foundryvtt
Allow activities to scale along multiple axes
On weapon items, the attack activity has a Consumption Scaling box/option area (Under the Activation -> Consumption tab):
On Spell items, the Attack Activity simply does not have this Consumption Scaling area:
I am requesting that this functional area be added. Two reasons:
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Logically, an Attack Activity is expected by the user to be the same regardless of the type of item it is added to. If this is not intentional, I think the Activities should be renamed somehow. An Attack Activity can be assigned as a Spell Attack or a Weapon Attack in the Attack Classification option under Identity - so this does not align up with the duality of spell attacks vs weapon attacks in the system. If there is an designer insistence on keeping attack activities on different types of items different, I must suggest they're called "Attack (weapon item)" "Attack (spell item)" etc, so the user is made aware they're dealing with different data objects with different input fields.
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While spells "naturally" scale from the slot level of the spell, there's really no (non-technical) reason they should not also be allowed to scale from other things. Say you have a resource called "spell power" in your homebrew, and you want any cast spell to use any amount of this spell power resource. Say you want to bake a weapon attack and sneak Attack into a cantrip, and make the damage scale off sneak attack dice. These things should (mechanically, logically) be possible.
The reason this box is missing is Spells are always treated as
- allowing scaling
- not having any scaling limit.
So you can still use other scaling vectors. The difference is spells are linked to the spell slot system.
The reason this box is missing is Spells are always treated as
- allowing scaling
- not having any scaling limit.
So you can still use other scaling vectors. The difference is spells are linked to the spell slot system.
Thanks for the background info. However, when you say "you can still use other scaling vectors", what exactly do you mean? Can you get the scaling slider UI element on a spell somehow, so the player can choose a scaling?
There's currently no way to get the slider but you can enable scaling on a consumption target
All of the effects of scaling are available on spells (scaled consumption, scaled damage, @scaling in roll data), but the actual way it scales in intrinsically tied to the level at which you cast it.
Cheers for more info. My request stands then - I think having the full functionality of scaling consumption (including the slider UI element) separate from and in addition to the intrinsic scaling by slot level would be great.
The problem that presents is then what are different parts of the spell scaled by? Right now there is one scaling value that affects consumption, damage, and roll data. If you have part of the spell scaled by spell slot and another part of the spell scaled by some other value, how to do you indicate what should be scaled by what? If it's a first level spell that I cast at 2nd level, and then increase the scaling slider to 5, what should the damage be?
I'm not much of a coder, but I guess some kind of way to separate the "external" scaling from the internal/integral spell slot level scaling would be needed if you wanted to use it in damage formulas. To be honest, I assumed the system was built to handle an arbitrary number of scaling values, and you could call these with some kind of "@scaling.x" or some formula I didn't know about. If it's currently only possible to have a single scaling value in a formula, and for spells this is locked to spell slot level; then I guess the feature request can be interpreted as adding in this ability.
The idea for this feature request came when I was trying to build versions of Green-Flame Blade & Booming Blade with a Rogue char's Sneak Attack damage built in. In which case we're talking about a Cantrip, and scaling isn't from spell slot level anyway. So if it's possible to suggest a reduced version of the feature that works from Cantrips I'd personally be happy with that.
However, as mentioned, I find it easy to imagine any number of features that would require this kind of multi-scaling damage on any kind of items, where damage (or other effect) should scale off both spell level and some other resource - which the player should ideally be able to choose. So I think having the technical possibility of doing this would be nice.
I would also like to pitch in saying that this is probably something that some spells can make use of? Currently theres no way to do something along the lines of "When you cast this spell, you can expend an amount of Hit Dice equal to your Spellcasting Modifier" as a separate form of scaling divorced from spell slot level. Becomes a bit messy and in some instances where 3rd party spells make use of something like this, kinda hard to create them in a way that works as intended.
