AC varying between Melee and Ranged

Hi, folks...something here I was hoping someone might have some advice on. I'm running a game of 13th Age, and one of the characters is playing the Vanguard class available from Vault of the 13th Age. The Vanguard class has one talent that gives it extra AC against melee attacks only. Thus far, we've been just kind of mentally adding one to his AC whenever folks attacked him in melee, but I decided to try building it in to attack abilities so we wouldn't have to do that. I gave him an attribute called MeleeACBonus with a value of 1, then had enemy attacks reference that ability added to his AC. So basically as a line in the attack I would include: vs [[@{target|Target1|AC}+@{target|Target1|MeleeACBonus}]] This worked, except that the other characters didn't have a MeleeACBonus and thus the attack ability would fail to run against them, because it tried to call an attribute that didn't exist. So my question, I guess, is: is there any way to make an ability call an attribute OR call 0 if the attribute does not exist? Or is there a less clumsy way to do this in general? O_O

There's no real 'or' in macro languages, so you'll have to find a workaround. You could set the MeleeACBonus on everyone, and set it to 0. That's one option, and likely your best given the existing setup.

Yeah, that's what I figured I would probably do. It's not a big deal, just was making sure there wasn't some easier way before I went and did that. :-) If there was something I just didn't think of, it'd be good to find out! :-D

As a Mentor, the easiest thing might be to duplicate the character sheet you are using and add that as a field on it with a default of 0. Then (provided all your tokens are set to a character sheet), you would at least have the attribute available for all your people.

Yeah, I may consider that too. I think every character will have to have it, NPC or PC, since some PC powers can force an NPC to attack another NPC. I'm getting halfway decent with character sheet stuff, slowly but surely, so I'm sure that's manageable.