[PF] NPC SRD insertion does not work properly / Feat: Weapon Finesse workaround suggestion

Today i read for the first time, that you are supposed to be able to drag the NPC SRD info directly into the character sheet. That would had been great and would have saved loads of time if it actually would work. The only info as far as i could see that was transfered into the sheet, been the ability scores. no HP, not even the important bits like attacks or anything else. So i presume that needs a little more work? or recently got broken with the big character sheet update? I would actually like it, if we could roll right off the SRD sheet. and assign tokens to open SRD sheets. That would perhaps be even quicker. So we just need to make sheets for NPCs not covered in the SRD. On another note. We often have rogues coming through on our games (i have no clue why we have such an attrition rate with rogues, but eh). What is often a little annoying is the fact you cannot select a melee attack with dex bonus instead of str bonus for the feat weapon finesse. That could perhaps be a work around: to allow to select via dropdown: melee dex or melee str. Other than that, most bugs after the big update got kinked out (as far as we can tell) and i am still pretty convinced that the current sheet is still the best you can find on Roll20 (never tried the 5E one so heh) . Keep up the great work!

For weapon finesse, simply adjust what attribute is used in the melee bab calculation section of the sheet (top of the attacks tab).

Good i did not noticed that before. well the sheet is, like pathfinder rather complex. But let's say, the character in question, for whatever reason has to use a weapon not covered by weapon finesse? Then it would be smarter to have the option in the weapon. not in the BAB. right?

True

v. 55: In the beta site (link on the first post in the "pathfinder sheet thread 5"  we've added an "alt melee" to the top of attacks page specifically for weapon finesse. So you can choose STR for melee, and DEX for the Alt Melee. Then in the attack row you just chose Melee or Alt Melee and it will adjust accordingly. Otherwise right now you have to change the "attack" bonus on each weapon individually. This update will make it easier to make a global change. So that is in the beta. We are working on the beta attacks now definitely check it out and give us feedback. v. 54: Also coming in a few days (not beta but going live now) you'll be able to populate more fields when dragging a monster from the compendium. CR, HD and HP and other fields are all populated now. Speed modes, special abilities, attacks, spells and spell like abilities, all go in large text areas, so it's easier for you to create attacks in the variable length sections since it's displayed right above. We have't gotten around to trying to parse the text yet. There are things we can't do yet: For instance, if the fort save is "+5" it will add 5 to the Fort entry, but then it will go and also add in the CON bonus, which will increase the fort save more. But luckily the original is right next to it so you can adjust that until the greyed out field matches what originally was pasted in.  Sometime we'll try to subtract the bonuses so it all matches up correctly. however. . it is a real nightmare to reverse engineer a monster since so many do not add up correctly...  so maybe instead we'll have 3rd fields like "fort should be:" Then you can adjust "Fort-misc" yourself till the Fort save matches the "should be" field. that is maybe safer and can be done quicker :) but  lazier on our part :)

Sounds like we really just need to get the pathfinder compendium fixed up so it has the correct information in it. Hopefully they let us start working on that soon. I'm all sorts of game for helping out with that project.

some of it is incorrect, i've been keeping a list just don't know where to send it. but some of the problem is Pathfinder is so old, since so much of it was copied from 3.5, that it's full of exceptions.  While writing the sheet and trying to parse, more and more I feel like I should switch to 5e. BUT.. I suppose in a few years 5e will be just as bad, since in order to stay in business everyone has to create more splatbooks, meaning more rules and more exceptions whether deliberate or due to editing mistakes. .. it's a never ending cycle!

Thanks Chris for the headsup. but yes that is generally one thing i noticed with the NPC sheet. that it. like the rest of the sheet. calculates everything over again and again. which would be useful. but especially for NPCs it isnt. perhaps have an option to "unhinge" the ability score bonuses on the sheet? so we can just plug in the numbers as we see them in the books or on the SRD?

that has been one suggestion - to make the fields editable if "is npc" is checked, and turn off most of the automatic calculations ...  but that would have a side effect of most of the sheet would not work, no more buffs or conditions to apply to monsters. etc  i'm sure people could live with that more easily though than the double counting which forces each user to reverse engineer it themselves. sigh

chris b. said: some of it is incorrect, i've been keeping a list just don't know where to send it. but some of the problem is Pathfinder is so old, since so much of it was copied from 3.5, that it's full of exceptions.  While writing the sheet and trying to parse, more and more I feel like I should switch to 5e. BUT.. I suppose in a few years 5e will be just as bad, since in order to stay in business everyone has to create more splatbooks, meaning more rules and more exceptions whether deliberate or due to editing mistakes. .. it's a never ending cycle! Well, corrected, and make sure everything is formatted correctly (maybe find a way for dragging the entry to the sheet to properly carry over the calculations that go into skills/saves/etc.

I am of the opinion that if the compendium is set up so that each value is properly listed, with their total values greyed out then maybe it might save time in the long run. For example, if an NPC has a constitution of 10 and shows a fort save of +2, then when adding the NPC to the compendium, they add the base save as a separate value. I don't know if I am being clear in my explanations, but I don't think it is necessary to force the sheet to do the calculations when, the compendium can do them for us.

We share many auto-calculated attributes between the PC and NPC section of the sheet.  This makes integrating compendium drag/drop of stat-block data problematic.  Many fields require parsing the data and "reverse-engineering"  the stat into it's sub-attributes so it can be properly added to the sheet. One option would be to separate the NPC section of the sheet from the PC side and make it flat( without or limited auto-calcs), user editable fields/attributes.  Stat-block data would be inserted at face-value.  This would be closer to how we use stat-blocks in real-life, right?

Absolutely Vince. An NPC sheet like the one we got on the last page should really only be to mark down the most important stuff. If we have more complex NPCs, that are not in the SRD anyway, we can still use the full sheet on the ALL tab. right?