[Feature Suggestion] Homebrew options for flanking

[tposney]

In GitLab by @NdranC on Mar 18, 2022, 21:04

I think it's a very popular rule to make flanking not grant advantage and instead do varied amount of things, like lower AC of the flanked creature, or increase melee attack roll by +1 or +2 for the flanking creatures since it makes advantage too easy to get. I tried doing this with the convenient effects "Flanking" status effect but I noticed that midi-qol seems to be forcing the advantage directly.

Suggestions:

• Option to make flanking ONLY apply the CE condition "Flanking" and let said condition determine the flankers bonuses.
• Option for flanking to give the CE condition "Flanked" to the flanked creature, instead of using "Flanking" for the flankers.
• Option for flanking to work on neutral creatures instead of just hostile ones.
• Option to make flanked creatures unable to count as flankers. (This is popular to prevent conga lines of flankers)

If I didn't express myself in a clear way, let me know so I can try to clarify. Thank you.

[tposney]

I think I understood the requests.

Option one is possible and makes sense. I will look at that.
Option two does not make sense to me, a flanked target is only flanked by a subset of tokens, so applying a flanked condition would be too general.
Option 3 is possible, what I'd likely do is look at allies to the attacking token and apply flanking accordingly, so flanking would apply to friendly/neutral/hostile tokens.
Option 4 might be in the too hard/diminishing returns basket - but I will give it some thought.

[tposney]

In GitLab by @NdranC on Mar 18, 2022, 23:29

Thanks for your time.

Regarding option two. The idea behind that would be to be able to apply a malus to the flanked creature instead of bonuses to the flankers. Lets say that I want to be able to give a -1 to the AC of a creature that is flanked. I would have to do it through a CE condition and this would allow other creatures (namely other attackers) to benefit from a creature being flanked.

Giving a "Flanked" condition doesn't have to come at the cost of giving the flankers the "Flanking" condition. Both can happen at once if you would prefer.

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In GitLab by @Fridan99 on Mar 22, 2022, 02:27

It would be perfect to implement a rule homebrew.... I currently use +1 bonus to attack rolls instead of AD. I think granting AD is a game breaking.

I think it's a fabulous idea to implement a homebrew exception, where you decide to grant +1, +2.... etc.

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In GitLab by @ben.nelson.neb on Mar 22, 2022, 08:11

I agree with Fridan99. I would suggest granting a numeric advantage to the flanking character.

[tposney]

I've implemented and released option 1, i.e. flanking simply applies the CE flanking effect to the flanker. Which it turns out has a bug which will be fixed in 0.9.39

So that should mean the +1 for flanking can be done by setting the flanking condition to have a +1 attack bonus, rather than advantage.

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In GitLab by @Fridan99 on Mar 22, 2022, 11:18

I understand that the Convenient Effect flank needs to be reconfigured? The only way is in custom, since the default does not let you modify.

[tposney]

That correct, when you copy it as custom, midi will pick up that version when applying the condition

[tposney]

I've implemented options 1 & 2 & 4. Getting the flanked condition right is reasonably expensive, but probably not so much as you'd notice (compared to the flanking test).

[tposney]

In GitLab by @NdranC on Mar 23, 2022, 18:09

You are amazing. Single handedly making 5e worthy of a vtt. Thank you.