correctly displays encumbrance level 1 (Light), but on the sheet it says the character has none encumbrance.

Do you have any idea what I've done wrong?

Cheers

Onkl

[tmedwards]

There are two places to select load-outs in the Load-Out Manager. The upper one, Selected Load-Out, is for editing – the fact that it's in a separate group from the equipment editing list is something of a UI design issue, but they're essentially one group of controls. The lower one, Encumbrance Load-Out, is the one that controls which load-out the character is carrying.

From the PDF, it looks like you didn't select the load-out in the Encumbrance Load-Out group, or if you did that it wasn't saved for some reason. Open the Load-Out Manager window and select the preferred load-out in the Encumbrance Load-Out group, at the bottom of the window, click the OK button, and then save the character. That should solve your problem.

[Onkl]

Thanks for you answer, but unfortunately that's not it. When you take a close look at the PDF you see that the « Combat » Loadout is in red letters and braces, meaning this is the active loadout for the encumbrance display...

[tmedwards]

Hmm, yes. I hadn't thought to look to see if you were printing the character's load-outs.

Well, that's just odd. In theory, that shouldn't be able to happen. The only option related to the marking of encumbrance is whether it's on or off, and Phoenix is, clearly, marking the encumbrance, but, also clearly, the wrong one. The problem is, however, that Phoenix does no calculations here, it merely relays the data made available by GCA, so I can't see that it could be a fault in Phoenix.

I've downloaded your WH40K GDF and have been able to, more or less, recreate the character. It's displaying the same problem as the one in your PDF example. Hopefully, it will help me narrow the list of suspects enough to figure out what's going on.

[tmedwards]

Update. It's definitely not a sheet issue, Phoenix or otherwise.

What's happening is that GCA is not using the equipment added by the character template Space Marine Power Armor (WH40k) when determining the character's current load. The Load-Out Manager window displays the correct load and encumbrance values for all of the equipment in the load-out, but elsewhere GCA isn't factoring in the equipment added by the character template. The character data, in the character save and also passed to sheets, only show a load of 17.5, which accounts for the non-template equipment, and an encumbrance of 0 (none), which is correct for the incorrect load value.

Armin will likely read this eventually, but I'll ping him about it anyway.

PS: A solution that you can use right now is to remove the equipment from the template and just have players' add it manually. Alternatively, you could remove the template completely and move the various gives (to Striking ST, Lifting ST, and Super Jump) to the actual Power Armor (Mark VII) equipment trait. I'm not sure what Eric would recommend here, but either of those should work.

[Onkl]

Thanks so much for looking into this issue. I'll try to improve the sheet in the manner you suggested and will upload an updated version.

Cheers!

Onkl

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by tmedwards

PS: A solution that you can use right now is to remove the equipment from the template and just have players' add it manually.

Actually, probably the best solution would be to just use the #DoNotOwn directive to allow the template to add, but not own, the equipment. That'll be as if the equipment were added manually without needing to do so:

adds(_
SK:Grok,
{EQ:Foo}#DoNotOwn,
{EQ:Bar}#DoNotOwn_
)

[Angel Darkover]

Is there a problem with putting the gives() in equipment, like Thom suggested? If not, I would suggest doing that instead, as this way the gives are directly tied to the equipment, and removing the equipment removes the bonuses from the gives(). Having it all in one template gave some semblence of a relationship, but by necessity of separating the equipment from a template, that relationship is also being severed. Months down the road, the equipment could go away for some reason and the stat boosts remain because the relationship was forgotten and not connected or enforced in the GCA mechanics.

Just my two cents on the topic.