Creating Spells/innate abilities

[Baybans]

Hello,

I apologise if there is a thread on this, however I have a demon I am creating and he has a frenzy ability whereas his attacks go up to 5 per round for 1d4 rounds and his armor class also goes up by 3. After that duration is up he is weakened and loses 3 AC for 1d4 rounds and damage dealt drops.

I thought the easiest way to sort this would be to copy Mage Armor and alter the wording but it appears not to be that simple. I can get the spell up but not the effect. I'm presuming I'm getting the wording wrong in the box below duration?

Many thanks

[Trenloe]

Which ruleset?

[Baybans]

5e Ruleset

[LordEntrails]

Pretty sure 5E does not have a way to have an effect last for a random number of rounds. Though I also think there may be an extension or two on the Forge that adds the ability.

I would just add an effect "Frenzy; AC: 3" and set the number of rounds after rolling a d4 and then when that expires do the opposite "Frenzy; AC: -3" I just put the text in the ability and then copy and paste it into the effects field as needed. Something like:

Frenzy
Demon goes into a frenzy, for 1d4 rounds he gains multiattack 5 attacks per round and his armor class increases by three. When frenzy ends, he is weakened for 1d4 rounds and loses 3 to their armor class.
Frenzy; AC:3
Frenzy; AC:-3

[Baybans]

Ok thanks but that is what stumps me, what is the effect box? Am I correct that it is the box below the duration?

[Bonkon]

Good Day Baybans
You can adjust it on the Combat Tracker. Under the Effects to the right it has Duration and what Turn it goes off. Just place the effect, roll the 1d4 and adjust the Duration to match the number rolled.

[LordEntrails]

On the Combat Tracker, click the Effects icon in the right side of the NPC entry (or PC). Then click the green plus to add an effect line, then copy the text into the effect line, then set the duration per the 1d4 roll.
Screenshot 2023-04-02 154729.png

[Baybans]

My Issue is that I have just tried to alter Shield so that it adds +3 instead of +5. And then for the after effect I copied shield and added -3 instead. When I add it to the Demon's innate ability and then put him in the combat tracker the effect is still +5 to AC so I'm obviously missing something. Add to this that I have created a character that has a new spell set (Spirit magic), I really need to know how to add effects.

If changing a working Shield spell breaks the effect I'm worried that new spells will not be possible. I would have though that the DEVs would have put a box in that plainly says Effects. So in short is there a tutorial that explains spells and innate abilities?

On another note, thank you to everyone that has replied. I really want to get this working as the PC's have done the first campaign and I'm stalling for the second campaign as I want it to be better than the first!

[Zacchaeus]

Fantasy Grounds uses a parsing system which picks out certain words in a spell or ability and creates the effects from those words. So if it finds words such as ‘the target is poisoned for 1 minute’ it will create a poisoned effect which lasts one minute. However it does not parse everything and armour class is not one of the things that it picks up. So the shield spell is hard coded; which means that when FG sees that spell it will create an AC: 5 effect. There is nothing you can do to change that short of writing an extension to over ride the ruleset code.

You can see the kind of things that the parser will use to create effects in this wiki page https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...and+Encounters

If you want to create effects for an NPC which can’t be created via the parser you can create them as custom effects in the effects window and apply them from there.

[Baybans]

Great! Thanks tbh it was driving me crazy! Nice to know that it's not something I am doing. Thanks for the link as well.