As we continue to make steady progress on the chat, this week we are proud to show some major changes to the Pathfinder character sheet, to bring it further in line with our vision for the future.
The first major upgrade is that we have fully enabled conditional bonuses in your character sheet view. This means you can now enable pre-defined buffs, and your view of the character sheet will be automatically updated. For example, if you activate a temporary bonus to Constitution granted by the Rage power, your Constitution will increase, as will your hit points, fortitude saves, etc.
Right now, you need to activate these for all affected area’s (for example, if you activate the Rage conditional modifier for constitution, it won’t automatically also activate the Rage conditional modifier for Strength or Armour Class). Likewise, if you activate a bonus to AC, it won’t modify your Touch AC or Flat-Footed AC just yet. This is something we want to expand upon in the future. Even so, the ability to toggle these bonuses directly should already make the character sheet a lot more useful at the table, as you can implement your common buffs immediately. The sheet also takes into account any changes in your encumbrance condition caused by the changes you make, such as reduced Armour Check Penalties, for example.
With this change, we’ve also had to make another upgrade, which actually brings the sheet more in line with the Pathfinder rules by fully implementing the games bonus type system. In Pathfinder, certain abilities grant bonuses of a particular type, and most of those types overlap, rather than stack, with one another. For example, if you gain a +2 Morale bonus from your class ability, but you also gain a +4 Morale bonus from a magic item you carry, only the highest bonus applies.
In the old sheet, you could already list if a bonus was a Morale bonus, a Luck bonus or an unnamed bonus, for example, but the bonus type was not taken into account. If you listed both your class ability and your magic item, the old sheet would simply add them together as a combined +6 bonus, which is incorrect by the games rules. Since there was only one final total, however, the work-around used was to simply omit the +2 bonus on the sheet, since it was overwritten by the +4.
In the new sheet, since we have conditional bonuses, we can no longer get away with that. As such, we have updated the sheets to correctly stack any bonuses and penalties as per the game’s rules. This means that if you have multiple overlapping bonuses on a single score, any that are overwritten are crossed out, and this will update automatically as you activate or deactivate conditional bonuses. As you can see below, the sheet also takes into account that certain bonus types do stack.
While we were there, we made some additional improvements as well. If you add an ability score as the source of a bonus, for example, when you add ‘Wisdom’ to your Armour Class, the sheet will automatically fill in your Wisdom bonus so you do not have to keep manually updating it.
During testing, we noticed this feature had become bugged, so we not only fixed that bug, but also added some visual clarification so you can more easily tell that the sheet has understood your plans and will keep the value updated. This also interacts correctly with any conditional bonuses you might activate.
We have made several other bug fixes and changes as well, which are all listed in this week’s changelog. We encourage you to check that out, and to play around with the new options. We would love to hear any feedback you may have to see how we can further improve the sheet, so be sure to let us know in the forums!