Call of Cthulhu API script or macro setup

How would I setup a players ranged attack with Call of Cthulhu ? You have rifles, handguns, crossbows, regular bows and shotguns The first 4 have a limited range and same damage with no fall off. A shotgun (there's several types) will do 4d6 @ 10 yards, 2d6 @ 20 yards and 1d6 @ 50 yards.  I have change my maps and players to yards in my game for the ranged combat and edited out "feet" which is the default. The farthest range weapon in the game is 200 yards for the time period I am going to use. There are modern weapons but we are going off the 1900. The farthest weapon I will have will be rifles and a gatlin gun. then we have 110 yards, 50 yards, 30 yards, 10 yards and finally touch for hand to hand combat. That will give you some kind of idea for my ranges. There are other weapons that drop in between those areas. i.e. certain rifles and english shotguns have different damages for their damage vs a standard 12 gauge American shotgun. Once I have this built in, then I will be able to drop in spells at some point since CoC doesn't have a level requirement. I have watched Nicks videos but most of his represent spells and levels for dungeons and dragons which will be slightly different than my setup.  Once I get this figured out then I can watch his video on how to have tokens take damage and hopefully find one about aoe damage and tokens within a radius taking damage and auto deducting them selves.

First I'd ask (dropdown) what kind of weapon your player wants to use. IF these weapons have a fixed range you can put that out, otherwise I'd ask for the range the player wants to use the weapon for and depending on that calculate the damage... with @{selected|...} you can read out the skill percentage direclty... The Keeper said: How would I setup a players ranged attack with Call of Cthulhu ? You have rifles, handguns, crossbows, regular bows and shotguns The first 4 have a limited range and same damage with no fall off. A shotgun (there's several types) will do 4d6 @ 10 yards, 2d6 @ 20 yards and 1d6 @ 50 yards.  I have change my maps and players to yards in my game for the ranged combat and edited out "feet" which is the default. The farthest range weapon in the game is 200 yards for the time period I am going to use. There are modern weapons but we are going off the 1900. The farthest weapon I will have will be rifles and a gatlin gun. then we have 110 yards, 50 yards, 30 yards, 10 yards and finally touch for hand to hand combat. That will give you some kind of idea for my ranges. There are other weapons that drop in between those areas. i.e. certain rifles and english shotguns have different damages for their damage vs a standard 12 gauge American shotgun. Once I have this built in, then I will be able to drop in spells at some point since CoC doesn't have a level requirement. I have watched Nicks videos but most of his represent spells and levels for dungeons and dragons which will be slightly different than my setup.  Once I get this figured out then I can watch his video on how to have tokens take damage and hopefully find one about aoe damage and tokens within a radius taking damage and auto deducting them selves.

This looks like a good case for using Scriptcards . It has a built-in function for calculating the distance between, say, a selected and target token, then can apply conditional logic to adjust the damage accordingly. You can even automate the attack resolution and damage application if you want. 

For a 12 gauge put this in the damage field of the weapon.  ?{Range|10 Yds, 4d6|20 Yds, 2d6|50 Yds, 1d6} You will have to change the the dice and range values for other gauges.  It will look weird in edit mode. ?{Range|Base, 4d6|Long, 2d6|Very Long, 1d6}

TheMarkus1204 said: First I'd ask (dropdown) what kind of weapon your player wants to use. IF these weapons have a fixed range you can put that out, otherwise I'd ask for the range the player wants to use the weapon for and depending on that calculate the damage... with @{selected|...} you can read out the skill percentage direclty... ----> Most players know to grab a gun with some kind of damage. Cthulhu isn't nice to players and it grinds them to remake characters over and over. That is why you can't easily sway a D&D player to Call of Cthulhu. As a player they don't feel the "growth" by leveling like they do with D&D. I like it myself but I am going to give the ability to burn "luck" to avoid certain things or make or reroll certain spells to keep a story going a little bit longer so the character can get to the "growth" stage of the game. The more you learn about the mythos the more the world unravels around you and you see it for what it really is and notice things you would never have blinked an eye about as well as be able to read certain magic spells that you couldn't before. i.e.-whatever you want to do for the story.  I like that POWer determines spells. Magic points are derived from POWer. I am going to have the players fight things from the future as well as the old west, which is where I want to send them. They will have a couple stops along the way. I will do my best not to offer them a machine gun of any kind. The ruleset for them are a headache. That is why I pick the 1900s era, plus we had alot of scientific discoveries going on, mysticism, and places on continents we haven't been too or mapped out. I would rather offer them homebrew spells or homebrew semi-cursed magic items to offset machine guns. The 1 exception would be a gatlin gun. It was in the old west it took forever to spin up and generally over heated at a certain point if it didn't have duds or blowup/need reloading. I feel that is a good draw back. Melee weapons fall under the Brawl skill. However the more I think about it, a 1 handed weapon user in melee has different fighting skills than that of a sword and shield, a two handed great sword/ax user, dual wield, or a spear for stances and parry/block issues. Where Parry/dex comes in. I would also like to give weapons hit points. This way if they "luckily" parry or dodge a nasty hit - the weapon could take the damage. The standard combat goes like this- Highest Dex goes first- ( I am a believer that the dice roll make it fun- so I am going to go with d100 plus dex.) Then the player/monsters declare an action- movement/cast/summon,aim,attack, duck for cover (if they see it coming),aim, parry/dodge in the order presented. (If someone is casting or aiming a rifle and they take damage then I would consider a INT roll or POW roll to decide if they kept their concentration or lost it due to the hit.) If the player has never seen this monster before in their life they make a SANity roll. If its fails then they lose sanity points. After so many SANity lost in a give day/occurence they go mildly insane temporarily or get a mania due to the situation they are in. ( I was robbed at gun point in my 30s and locked in a walk-in cooler- I never once believed it was real. I was even a smartass to the guys while they waved guns around in my face-there was 3 of us locked in the walkin refridgerator @ a restraunt.-luckily they were robbers and not murderers) I've been down the crazy road before.  Once a character has seen something and passed a SANity check then they will no longer lose SANity to it again unless its doing something different. i.e. ripping a players head off and eating it or w/e. The last part about the SANity check and a place to document on characters should be a place for its notes to track what they saw and passed or saw and failed. The Keeper said: How would I setup a players ranged attack with Call of Cthulhu ? You have rifles, handguns, crossbows, regular bows and shotguns The first 4 have a limited range and same damage with no fall off. A shotgun (there's several types) will do 4d6 @ 10 yards, 2d6 @ 20 yards and 1d6 @ 50 yards.  I have change my maps and players to yards in my game for the ranged combat and edited out "feet" which is the default. The farthest range weapon in the game is 200 yards for the time period I am going to use. There are modern weapons but we are going off the 1900. The farthest weapon I will have will be rifles and a gatlin gun. then we have 110 yards, 50 yards, 30 yards, 10 yards and finally touch for hand to hand combat. That will give you some kind of idea for my ranges. There are other weapons that drop in between those areas. i.e. certain rifles and english shotguns have different damages for their damage vs a standard 12 gauge American shotgun. Once I have this built in, then I will be able to drop in spells at some point since CoC doesn't have a level requirement. I have watched Nicks videos but most of his represent spells and levels for dungeons and dragons which will be slightly different than my setup.  Once I get this figured out then I can watch his video on how to have tokens take damage and hopefully find one about aoe damage and tokens within a radius taking damage and auto deducting them selves.

My reply bugged or something- I have the post above with ------->

Dave M and David you guys are extremely helpful. Do I edit the script cards from scratch with all the weapons and spells in my game or what do I do once it is up and going ? Keep in mind- Cthulhu goes off yards for range not feet. I picked it up but I need a little more guidance. Then I can start typing what i needed or run with it.

It looks like David's (not David M's) query insertion into the damage field (an manually rolling directly from the sheet) is going to be the easiest solution. The scriptcards route can potentially automate the entire attack/damage process inlcluding damage fall-off but will be a bit involved to create considering this would be your first foray into scriptcards. Also, you would likely have to create new macros for each type of weapon attack unless you wanted to add extra queries and conditional logic to a one-macro to-rule-them-all scriptcard attack macro which you'd have to click through every time.

The Keeper said: My reply bugged or something- I have the post above with -------> Melee weapons fall under the Brawl skill. However the more I think about it, a 1 handed weapon user in melee has different fighting skills than that of a sword and shield, a two handed great sword/ax user, dual wield, or a spear for stances and parry/block issues. Where Parry/dex comes in. I would also like to give weapons hit points. This way if they "luckily" parry or dodge a nasty hit - the weapon could take the damage. This is not the case. You have different skills for different weapons BUT normally you handle melee weapons just for simplicity via Fighting (Brawl) Skill... As for Weapons and Hit-Points / Parry have a look at Golden Goblin Press' Cthulhu Invictus! There, weapons / shields / armor etc. do have hitpoints and will break if severely damaged. If you want, carry that over to the 1920s or any other era you want to play in... In Invictus you also got the "parry" option instead of just dodging or fighting back... (AND in the List you can see with which weapon you are able to parry)

I haven't bought it yet. I do have Stormbringer- which I will incorporate into the dreamlands. That is where I am giving hitpoints to weapons/shields. Figuring out which weapon to parry would be very helpful I may pick it up next. I grabbed the hardcover books of The Cults of Cthulhu and softcover throw the ages and I believe The Dark Ages hardcover. I will check my PDFs from Chaosium as well. They might be in there. I (figuratively) cry when I see all the original Cthulhu, Vampire, D&D 2nd edition books I had an lost thru the years and what their value is at today. I also saw Eldritch Century for sale at a walmart ?! It seems like it might be interesting and have some different ideas for spells, monsters and such to incorporate into the game. Does anyone know of this or if it is worth it?