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How to use Character Assistant: Advanced Guide

Posted: July 5th, 2018, 8:45 am
by Daedalus
This guide assumes that you have already read How to use Character Assistant.

This guide will cover five sub-topics of the Character assistant; adding limit break/trance, adding armor, adding weapons, adding rolls, and finally, adding buffs/debuffs.

Adding limit break/forcefield/trance:

Limit break
To add limit break to the assistant, simply append to the assistant's bbcode tag.

Example:

And that's it. Limit break is thus added to the tracker.


Force Field(feat)
To add a forcefield to the assistant(the feat), simply add a parameter to the assistant's bbcode tag, forcefield, with a value of your spirit variable, or a flat number:



Trance
Trance is a bit different from limit break, as it doesn't rely on the "extra" config option. Instead, trance is added as a bbcode itself to the content of the assistant bbcode.

Example:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [trance]
  [/trance]
[/assistant]
And that's it! However, what is trance without buffs? The trance feat does allow for the addition of feats, after all, that can of course add more temporary points to certain stats or the like. Well, there's a reason the trance tag is structured the way it is; it's so that those buffs can be added.

This is done with the bbcode tag. Bonus has a few config parameters; name, var, emp, shield, equippable, slot, and floor. Not all of these parameters are required for trance bonuses; all we really need is var and the bonus content:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [trance]
    [bonus var="spirit"]+500[/var]
  [/trance]
[/assistant]
The "floor" config parameter only becomes relevant if you want to round-down the results of the math. It would be relvant with the following example bonus:

Now, when trance is in the activated state, that supplied bonus will become active, and modify the tracked stats for the duration of the active state.

Trance only becomes active when the active button is clicked, and only deactivates with the deactivate button is clicked.

Adding armor:
Adding armor works like adding a trance; one adds an tag to the tag's content:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [armor name="Armor name goes here" ps="armor_psoak" ms="armor_msoak"][/armor]
[/assistant]
That's it. Armor in its most basic form; physial soak and magical soak are added either as variable names, or numerical values(1000, 1000+ 2000), or of course, math. Of course, some armor may be upgraded to add bonuses. Like trance, the armor tag may use the bonus tag as content:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [armor name="Armor name goes here" ps="armor_psoak" ms="armor_msoak"]
    [bonus var="strength" emp="yes"]+400[/bonus]
  [/armor]
[/assistant]
You will notice here that we have added an extra parameter to the bonus tag, "emp". The emp parameter may be used for armor bonuses which rely on power to function, such as an exo-skeleton.

For adding internal shielding to armor, it's a slight different, but still simple.

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [armor name="Armor name goes here" ps="armor_psoak" ms="armor_msoak"]
    [bonus shield="yes"]20000[/bonus]
  [/armor]
[/assistant]
Unlike prior usages of the bonus bbcode, this one doesn't make use of "var", instead is has "shield". Shield automatically turns emp to yes, and takes the supplied number in the bbcode as the max shield capacity.

Adding weapons:
Like adding a trance, and armor, weapons are added via the tag to the assistant tag's content. Like the armor tag, the weapon tag has a few config parameters; name, bonus, and damage. Name is of course the name of the weapon, damage is of course the damage. Either can be a flat number, a variable name, or math with either:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [weapon name="Awesome sword" bonus="50" damage="varname2 * 30"][/weapon]
[/assistant]
And of course, like trance and armor, weapons may have bonuses. For weapons, there are a few relevant config parameters; name, slot(optional), var, emp(optional), and of course, equippable(optional). Name is the name of the bonus, such as "Digital scope" for a scope. Slot is optionally a slot that the bonus takes up, and is only in use if equippable is set to yes. A good example of this is a scope; you can only have 1 scope on a gun at a time, so if you have two scopes for the weapon, set both of their bonuses slot to "scope", equippable to "yes", and the assistant will alternate between the bonuses; only one may be equipped at a time. If emp is "yes" on the bonus, like armor, the bonus is disabled if emp is active.

Example of a sniper rifle with two scopes and a suppressor:

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[assistant character="Some character" hp=hp mp=mp ps=psoak ms=msoak]
  [weapon name="Sniper rifle" bonus="50" damage="varname2 * 30"]
    [bonus name="Digital Scope" slot="scope" var="attack_bonus" emp="yes" equippable=yes]+40[/bonus]
    [bonus name="Analog Scope" slot="scope" var="attack_bonus" equippable=yes]+20[/bonus]
    [bonus name="Suppressor" slot="barrel" var="sniper_damage" equippable=yes]*.75[/bonus]
  [/weapon]
[/assistant]
Adding rolls:
There's not much that needs to be changed for existing rolls. However, unlike all the previous bbcode tags discussed above, rolls do not need to be added as content to the assistant tag. Rather, they can remain wherever they are currently, but they do need some additional config parameters; name, show, type, mp, damage, damagetype, and extra. name is the name of the roll, to appear in the generated roll log for the assistant. Required if you want the roll to appear in assistant's roll log. show defaults to yes, and determines whether or not the roll is displayed where it is in the character sheet. It will show up regardless in the assistant log, just so long as name is defined. type is optional, but can be one of: combat, skill, stat, or other. mp is optional as well, but if specified, is a number. damage may be a varname, a number, or math with either. damagetype is a sentence, like "Unsoakable fire" or "Physical"; it can be anything, really, just as long as it is enclosed in quotes. Finally, extra is anyting extra about the roll, such as how many foes it hits, how many hits it does, etc. A | can be used in its value, where each bit of text is separated by a |, for example: "one | two | three". Text separated in this manner is given its own line in the extra column.

Finally, the bonus for the roll can stay the same. Example of the above:



However, giving a type to each roll can get a little.. crowded. For that purpose, we have . Simply set category's value to either: combat, skill, stat, or other, make the content the rolls you already have defined, and boom, typed rolls.

Any rolls added in this way may be rolled at the click of a button; the button that looks like dice, to the far left of the roll row.


Adding buffs/debuffs:
Finally, we're onto buffs/debuffs. To add a buff or debuff, click the 'fav vars' tab(short for Favorite variables), type in a variable name(it will offer suggestions), then hit return(not tab), or click the variable name as it appears.

Once that is done, a favorite variable will be added. You can now add buffs/debuffs to that variable. Simply click the "Add a bonus" button, enter a value akin to "-100", "+400", "* 1.5" in the field, and presto! That variable is modified everywhere it is relevant, including the sheet. So if your sheet uses the or bbcodes, any math inside of them will be recomputed accordingly.

That's it for the advanced guide.