Kicking skill causes wrong natural attack damage

[tofof]

Reproduction:

Create a character with Brawling 4pts to DX+2 Observe natural attack Kick is at SL 10, damage 1d-1 cr. Add Kicking skill 2pts to -1. Observe natural attack Kick is now SL 11 (correct), damage 1d-2 cr (incorrect).

For some reason, adding kicking skill causes the damage to be calculated presumably based on that skill, rather than on Brawling or Karate. B231 specifies "Use Brawling or Karate skill - not your Kicking level - to determine your damage bonus."

GCS v5.16.2

[richardwilkes]

This is actually something that needs to be fixed by adjusted the data files, not GCS, as noted in Discord. I'll copy and paste that response here:

The problem here is that when the "Kick" weapon entry is resolved, it determines that your "Kicking" technique is what it derives from, not your "Karate" skill, since Kick defaults to DX-2, Brawling-2, Karate-2, or Kicking and the Kicking skill level is better than the Karate skill level. That means that the features in the Karate skill, who look to see if the weapon is based on Karate, never see the Kick entry. You can correct for this by adding the same entries that you see under Features in the Karate skill to the Kicking technique, but change the two places where it says "Karate" to "Kicking".

I'll move this into the gcs master library repo and maybe someone that cares about this edge case will pick it up and submit the relevant changes.

[rinickolous]

This actually seems to be slightly more complicated than what is described above.

Adding the feature to the Kicking technique means the bonus is still dependent on the Kicking technique and the RSL that Kicking has against Brawling/Karate. I don't see a good way of accounting for this edge case.

[tofof]

It seems like it has to be fixed in GCS, not the libraries, taking into account the edge case that certain downstream targets (damage, in this case) don't always cleanly depend on a single upstream target. I don't believe kicking is the only thing that has this problem.

[tofof]

Fundamentally, GCS needs to be patched to include 'best of [choices]' to determine some calculations, and the library files need to indicate where such shared responsibilities lie.

[richardwilkes]

OK, I'll move this back to the GCS issue board. However, I don't think I see a clear way to actually make this work, given all the other things that have to be taken account of in general.