NPC Effects that go Unparsed in the Combat Tracker

Fantasy Grounds does a pretty good job at parsing NPC Actions and placing hyperlinks in the NPC's Actions menu. One of the Action types that FG doesn't handle robustly is Effects. Conditional Effects (e.g. Prone or Restrained) are handled but many of the other Effects (e.g. disadvantage on ability checks or disadvantage on strength saving throws) are not.

Two questions:
1) Is there a syntax that can force the Effect into the Combat Tracker? For example: "[EFF: DISSAV: strength]". If I added the magical syntax to a NPC Action in the Stat Block, FG would key off of it, and place that exact verbiage into the Action Menu of the NPC in the Combat Tracker?

2) Does someone know of an extension that handles this? Via either more robust parsing or special syntax?

I've done my obligatory searching of the forums, but was unsuccessful in finding an answer.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[EDIT] Oh, yes, BTW I know about the Effects Manager and extensions like Rob2e's that use the Effects Manager, true these would substitute as work arounds, but don't really answer my question.

I'm assuming that you are talking about 5e here.

If so then this extension adds effects to an NPC https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...cs-characters)

Otherwise the only effects which are added to the CT from an NPC are the ones which the parser can work out and are discussed here https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...and+Encounters

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

I'm assuming that you are talking about 5e here.

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Yes, Zacchaeus I am. Sorry for not being specific.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

If so then this extension adds effects to an NPC https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...cs-characters)

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This is not quite where I was headed. Thank you. I use this extension and was excited that it might do what I had hoped. But alas not (see below).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

Otherwise the only effects which are added to the CT from an NPC are the ones which the parser can work out and are discussed here https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...and+Encounters

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This is quite helpful.

Thank you very much Zacchaeus for trying to help me out. Here is more detail at to what I was driving at. There are a couple screen shots.

In this screen shot, when the Dragon is dropped into the Combat Tracker, note how the Frightful Presence (circled in red) and Weakening Breath (red) actions are parsed. The target's saving throws are parsed properly (green) as is the Frightened Effect (blue) but the Weaken Breath effects, disadvantage on attacks, checks and saves (also blue) are not parsed.
Attachment 35989
What I was hoping for is some sort of undocumented "default" parsing protocol already in the ruleset that would allow special syntax text to be parsed into the Combat Tracker. A simple example is shown in the next screenshot.
Attachment 35990

What I have learned though, using the third part of your help information above is that even if the effects are in the Combat Tracker as shown (syntactically correct I believe) when I hover over my added [EFF:...] entries, they don't highlight, in other words, even though they're there, in the Combat Tracker, they cannot be applied to the target.

I could write an extension to do all of this, and who knows, maybe I will, but at the moment, I'm extension'ed-out. I don't want any more extensions to try to maintain.

(And before someone else comes along and informs me that I can just use the Effects Manager Utility... I'm aware of this, I just wanted the consistency of having the non-conditional effects in the same place as the conditional ones that are properly parsed into the Combat Tracker.)

As always, Zacchaeus thanks so much for your help.

The wiki might be more up to date, but I still look at this; https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ffects-on-NPCs

Will that help?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LordEntrails

The wiki might be more up to date, but I still look at this; https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ffects-on-NPCs

Will that help?

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Thanks LordEntrails, but not quite. Although, it is a real gold mine! Only conditional effects (like prone, intoxicated, grappled..) are addressed, all those other effects that we can apply as covered here are not (and I am beginning to suspect aren’t supported in the parser).

Moved to the 5E forum.

The parser looks for specific words, basically the conditions, that are defined in a LUA table within the ruleset. It also make a best effort at extracting data from phrases. There has been discussion from the devs about moving to an automation syntax, but I haven’t seen anything definite in 5E. The PFRPG2 ruleset has an experimental form of this being expanded on each release.