Development Update January 2024

Happy New Year Adventurers!

I wish you all the best for the coming year, and many improvements over the last. My own backend of 2023 was not ideal, my family suffered from loss on a number of fronts, and we finished the year with my mother-in-law fracturing her neck. We are looking forward to her continued recovery, although she lives a long drive away (at least, long for us Europeans).

This year is shaping up to be very interesting indeed - 5e 2024/OneDnD/5.5 is hitting us later this year, and no doubt there will be a number of changes and improvements to make. Not only to the core 5e system, but also parsing of characters and compatibility etc.  

I'm looking forward to making progress on improving the class feature importing for the muncher, and there is a big chunk of work coming up to migrate some historic scenes into formats supported by the upcoming v12 of Foundry.

Last year I've also been personally running and playing in a variety of games from Pathfinder 2nd Edition (using the amazing Abomination Vaults premium Foundry module) to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Call of Cthulhu. As I type this I have just received my copy of Shadowdark in the mail, and am looking forward to cracking it open and maybe running some OSR vibing dark dungeon crawl.

This month, I've been working very hard on improvements to parsing Classes, Races and Backgrounds with the 2.4 version of the 5e system. This is out and for Character import and adds most advancements to imported classes for Languages, Tools, Skills, Ability Scores, Feats, etc 

There are still a couple of gaps, but this marks a big step towards improving the character feature standalone muncher.

Pathmuncher also had several big improvements as the export data continues to improve (many thanks to RedRazor!), allowing for improved accuracy of the parsed characters.

Lairs of Etharis is now fully mapped and monstered, all 20 adventures. They look varied and exciting, so if you're on the fence, I think they would provide a few interesting one shots, or drop in scenarios.

The Dungeons of Drakkenheim book also released, this is importable but none of the scenes are yet sized. These may take a while, as the scenes provided in the book aren't great (the pdf, came with some excellent maps, which are available via the Maps tool on DDB, but the importer cannot access them).

Thank you for your support!

MrPrimate/Jack


Condensed Changelog

Pathmuncher

• Saving throw data is inferred from classes, but in some instances remnants of the old data model could cause problems.
• Axe Musket, and other weapons with a Ranged/Melee option in Pathbuilder were not matched/imported. @mirtos (he/him)
• Handle resilient rune on shields.
• Match toolkits in remaster.
• Support for Pathfinder system v5.11.1 (and dropping of earlier versions)
• Attempt to match Large Weapons and upsize them for you.
• Shields will add resilient rune again.
• Fixes for runes in v5.11.x
• Improved name matching for some items (thanks @killersquirrel59 )
• Improved Large weapon matching.
• Detection of Mystery types for Oracle.
• First pass at improved child feat detection for Pathbuilder exports in v79 of Pathbuilder. This should dramatically improve imports for a variety of characters.
• Some slightly improved name mapping for legacy toolkits.
• Handwraps of Mighty Blows will import correctly.
• Various improvements for legacy equipment matching.
• More improvements to feat detection for child feats.
• Improved detection of skill choices for feats such as Empiricism and Natural Skill.

DDB Adventure Muncher

• Support for Lairs of Etharis scenes/adventures 1-20
• Improve meta data download detection in circumstances it has been manually extracted.
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim, first release support. No scenes are scaled, walled or have monsters applied.
• DoIP Sword Coast map re-alignment

Tokenizer

• JA language updates from doumoku
• Slight tweaks t allow the Tokenizer menu to appear if player has permissions on actors tab.
• Support for 3.2.0+ of Coriolis system.

Link Item and Resource DnD5e

• If a resource value is cleared it looks like 0 but sets the underlying value to null. In this case update the feature value to 0, not null/empty string.

DDB Importer

• Base class features were duplicated by sub-classes during class/class feature generation.
• Massive rework of class parsing in the muncher. This helps support 2.4 and also improved class/feature parsing in the future.
• Character Import: Support for Save, Language, Skill, Ability, Expertise, Tool, Armor, Weapon and  Damage Resistance/Vulnerability/Immunity/Conditions Advancements on Classes in 5e 2.4.
• Character Import: Support for Skill, Tool and Language Advancements on Backgrounds in 5e 2.4.
• Character Import: Support for Skill, Tool, Feat and Language Advancements on Races in 5e 2.4.
• Fixes for AC bonus field changing to string when using the system without DAE.
• Active Aura Effects were not applied to Paladin Auras.
• Correction to Grease style AA macros.
• Monsters display legendary resources on bar2? (Like the SRD Monsters) did not set the setting due to typo. Can't believe none of you spotted this till now!
• Improved table linking to compendium to use UUID over name where possible.
• Aura of Hate Effect.
• Lifedrinker Warlock pact feature would apply @mod instead of charisma damage as a bonus, which was wrong if your str/dex is higher than your cha.
• Character Import: if a custom action had the same name as a feature, it could cause parsing issues.
• Ice knife macro fix for v10.
• Improvements to template string parsing, these are the dynamic blocks in descriptions, e.g. the dice value for sneak attack is evaluated.
• Improve Frightful Presence
• Condition immunities on characters did not always parse correctly.
• Fix tool proficiency and tool expertise on characters.
• In 2.4 you can now use the new chat description functionality to add the snippet there.
• Effect: Blindness/Deafness Macro fix.
• Magical Staves now have + @mod added to their damage calculation.
• Character import conditions: Immunity to Disease was not always detected.
• Parsing TemplateStrings for Elemental Cleaver is fixed.
• Internal effect helper remaster to improve maintainability and use going forward.
• Fix for races failing to parse when using Feature Munching.
• If the DDB Feats compendium was empty, classes, races or backgrounds which granted feats would cause the import to crash.
• Some small improvements to the campaign fallback UI to ensure that its obvious a campaign is still selected if the campaign list fails.
• Witch Bolt will now prompt the user who cast the spell rather than the GM if they wish to sustain the spell. (requires socketlib)
• Green flame blade will once again prompt user who cast the spell for secondary target rather than GM.
• Some custom backgrounds would not parse.
• Enhanced Ability macro fix.
• v10 compatibility improvements

2.4 Note:

• Class/Race/Background Advancements are not yet generated through direct Feature import, but the work here is a big step to enabling that. There are outstanding advancement improvements to come: Equipment and Feature Choices such as Fighting Style, Granted Spells for some races.