Eternalknight said:
So, Eric, can you answer the following question for me: The three core rule books are supported in E-Tools. Is it possible to add feats from, say, Song and Silence, magic items and spells from Magic of Faerun, monsters from Oriental Adventures.... etc? Is it fully customizable that way?
First, there is at least one area of the core rules that is not really supported by Etools -- and that is monster templates. There is no one-click templating, and that's definitely a weakness. You can "sort of" do it by opening an existing .rac file and tweaking it, that works pretty well except that some templates (notably Vampire) also change your type, and you can't do that when editing a .rac file. But I used it to make fiendish stirges of Xvim (two templates there) for my campaign, for instance, and that worked out fairly well.
Now to customizing: Some of the customizing is "fully functional" -- a new weapon, new armor, new spell, new language, new skill, for instance, will act just like a core one. But some of the customizing is "text only" in a sense. That's the case with feats. You can give the feat a name, determine some kinds of prerequisites, give it a description, categorize it (metamagic, etc. if necessary), but the feat will have no impact on your stats. So, for instance, I added the Dash feat from Song & Silence for my rogue character -- it appears on my list of feats but does not change my speed. There are just too many crazy things that a feat could do, I guess. The "text only" customizing includes feats, magic items (new magic weapons and armors and shields do have functional enhancement bonuses though), and domains (custom domains can be assigned to a god, and can have spells assigned, but domain abilities are "text only").
All is not lost, however. Let's take feats for example. There are a number of ways to "trick" Etools into calculating various bonuses and penalties associated with custom feats. If you have created a feat that improves initiative, saving throws, or armor class, you can manually adjust these stats on the Stats screen of the Character Generator for a character knowing the custom feat. If you have created a feat that improves one of the six attributes or grants bonus hit points, you can manually adjust that on the Adjust Stats screen. If you have created a feat that provides a bonus to a skill, "overspend" the necessary skill points on the Skills screen. All of these user-adjusted statistics will appear on the DM screen, so you'll need to be able to justify these adjustments to your DM. If your custom feat impacts some other facet of your character, you will need to make a note of it on your character sheet.
