Negative damage effects and crits

[Surles]

I have a weird interaction i would like some assistance on. I'm trying to setup an easy way for my PC's to use bombs when they crit; using ShadeRaven's wonderful drag'n'drop effects everything works perfectly until a crit is involved. Because the splash damage is part of the main attack roll, it gets doubled. Separating the damage causes other problems (resistance and weakness getting calculated twice) so i went the route of just giving an effect for my PC to click when they crit that looks like "DMG: -1". The expected outcome would be (1d6+1d6+2)-1. Instead, it seems i gets (1d6+1d6)+1-1, resulting in the splash damage disappearing entirely.

Entirely possible I'm overthinking this, but I'm just looking for some guidance on how to handle this. Thank you!

[ShadeRaven]

Hey Surles. Welcome to the forums!

Let's see what possibilities we have here. I am not going to lie, a lot of what I did was in the infancy of the PF2 ruleset. Tren has done a tremendous amount of updating since Drag and Drop was done. Ideally, and in the future, items will be getting their own use process so things like this won't be an issue in the future.

For now, I think there's no terrific solution, tbh. An alternative to using spell slots for this, you could set up Weapon Attacks for these damage outputs. I did similar, later on, for things like Brutal Attack, I believe (which could be handled even better with the additions since then).

So, if a player doesn't mind a longer list of weapon attacks, you can set up a weapon attack to look something like:
[Equipped] Bottled Lightning (ranged) +7/+2/-3 [1d6 electricity + 1 electricity, splash] where, within, you can set the Crit Modifier on the Splash damage to 1... so a crit will then roll up as: 2d6 +1 electricity. You'd then need a separate line for the 1 electricity splash damage for those in the splash radius... A "spell group" that tracks formulas and applies things like Flat-footed will still be useful, probably.

One advantage to this would be that a character can use the ammo field and the equip/not carried/carried toggle to show what they create each day, then go into Combat Mode to get rid of what will become a very long list of bomb attacks as more formulas are attained.

I can do some screen shots if that would help visually get you to where you are hoping to get.

Now it's also possible others have come up with even better solutions to this! But that's probably where I would start myself.

[CaptJack2883]

Surles,

This is being caused by the effect of "DMG: -1" is being multiplied on a crit as well. The solutions posted by ShadeRaven could work, or you could try putting a separate damage line for the splash damage, this way the crit system will multiply everything on the first line, then you click the splash damage separately afterwards.

[Surles]

Shaderaven,

Did not realize that the weapon damage section actually had individual crit modifiers! The damage and everything definitely works with this solution, although it is slightly annoying to have to scroll down for the PC to grab the correct effect to apply. Still, I might end up going with this solution for the time-being. It's too bad the damage spell actions don't have the same ability to customize crit mods, but it's probably better to just focus on the full item overhaul for the dev team. I was also using a similar system utilizing the prepared casting system and assigning each item a "spell slot" to calculate ammo, but just using the actual ammo system likely works out better.

Capt,

This is the first solution I went with, but it had the problem of resistances or weaknesses getting double-dipped, as well as just being an extra button to click. That said, it seems we aren't getting out of the extra clicks, so what I may do is just drop the damage types from the splash damage. There are some oddities with that if the monster has resistance just above the damage roll, but I don't think it would be too hard to deal with. Either way i need to do some testing to see which actually works out better in game

Thank you for the assistance!