spell effects

I thought that spell effects would be attributes of the spells. (I wouldn't expect area-of-effect or casting shapes, or tricky spells to be automated-- just the simple ones). I haven't dug into manual editing of the campaign files yet. Could that be done by editing the campaign files, and it just hasn't been done yet? If that's not possible then it seems crazy to have to repeat spell definition work for every campaign.

The work-around I'm using is to save and load spell effects, though to cover all the spells that characters can use on different days the spell effect pulldown list will quickly grow to be huge. But spell effect saving doesn't work right either. Some basic effects work great, but the duration settings below do not save.

 

When I Save an effect, the only file updated is D20PRO_ROOT/user/effectsd20Pro.GM.dat. I see that that contains my named spell effects (with the names as text content of <name> elements). This the right file? POSTNOTE: I see that non-judges have the file named "effects2d20Pro - PC.dat". (Pretty inconsistent file name segment delimiters.) Looks like same schema inside, so I can just copy back and forth between these files right? POST-POSTNOTE: Verified! these files are interchangeable and replacing them has the desired effect.


I've tested the Fast Healing/DOT behavior and am reporting my findings here for posterity. Works great for static ongoing damage. As Dragonmaster13 suggests, it would be great to support variable ongoing damage too. Just for brevity here, I'll call the feature "DOT".

• Logic imperfection in the field label. Says "DOT" but you must actually enter a heal value so must enter a negative value to have damage applied. More widespread use of toggle-able tool tips in d20Pro would make things much easier to understand (making it largely self-documenting) and would allow for labels to be shorter. Could also use a tooltip on the Duration fields to say that it (unintuitively) effects only the specified DOT value.
  
  The duration of the DOT is correctly constrained by the Duration setting below.
  
  No DOT-specied heal/damage is applied immediately/in-current-turn.
  
  Heal/damage is applied whenever the effectee's turn comes up. If the effectee's turn come after the spell is thrown, then the ongoing damage will indeed be applied in the same round as the attack was thrown. So in that case if I specify regular damage of 5 and DOT of -2, the effectee will take 7 HP damage in the 0th round.
  
  The spell effect shows as active in both the Active Effects panel and by effectee indicators until the effector's turn on the last round, even after the effectee has taken the last of his damage.

 

I'd love to, but where is this discussion? I've searched the forum for topics with "+abilities +spells". User guide has no section with "abilit" in the title and is not searchable. The Ability Tab section of the Character Sheet page has no discussion. A search for "abilities" on the blog captures nothing relevant.

 

Excellent. I appreciate all the coaching!

 

Any ETA on the spell system/effects redesign? The roadmap thread hasn't been updated this year. I'm trying to get my players onboard with d20Pro, so if these complex and inter-dependent work-arounds will be unnecessary in a few months, I'd rather do something simpler, perhaps totally manually, temporarily.