Today we are proud to announce that the our efforts to add the d20 ecosystem have born their first fruit, in the form of basic Pathfinder support. We will be adding features to the Pathfinder system in the coming week, and from there extend support to other systems within the d20 ecosystem, based upon the work we’ve done for Pathfinder.
One of the main reasons we’ve concentrated our efforts on Pathfinder first as it is one of the simpler variants of d20 from a developers perspective. Pathfinder has fewer exceptions in its core rule set (for example, it has no cross-class skill ranks like 3.0 and 3.5 D&D) which means it requires less effort to get a first version out there for beta testing.
In the image above you can see a screenshot of the top half of one of the new Pathfinder character sheet. Not included — for the sake of brevity — are entries for feats, languages, special abilities, spells, equipment and notes.
In a previous blog, we covered how we’d model many of the system’s values, such as abilities, skills and saves and their conditional and unconditional modifiers, and you can see the fruits of our labour represented in the sheet under the arrow, where such details are presented in case you need to know more than just the final total
This model also becomes your guide for editing these values. Many values like abilities or skills having a “base value”, ranks in the case of skills. While others have a natural base set to 10 (armour class, combat maneuver defense), or they have no base at all (saves, combat maneuver bonus).
The base (if any), modifiers and conditional modifiers are added up automatically, though the current version does not (yet) take bonus types into account. Rather than force the core rules for this upon you, we want to offer some configuration options, allowing you to decide to let some bonus types stack (like Dodge bonuses) while others only use the highest.
A second feature that we will be adding in the near future is the automatic addition of ability modifiers to various fields. For example, reflex saves and certain skills benefit from Dexterity, and we will be adjusting the sheet so these modifiers are added automatically, all with the goal of reducing how much work you need to do to keep your character sheet up to date!
That should not stop you for the moment though — we’ll make sure your character sheets will be able to seamlessly take advantage of these features once they are implemented.
A more detailed list of features is provided in our changelog and we would of course love to hear your views on our progress, including what features would make your life easier!