Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Discussion concerning lmarkus' campaign framework for D&D3.x and Pathfinder.

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lmarkus001
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by lmarkus001 »

So I played around with the campaign file you put in your GoogleDocs that I thought had all of the tokens all on one map. But some of the tokens are clearly untested (they have HUGE names that appear to be much of the statblock text). Are they the same as the individual tokens in GoogleDocs or are those massaged a bit more?

I see you are using the average (Bestiary) hitpoints, but I have not found anything in PF rules that says that is what summoned critters should have. If I don't find any such rule, then I may process these tokens to have random Max HPs. I played around with the macro on Neofax's version of the framework, and have setup a map with just the summoned critters and you can press that macro to summon what you desire. I could add to that macro the calculation of the random Max HPs. I did remove all of the Augmented tokens and am processing those that are only Augmented back to baseline. I will use a Augmented Summoning mod-set to apply the augmentation (or make another macro like the Fiendish template macro).

dragonlady
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by dragonlady »

When I did these i used statbock import utility. Your right that not all are tested. But it is a starting point, and I may go through the entire exercise and use the new Statblock import 2 utility that is going on out there.

As for HP, the Core rulebook does not state hp for monsters, but the Bestiary and Bestiary 2 give HPs for the average beast, but that does not mean for a home game you can't do what you want.

Be careful though about maximizing Hit Points, because that would made the augmented summoning feet pretty useless then.

Part of the problem in my import was that the statblocks that I used was not a standard text block, but a pdf file that had overlaying text blocks, so copy and paste errors occurred.

So the individual tokens are the same as on the one map.
Last edited by dragonlady on Sun Jan 23, 2011 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Azhrei
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by Azhrei »

dragonlady wrote:Be careful though about maximizing Hit Points, because that would made the enhanced summoning feet pretty useless then.
Interesting, I hadn't considered that.

But Augment Summoning (there is no "enhanced summoning") simply bumps the Con by +4, so it doesn't matter if you maximize HP.
Part of the problem in my import was that the statblocks that I used was not a standard text block, but a pdf file that had overlaying text blocks, so copy and paste errors occurred.
Yeah, the PDFs have a bunch of annoying problems. :(

For example, they'll use a long dash instead of a hyphen and that screws up any kind of pattern matching that relies on the hyphen. There are other examples as well: single quotes, double quotes, and sometimes the ellipsis will be one character instead of three periods...

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aliasmask
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by aliasmask »

Azhrei wrote:Yeah, the PDFs have a bunch of annoying problems. :(

For example, they'll use a long dash instead of a hyphen and that screws up any kind of pattern matching that relies on the hyphen. There are other examples as well: single quotes, double quotes, and sometimes the ellipsis will be one character instead of three periods...
I just recently parsed through a pdf file and I find consistently words with "fl" or "fi" will toss in an extra space after those 2 letters. Find and replace works well to fix that though.

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lmarkus001
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by lmarkus001 »

I am about to release an updated version of my framework. In it I am including your nice map with all of the summoned critter tokens. I have scrubbed the level 1 critters so they are all "up to snuff" and I have purged the celestial/fiendish tokens and removed the augmented (+4 con/str) from the tokens as we will have an Augmented Summoning mod-set and we have the nice macros to assign Fiendish/Celestial. I also used the summon macro in the PFS campaign macro set and made it so it defaults to summoning critters, oh and I am renaming the critters like "0101 Rat - Dire" where the numbers are the summoning level for Summon Monster/Summon Nature's Ally. I am leaving the HP to the average but am changing HPMax to the dice (like 2d8) and there is a macro to roll the hitpoints. All of that makes playing the Summoner nice and easy :-)

I wanted the summon to also apply Fiendish/Celestial + Augmented + roll hitpoints as needed, but copyToken() is a bit of a grump to work with so they are follow-up macros (in the past I have had some success with execLink() and delaying the processing but it just was not cutting it for me recently, sigh).

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Azhrei
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by Azhrei »

lmarkus001 wrote:I am about to release an updated version of my framework.
Wow, those all sound like nice updates!

You are aware that (most of) the PF monsters are available from IMarvinTPA's web site at prpg.imarvintpa.com? (You want the "Monsters" section in the bottom right section.)
I wanted the summon to also apply Fiendish/Celestial + Augmented + roll hitpoints as needed, but copyToken() is a bit of a grump to work with so they are follow-up macros.
There are actually some neat techniques that can be used in this regard. For example, you can invoke the Fiendish macro automatically as part of the Wiki: copyToken() execution.

Say you want 4 fiendish critters. Set up the following:

Code: Select all

[h: original = "SomeCritterToken"]
[h: posX = 1]
[h: updates = "{
  name: '[r: original + posX]',
  x: '[r: posX][h, macro(...): args]'
}" ]
[h: copyToken(original, 4, "", updates) ] 
Replace the macro(...) with your macro parameters. Note that the newly created token is the "selected token" for the purpose of executing the bracketed commands, just as if Wiki: switchToken() had been called on it. This is documented in Wiki: copyToken().

There are some weird things with this, though. Regardless of which order you put the elements inside the updates variable, the properties will always be examined in the same order. I know name comes first and the x and y properties come later, but that's all I remember at the moment. What that means is where you put your [macro:] call determines which properties have already been set on the new token. Ideally I would've created a new property called "postmacro" or something that always would've been executed last, but I didn't think of it at the time and it's too late to get it in now.

Ask in a new thread if you have questions.

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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by dragonlady »

Well it is great to see movement on all of this!

I look forward to seeing all the work y'all have been putting into this.

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lmarkus001
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Re: Pathfinder Templates and Summoned Monsters

Post by lmarkus001 »

@Azhrei

That looks cool. Pretty impossible to make work, but if it did it would be cool :-) Ok posting elsewhere (http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php ... 64#p187364) for assistance heh....

I can get the macro called to be somewhat executed, but no property changes occur.

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