So I've just started running a Savage Worlds campaign for my D&D buddies since we've had to split up due to college. Unlike most RPG's Savage Worlds doesn't have an HP system, they have Wounds. Which would be easy if it were just that. An attacker makes a Fighting roll against the defender's parry. Assuming that that hits, attacker then rolls weapon damage against defender's toughness. But unfortunately, there's an extra step that continues to serve as a monkey wrench in my Macros. In order to Wound a target you have to roll their toughness+4. If it is under their toughness it does nothing, but if it hits their toughness but doesn't reach toughness+4 the target becomes Shaken instead. The current macro I've been using is: /emas @{selected|token_name} roars, [[1t[Taunts]]] before attacking @{target|token_name} with his @{selected|MeleeWep} for [[({{d@{selected|Fighting}!}>@{target|Parry}})*((d@{selected|Strength}!+@{selected|MeleeDmg}!!-(4.1+@{target|Toughness}))/4)]] wound(s)! This works fine for the most part, but there are three snags. Neither of which are too bad, but I know other systems have it worse than Savage Worlds and if/then statements would be absolutely beautiful for 5e D&D's crit system. Problem 1: When rolling for toughness it shows one of four results. In the case of a successful fighting but a failed toughness, it displays a number <=-1 If it displays a failed fighting, regardless of toughness it displays 0. Should you succeed on the Fighting and the toughness it shows one of two things, and here in is the nature of the problem. If the number displayed barely hits the toughness it shows a number that is >-1 but <0 which indicates Shaken. If you roll way over the 4+Toughness it displays a number >1. You'll note in the above macro I changed the 4 to 4.1. I did this because on occasion the melee damage would = the toughness and display a 0, despite that they hit. This isn't normally a problem in Savage Worlds since the rules state that a tie falls to the defender, but as my D&D party is more used to our D&D rules in which the attacker wins ties I've homebrewed it for this purpose. But now I'm rambling. My original hope was to use an absolute value equation (which I later found out didn't exist) to make it so that the numbers that are >-1 but <0 displayed as a positive decimal. This of course was scrapped because by implementing it, it also made the Toughness misses that would normally be <=-1 result in positive numbers >1 which incorrectly indicates a wound. So to fix this I simply added an extra comment at the end of the display text that says if the result is <0 but >-1 the creature is Shaken. I suppose this is when most people would call it a day and be done with it, but I'm stubborn, especially when it comes to butting heads with computers over math and logic. That being said, I think it would be nice to create an if/then function so that if a result was within a target parameter it would print text (or hell roll other numbers). To use a simpler example, if you were to r/ 1d20 and its natural result was 20 then it would print "Critical hit!" or something of that nature. The next step after that would be getting it to recognize the crit and come up as max damage, but baby steps y'know? This brings me to Problem 2 (a bit less essential, but still a nuisance in its own right). Often spell casters in Savage Worlds have a punishment when their Spellcasting die (as opposed to Fighting) comes up 1, they are struck by some unfortunate backlash regardless of the result of their Wild Die (an extra D6 for important characters that can still hit even if their skill die misses). The Inline rolls unfortunately displays a red box if any of the dice roll the minimum value. Assuming they missed the spellcasting roll it would come up 0, but with the red box that indicates they rolled minimum value. But because of the toughness roll they could have rolled low, but not 1 and it would still come up as that lovely red box my players have come to dread and respect. Sure it's easy enough to just scroll over it to check, but I think it'd be nice if it was just a simple "Yup, backlash." Problem 3! Remember the aforementioned Wild Die? Well that little prick causes some irritations in my macro. Unlike other games where normally these dice are combined, when rolling attack rolls, you treat the Wild Die and the Attack Die as separate rolls and drop the lower one. So for example, if your skill die is a d6 and you roll a 4, but your Wild Die aces ( allowing you to reroll) and it comes up 9 you would use the 9 instead of the 4 from the skill die. This causes problems because now my macro's print outs are extremely long. So instead of: /emas @{selected|token_name} roars, [[1t[Taunts]]] before attacking @{target|token_name} with his @{selected|MeleeWep} for [[({{d@{selected|Fighting}!}>@{target|Parry}})*((d@{selected|Strength}!+@{selected|MeleeDmg}!!-(4.1+@{target|Toughness}))/4)]] wound(s)! (If |<1,>0|, @{target|token_name} is Shaken.) It looks like: /emas @{selected|token_name} roars before attacking @{target|token_name} with his weapon for [[({{d@{selected|Fighting}!}>@{target|Parry}})*((d@{selected|Strength}!+@{selected|MeleeDmg}!!-(4+@{target|Toughness}))/4)]]wound(s) or [[({{d6!!}>@{target|Parry}})*((d@{selected|Strength}!+@{selected|MeleeDmg}!!-(4.01+@{target|Toughness}))/4)]]wound(s) and they then pick the higher of the two. Temporarily stepping back to Problem 2, this causes the thing to appear as a Crit Fail (the result of 1 on both Skill and Wild die) despite that they just rolled minimum damage. This makes a difference because it is often encouraged that when a Crit Fail occurs to allow crazy shenanigans occur. I personally use a "Wheel of Morality" to provide essential lessons discovered through experience at random on a table. I.E. "As a spell caster, remember you cannot bounce fireballs off of the Tank's shield in an attempt to hit an enemy beside him." (Followed by the tank taking a stray fireball to the back or what have you). Again, it is easy enough to just scroll over it and double check, but simplicity. Back to problem 3! Due to a flaw in my Macro, it requires that they roll damage twice in order to calculate how many wounds they received. As you can probably tell, I enjoy inline rolls over normal ones because it keeps chat nice and clean as opposed to the insane luck of my players resulting in 15 explosions of what was supposed to be 1d6 now filling up my screen. That being said, it would be nice if the calculator could drop dice of different sizes by calculating the roll that way. For example: Johnny Wizard has a d8 spellcasting skill. As a Wild Card, he gets a d6 wild die. When he rolls them both, his d8 comes up 5, but he aces his wild die and ends up at 11. Since the total of the explosions makes the wild die's result greater, he keeps that one and drops the lower d8 roll. Then he rolls for damage (or even better lands his attack and thus the formula recognizes the success which then causes it to activate his damage macro). I know this is asking a lot, but even if it was just one of these being solved, it would make my job a lot more hectic. Should anyone have solutions for this I would absolutely adore it if you could enlighten me. My players can be a little lazy sometimes so they look to me to make macros, which I don't mind too much. It is just time consuming. Sorry about the tl;dr.
