Allow Bonus to Skill Checks

[Illydth]

It would be nice if there were a way to provide a permanent bonus or penalty to skill checks to skills such as stealth or perception.

In many cases in D&D It's appropriate for characters to earn small permanent bonuses to skill abilities: For instance in my campaign joining a faction (such as Emerald Enclave or Harpers) provides bonuses after training to some skills checks. There are also magical items and effects that do the same.

It would be a nice to have if I could tell the system that there was a bonus for Character Token X's Perception skill or Token Y's Animal Handling and Nature checks.

NOTE: I am not saying this is a good idea. :) This might not fit the framework in any way. Given the "simplistic" intent of Simple5e it might be the CORRECT thing to do to say "add those bonuses manually to the skills / checks you wish by modifying the macros on the character sheets for those who have them". However since Attack and Damage macros do have the concept/ability of adding special bonuses (I assume for magical weapons and such) it's worth at least considering what the implications of doing that "add random bonus" for skill checks (along with potentially saves) means.

[melek]

The 'Simple5e' way to do this is to simply edit the appropriate macro on that token, since these types of bonuses are rarely updated. Nowadays the tooltip is live, so you'd want to update the tooltip, as well.

Unfortunately, the 'Sheet' macro isn't so easy to update. This was part of my initial reticence to add the Character Sheet functionality; I don't want anyone having to edit two macros rather than a single property, and also would rather skip on having a host of additional skill-based properties. That said, I did do 'Initiative' (which is a Dexterity ability check) and have 'IniativeBonus', so 18 'SkillNameBonus' properties wouldn't be too hard to cope with, especially since they are universal. They would complicate the Skill macros, unfortunately.

Hacking around it: Embedded Bonuses

You can "embed" bonuses in the existing skill properties with weird proficiency values; For instance, a +1 bonus to stealth for a level 1 character who is proficient would be 1.5 (+3). Once they hit level 5, it has to be 1.333, and the math starts breaking down really fast, so you'd have to round() the results. This could be the basis for a system on top of Simple5e that lets you add bonuses. Unfortunately, a lot of little changes have to happen for the 'Sheet' macro to work with this system, but those are just logistics.

In a sort of descriptive notation, such bonuses would be: [r: {0|1|2} + {Bonus / Proficiency}]

For a bonus like the one you described, you could make a macro in the "Stealth" proficiency property:
[r: 1 + (2 / Proficiency)][h: "<!-- Proficient. +2 Stealth for magical item -->"]

The only rub is that for the associated skill you must add round to the result of the multiplication, and the Configure Token macro would have to be rewritten so formulas in skill values aren't overwritten, and it all could even be structured in a way that could be reverse engineered for easy editing.

Nifty, but is definitely not simple. At very least, the 'Configure Token' macro needs to skip over skills which have formula values, so that they can be customized without being lost upon further configuration.

Barring adding new properties (Not quite ready to do that), I think the following changes for the next version could support the embedded bonus system for those interested:

1. Update 'Configure Token' to skip/edit directly Skill values which contain formula, so that embedded bonuses would be allowed to work.
2. Add or make a way to add round to the skill macros and the rollers in the Sheet macro to handle repeating values created by exploiting the proficiency system for bonuses.
3. Make a Skill Generator macro that would help people make and customize their skill macros en masse, so you don't have to make 18 similar changes. I could update the 'Resize Skills' macro to do this kind of thing pretty easily.

A lot of ideas, what do you think?

[melek]

Related: #41

[melek]

After further consideration, I think you nailed it here in the original issue:

Given the "simplistic" intent of Simple5e it might be the CORRECT thing to do to say "add those bonuses manually to the skills / checks you wish by modifying the macros on the character sheets for those who have them"

That basically means that the Skill macro is the definition for that skill's total bonus for that token. But as you point out, this causes problems trying to refer to the bonus in other macros.

To expose that bonus, I think I'll implement a new pattern in the framework where the skill macros can optionally return the bonus with macro.return. After a bit of testing this seems to work really well, and makes it possible for the Sheet macro to get the bonuses from the skill macros:

I'd rather not do this by default for skills, so this might demand including a 'bonus manager' utility that helps GMs and players quickly customize macros down the line - but adding this capability in the Sheet macros would open the door for integrating the macro buttons with the sheet (and any other macros).